In 2023, I made some big changes to my fitness routine. This post covers the thinking behind my new routine. If you want to skip ahead to see what I’m actually doing now, check out my 2023 Fitness Plan.
First off, my history. I always hate it when somebody advocates for an exercise, technique, workout etc. without any context about their current status and training history. Things someone is doing now are likely different than things they did to get where they are, and trying to replicate their results by using the current plan is likely to fail unless you’re in a similar place as them. Digging into that debate is for another blog post. Right now, more about me…
As of this writing, I’m in my late 30s – 38, to be exact. I’ve been alive for about 2000 weeks, around 14k days. Yes I had to calculate the years to remember if it was 38 or 39 and found some interesting stats while I was there. I’ve been following the Renaissance Periodization (wow I actually spelled that correctly this time) Male Physique Template plan – high volume, 6 days a week, periodized (of course). It’s a solid plan that got me over the fear of overtraining and volume. Looking back at my log, I’ve got 21 mesocycles recorded on this plan – that’s almost 10 years. Dang. Before that, I was doing 5x5 sorts of programs – StrongLifts, Starting Strength etc. since around age 25.
In the past few years – since I picked up Ultimate Frisbee, and since I started having kids and wanted to always be able to keep up with them – I added running as well to work on my cardio. Stacked with a 6 days a week lifting program, that was a lot of two-a-day’s. Sometimes I’d go 5 days a week lifting to fit in cardio. Or split up the big lifts for the gym and do another smaller dumbbells session at home. Either way, that’s a lot.
So I’ve been doing high volume for quite some time, stacking in cardio, splitting things up sometimes to two a days since I work from home and can get in some home gym time etc. No overtraining issues from a neural or strength point of view, but I realized I was just feeling beat up all of the time with various aches and pains and strains and everything was very tight. I pulled both my left and right adductors a couple of months apart while playing Ultimate Frisbee, and that brought things to a head.
I’ve followed many people in the fitness industry for awhile, and I really like mashing up the best elements from several sources to make a better whole. I’ve realized this is a technique I use in many areas from recipes to learning skills – and here again with fitness.
I saw some posts on Twitter and various blogs advocating a minimalist approach. This got me thinking: I’ve been doing volume for a long time – 6 days a week, 3-6 sets of everything, leave a couple reps in the tank. What if I did the opposite? Lift 3 days a week, 1-2 sets of everything, and lift to failure (not form breakdown, but try to eke out the last good rep). What’s the minimum volume needed to make progress, or at least to maintain? This isn’t a common topic in the fitness community (which is generally about maximizing “results” in a minimum time period rather than considering lifestyle holistically and coming up with a balanced intervention.
This brings up a deeper question: What is my goal with lifting and my fitness routine in general? The vast majority of thinking in the fitness community is oriented around maximizing an increase in a short period: “What method did this 6-12 week study say increased muscle growth 12% instead of 6%… lets do that.” And that 6% difference is what… less than a pound of muscle? That sort of thinking might make sense if I was a powerlifter or bodybuilder with a contest to win.
My maximization function is different: how do I optimize my fitness over the next 40-60 years? I don’t really care about wether I gain one pound of muscle this year or two or even five. I have the luxury at this point of having built a chunk of muscle already so I don’t need to race to build more. But even for a newbie to lifting this might be the same calculus because noobs can gain from just about anything. Quick progress is impressive, but does it matter in the long term?
To maximize long term progress, I care about three things:
- Continuing to progress as long as possible. Eventually aging will reverse progress (although I have a theory that a lot of the studies about the impact of aging are actually measuring decreased activity and other coorelations, not a causation). In the meantime, what impacts continued progress?
- The long term ceiling. Natural processes tend to have diminishing returns from the same level of effort at some point. You can override that with increased effort for a time, but eventually you’ll hit diminishing returns from increased effort as well which causes an overall ceiling to growth in that area barring some outside influence.
- Time efficiency. I enjoy training and have plenty of time, so this is a less important priority. However, there’s only time and mental space for a certain number of things in life so if I can get a good training effect in 5 hours a week instead of 10, that’s 5 other hours I can use for something else.
The first and last have the same answer: less is more. The biggest factor in long term progress is consistency, and (at least in my experience) the biggest factors in consistency are a) not doing too much (so you’re always eager to do the thing) and b) staying healthy instead of getting hurt and having to take a break. And doing less is more time efficent.
So we end up with two questions:
- How does volume and frequency impact the long term ceiling and lifetime muscle gain? Where are the diminishing returns? Will I be noticably bigger or stronger in 10 years if I’m doing 10 or 20 sets of squats per week instead of 1 or 2 or 5 sets?
- What’s the minimum volume and frequency to make gains? To maintain?
The Stronger by Science guys like to break down research at a very detailed level, so I started my minimum volume research there. More is More in a short term time window, sure… but how much is enough to make progress? There are a couple of related research spotlights: Minimum volume meta-analysis, The effect of weekly set volume on strength gain. Some information on minimum volume, not much on how volume affects lifetime ceiling – that question seems like it’d be hard to answer with a study.
It all sums up to this, though: Can We Predict Muscle Growth? to which the answer is there’s no good way to predict how much I’ll grow from my training. We know that more work will make you grow faster, maybe 20% faster for 2-4x as many sets. But we don’t know if more work increases your ceiling over a decades timespan. Even if it did by 5 or 10 or even 20%, how much is that worth – doing 2-4x as much?
I see Jeff Nippard on minimialist training – interesting ideas there as well, but that particular plan goes a bit far into the minimalist weeds for me. I’m not trying to reduce working out to the bare minimum. Saving time on lifting leaves time for other things but even there you hit diminishing returns. It’s not worth it to save time lifting and blow it on consumption, but there are plenty of other places in the fitness arena where I can reinvest the time – namely cardio and mobility. So considering that optimal balance for overall fitness is worthwhile.
Based on the above, I don’t see much data about the absolute minimum, but a 3x/wk low volume lifting program seems like it would be high enough to progress, low enough to get good recovery. Stack on some cardio on non-lifting days and some mobility work and now we’ve got a good all round health program that could improve things slowly for years.
At the beginning of 2023, I solidified these ideas into my 2023 Fitness Plan – low volume 3x/wk lifting, 3x/wk incline treadmill zone 2, 1x/wk ultimate frisbee, 1x/wk drills, 1x/wk long cardio.
A couple of things to consider after I run the simple plan for awhile:
- We flipped high volume to low volume. What if we still undulate volume, but do the opposite of RP’s stuff? Mostly low volume high intensity, with a short high volume block here and there? Or does ramping 1-3 sets suffice for volume? I do like the high rep block RP does, and the strength block too.
- A side note in a lot of these articles: Many times the outsized gains from higher volume were actually from bringing up something lagging, getting better skilled. Maybe a focus block with high volume on just one body part?
- Any other low volume plans I could try? Doggcrap’s been around for awhile and I’ve never done it.