What is the minimum 'dose' of strength training required?
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I am fortunate enough to enjoy exercise, but I’m also not naïve enough to think that everybody else feels the same way about it that I do. Quite often, clients will ask the question: “What’s the minimum amount of strength training I should be doing for general health”. Let’s answer it.
First of all, let’s go over a quick recap of some of the main benefits for performing consistent resistance training:
Improved strength for activities of daily living;
Improved metabolic health;
Attenuate the age-related decline in lean mass and associated loss of independence;
Reduced incidence of cancer, all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, and depression;
Improved economy and performance of endurance exercise (running, cycling etc.);
Improved physique (when nutrition is accounted for);
Improved bone density
The list goes on…
Oftentimes, people will see this huge list of benefits and convince themselves that they need to be in the gym every day, but this is incorrect. I’ll spoil the surprise straight away: The answer is that you don’t need to perform as much resistance training as you may think. This is good news, because I can guarantee that if you were to ask 100 non-gym goers to list three reasons that they don’t go to the gym, at least 95 of them would state that they simply don’t have the time. (For context, other common reasons for not going to the gym include fear of judgment/lack of confidence, monetary barriers, and not knowing what to do once in the gym.)
The question, then, is just how many days do I need to visit the gym each week to gain the benefits of regular strength training? Well research now shows that only two visits to the gym each week are required to unlock these benefits. The trade-off is this: By coming twice a week, the content of your training needs to be spot on. Hard enough to provide enough of a stimulus, but also not too long in length (no point in coming to the gym twice per week if you need to spend 3 hours there every time). This is where your trainer, if you have one, will be able to prove their worth. Within an exercise session, your trainer would manipulate certain variables. I have outlined them below. When manipulated correctly, these variables can allow you, the exerciser, to reap the benefits of a twice weekly session without losing too much time, or inducing too much soreness. Understanding these variables will give a greater understanding to the rest of the article, so try to get your head around it.
Exercise variables
Frequency
As mentioned, this is the number of visits to the gym each week - 2 in our case.
Volume
Put simply, volume is the total amount of work performed. For example, multiplying the total number of repetitions performed by the external load (kg) they were performed under. If you squatted with 50kg for 3 sets of 10 repetitions, your volume would be 50kg*30 repetitions = 1500kg. Quite often, gym-goers will revert to 3 sets of 10, or 4 sets of 12 (expressed ‘3x10’ or 4x12’) as they see this a lot online without questioning it. Well, research shows that in fact, we only need a minimum dose of 1-2 sets of 6-12 repetitions per exercise, twice per week, to gain strength and improve health. However, under one condition: The intensity must be correct.
Intensity
This refers to the difficulty of the exercise and may be measured in a variety of ways. Rating of perceived exertion (RPE; a scale of 1-10 - 1 being very easy, 10 being very hard), % of 1-repetition maximum (1RM; the heaviest weight you can lift just one time) and repetitions in reserve (RIR; the number of extra repetitions you think you could hypothetically perform at the end of a set) are common methods for this. If coming to the gym twice per week, we now know that we only require 2 sets of 6-12 repetitions per exercise. However, the required intensity for this setup is between 70-85% 1RM, which means that, if going for 12 repetitions, the final rep should be the absolute last one possible.
Rest
This simply refers to the amount of time spent recovering after each set - in this case, after each burst of 6-12 repetitions. Research shows that around 60-90s is probably optimal for this.
Movement Types
Once you can half-understand the variables of each exercise (volume and intensity), attention shifts to the types of movement which must be performed to improve total body strength and health with just two weekly visits to the gym. Logically, the most efficient movements possible need to be prioritised. We call these compound exercises, which refers to the fact that they require the use of multiple joints at any given time. Examples of these include: squats, pull-ups, deadlifts, and bench press.
Instead of focusing on specific exercises, I like to recommend one compound exercise for each specific type of movement. These movements and some examples are as follows:
Vertical push (shoulder press machine, dumbbell shoulder press, military press)
Vertical pull (Lat pull machine, pull-up, chin-up)
Horizontal push (bench press, push-up, chest press machine)
Horizontal pull (seated row, single arm cable row)
Squat (barbell squat, leg press machine, goblet squat)
Lunge (bosu lunge, split squat, forward, backward)
Hinge (barbell deadlift, single leg deadlift, good morning)
Rotation/Anti-rotation (Pallof press, cable rotation, bird dogs, woodchoppers)
Here’s the clever bit. You’ll see a big long list like that and think, “That’s a lot of exercises to squeeze into one gym visit”. But this is where creativity can maximise the efficiency of a gym plan.
Supersets and Tri-Sets
So, to recap:
We now know that we should probably perform 8 movements on each visit to the gym. Each exercise should be performed for 6-12 repetitions, for two sets, making sure that the final repetition is a real struggle. We then rest for 60-90s before going again. Conventionally, this may look like:
Chest press 12 reps
Rest 90s
Chest press 12 reps
Rest 90s
Leg press 12 reps
Rest 90s……
However, more efficient methods do exist! Supersets refer to the act of ‘pairing’ exercises together without resting between. This is particularly effective when pairing together exercises which use completely different body parts. If we take the example above, this would then look like:
Chest press 12 reps; Leg press 12 reps
Rest 90s
Chest press 12 reps; Leg press 12 reps
Rest 90s
We can even take it a step further. As the name suggests, tri-sets put 3 exercises together with a rest at the end:
Chest press 12 reps; Leg press 12 reps; Pallof press 12 reps
Rest 90s…
It is easy to see how this then saves lots of time over the course of a gym sessions, and it is entirely possible that a session could take less than an hour in total over the course of the week.
Putting it all together…
So, you’ve read this article and now you’re wondering what your gym session may look like. Well, I’ve been kind enough to put a sample workout below. ***This is assuming no current injury or pre-existing condition***. Each exercise has been assigned a letter and a number. Exercises with the same letter (e.g. A1, A2) should be performed as a pair with no rest between. Each pair should be performed twice before moving on to the next pair (A1, A2, rest, A1, A2, rest, etc.)
If you’re short on ideas, give it a go. It shouldn’t take any longer than 30 minutes. Good luck!
Got any questions about the gym session above? Maybe just general advice? If so, pop me a message me clicking the link below.
You’re a good writer and I enjoyed reading this.