I’ve trained once a week for 6 years. Here’s what’s missing.

For the last six years, I have only trained six exercises each once per week. It’s a simple routine, it’s easy to stick to, and it has worked incredibly well, but it’s not perfect. I covered training volume in a recent video, but the biggest gap that I see in this system isn’t volume, it’s frequency, how often we actually stimulate each muscle to grow. So I want to share the experiment that I’ve been running to test a different approach. If you’ve been getting stronger off the basic 40 minutes a week and have more time that you actually want to spend training, then what I’m about to show you is the most productive place that you could possibly invest it. So the biggest problem with training every movement once a week is that following our training session where we go and stimulate our muscles to grow and get stronger, research is all pretty clear that muscle protein synthesis, which is the process of growing new muscle tissue, peaks at around 24 to 48 hours following our session.
Regardless of how hard we train, by about three days after training, we’re more or less back to baseline and our muscles aren’t necessarily growing any further. I think the best analogy for this is to think of your body like a muscle building factory and it’s more or less binary. Either the factory’s on, production line is running and we’re actively building new muscle or the lights are off, workers are at home and no progress is being made. To make the fastest progress possible with building strength and muscle tissue, we obviously want to maximise uptime. Ideally, the factory’s on twenty four seven, round the clock, pumping out new muscle tissue. If possible, that would be our ideal state of affairs. And so to do that theoretically, we would be hitting our muscles every two to three days, meaning by the time this curve comes down and dips, we’d be hitting it again and again.
And so we’re always kind of maintaining this baseline level of muscle protein synthesis. Now doing this in practise isn’t quite that simple. One thing we have to think about is fatigue because depending on the sort of training you’re doing, how hard you push it, how much work you do, that can last quite a lot longer. And so if you’ve had a hard session, even just doing one long max intensity set at 72 hours, you could still be experiencing fatigue that would be heavily inhibiting your ability to train. And if instead of letting that dissipate, you keep accumulating more and more of that, then not only is your training performance going to be really low, but very soon you’re going to run into problems with injury. You got not only your muscles to think about, but also your tendons and other connective tissue. So as I talk about this, just bear in mind that adding frequency can be great, but the more frequently we try to train, the more conscious we have to be of also managing fatigue and total workload.
And so bearing that in mind, I think an easy guideline for this is to say if we aim to train every muscle twice per week, that means we hit everything every three to four days, which if we’re managing fatigue pretty well should put us past the curve of most of that without giving us too much downtime on the factory. So with that in mind, the way that I’ve trained for six years now actually does nail the brief for at least the upper body because we’ve got two movements for pushing and two for pulling. The way that I train and encourage all my students to do, if possible, is to actually split up their pulling and pushing movements over the week, ideally three to four days apart. So that means that upper body gets hit twice per week. We then use two movements for the lower body, one for knee extension and one for knee flexion.
So that means that legs are only getting hit once. And so the obvious gap here, if we’re hitting all these lower body muscles once and then the two to three days after that we’re recovering and growing, it means we’ve got half a week of sort of dead space. Now for me, a lot of my training career admittedly hasn’t been a huge priority growing legs. A lot of my strength goals have been really upper body focused and for a long time I undervalued the massive difference that building leg mass makes to your overall physique allows you to be so much leaner not to mention the athletic benefits of building strong, powerful legs. So the obvious way to make this routine better would just be to add in a leg session each week. Now I have experimented with this recently and immediately realised why it wasn’t a very feasible, sustainable approach, at least for me.
The last time I did a four-day training split was back in uni and I ran it for a few months before kicking it to the way so I can go back to three days a week. In my experience, three hard sessions per week, regardless of the specific movements you’re doing, I think it is just the best way to train. And so with that in mind, I devised a solution that I was pretty chuffed with, which to date has been a game changer for me in terms of at least my enjoyment of training. And again, while it’s still too early to give you much data on this in terms of progress, at least subjectively it feels a lot more productive. It’s in line with the basic science, which would suggest that it’s a much better way to train for rate of progress. And with the other recent changes that I’ve mentioned in the other video has added negligible time to my routine.
So let me walk you through that. You can use it if you want. Before we do that, if you are not already consistently training the basic movements once per week and making steady progress with them, then frequency is just not your problem yet. The basics are, and that’s completely fine. That’s whe everyone starts. To help you out, I’ve put the six movements that I use in this system together into a free guide along with progressions and exactly what you want to aim for with each one. Grab that first if you haven’t already, links in the description below. And as I said, if you do have those basic movements happening, you’re consistent with it, but you’re hungry for more, this is what I go to. So it’s a really simple A/B split. You’ve got two workouts and you’re just going to cycle through them every other day.
So three days a week, take the weekends off. So Monday you do workout A. On Wednesday, workout B. Friday workout A. The next Monday, B is the next one so you do that and you just keep alternating through. If you miss a day, next session, just do whichever one you’re up to. And both of these workouts are going to just have three exercises, each covering one of your push movements, one of your pull movements and a leg movement. And so the way I run this is that workout A is horizontal push, horizontal pull. So they’re antagonist movements, they’re directly opposite, doing one kind of primes do the other. And then I do squats and then workout B is just the remaining movements. So vertical push, vertical pull and Nordic curls. And that’s it. Really important point to make here, going back to this idea of fatigue and having to manage that the more frequency you add in.
I mentioned in the past that doing three movements in a session was really tough, taxing, and it was the way that I was training prior to my recent volume multi-set experiment where I massively cut down the length of my sets and the amount of fatigue that I accumulate. So if you’re finding it difficult to do three movements, you’re probably doing just too much fatiguing work and then you need to reign that in and actually do less. Again, I think it’s very worthwhile putting the effort into managing your fatigue total workload so that you can train more frequency and again, have the factory running at full steam more of the week. And so what you notice here is that this turns out upper into three times per week and each side of our leg into 1.5. And so we’re still upper body dominant because there’s some muscular differences in your horizontal push doing planch pushup work, for instance, very chest dominant versus vertical push, doing handstand pushup work, very shoulder and tricep dominant, you’re unlikely to overdo it.
You’re still getting some degree of rest or less emphasis every second session. And again, this is not optimal, but one and a half times a week is 50% more than once per week. And so for me, this is just a really nice balance between good level of frequency, still minimal enough that I can train like a psycho on these sets and really push them hard and simple enough that I just have two workouts, three exercises each, and I just alternate between them. And so in terms of timing, if you’re doing one set, it’s going for about a minute on each of these movements and you rest five minutes in between, then your total workout time here is still only 13 minutes. And so you do three of those a week, you’re coming in at literally 40 minutes a week of work. And that’s the old model, including a lot of rest.
If you watch my recent video on the multi-set experiment, the way that this has actually been looking has been more like a minute between sets, which gives you still five minutes before repeating the same movement. And so going through all of this three times for three different sets, I’ve still been getting 15 to 20 minute workouts in, which puts me at 45 minutes to an hour a week of training for 50% extra frequency on everything and then triple the effective sets for a very marginal increase in training time. So that’s it. That’s the other side of the recent changes I’ve been experimenting with to great success so far. I want to reemphasize here though, you do not need this. The classic, very simple model of every movement once a week, one set works. Please don’t forget that that is what I built my physique and strength off.
This is just another way of organising your weekly training if it’s something that you like the idea of. But there are two things that are more important than any of this. The first is consistency because if you’re not doing it, optimization doesn’t mean anything. Choose a routine that you are going to stick to no matter what. And the second is intensity. You can nerd out as much as you want on muscle protein synthesis. If you are not pushing as hard as possible to get stronger over time, then it’s irrelevant. Gains do not make themselves. All of this is just giving ourselves a framework to regularly show up and try. That’s how you get results. If you want a complete system that takes care of all of this, the movements, progression, nutrition, link for that is below as well. Hope results. Speak soon. I