To be a maximalist, you must first be a minimalist. That鈥檚 an aphorism I first heard , the Mayo Clinic physiologist and human performance expert, and it resonates. To truly reach your potential in one or a few areas, you have to be disciplined about all the other ways in which you could fritter away your valuable time and energy. Excellence requires tough choices.
All this is to say that when it comes to strength training, I鈥檓 not ashamed to admit that my number one question is 鈥淗ow little can I get away with?鈥 I鈥檓 fully convinced that strength training has important benefits for health and performance, and I recognize that lifting heavy things can be a source of meaning and self-mastery. But I鈥檝e got miles to run before I sleep and, metaphorically, a bunch of errands to run before my kids get home, so caught my eye. An international group of researchers, led by David Behm of Memorial University of Newfoundland and Andreas Konrad of Graz University in Austria, sum up the existing research on minimalist resistance training: how low can you go and still get meaningful gains in strength and fitness?
For starters, let鈥檚 acknowledge that making meaningful gains is not the same as optimizing or maximizing your gains. There鈥檚 a general pattern in the dose-response functions of various types of exercise: doing a little bit gives you the biggest bang for your buck, but adding more training leads to steadily diminishing returns (and eventually, for reasons that aren鈥檛 as obvious as you might think, a plateau). Those diminishing returns are worth chasing if you鈥檙e trying to maximize your performance. But if your goal is health, more is not necessarily better, as we鈥檒l see below.
In a perfect world, you鈥檇 like to see a systematic meta-analysis of all the literature on minimalist strength training, meaning that you鈥檇 pool the results of all the different studies into one big dataset and extract the magic training formula. Unfortunately, the resistance training literature is all over the map: different types of strength training, study subjects with different characteristics and levels of experience, different ways of measuring the outcome. That makes it impossible to meaningfully combine them in one dataset. Instead, Behm and Kramer settled for a narrative review, which basically means reading everything you can find and trying to sum it up.
Their key conclusion is that 鈥渞esistance training-hesitant individuals鈥 can get significant gains from one workout a week consisting of just one set of 6 to 15 reps, with a weight somewhere between 30 and 80 percent of one-rep max, preferably with multi-joint movements like squats, deadlifts, and bench press. That鈥檚 strikingly similar to a minimalist program I wrote about a couple of years ago: that one involved a single weekly set of 4 to 6 reps, but the lifting motions were ultra-slow, which heightens the stimulus. You don鈥檛 even necessarily have to lift to failure, though you probably need to get within a couple of reps of it.
The data that Behm and Kramer looked at came from studies that typically lasted 8 to 12 weeks. One of the unanswered questions is whether such a minimalist program would keep producing gains on a longer timeframe. You鈥檇 clearly need to continue increasing the weight you lift to ensure that you鈥檙e still pushing your body to adapt. But do you reach a point where further progress requires you to increase the number of sets, or the number of workouts per week? Maybe鈥攂ut it鈥檚 worth recalling that we鈥檙e not trying to maximize gains here, we鈥檙e just trying to achieve some hazily defined minimum stimulus. For those purposes, the evidence suggests running through a rigorous full-body workout once a week is enough to maintain a minimum level of muscular fitness.
There鈥檚 another, less obvious angle to minimalist strength training that researchers continue to grapple with. Duck-Chul Lee of Iowa State and I-Min Lee of Harvard, both prominent epidemiologists, published called 鈥淥ptimum Dose of Resistance Exercise for Cardiovascular Health and Longevity: Is More Better?鈥
The question echoes a debate that flared up a decade or so ago about whether too much running is bad for you, in which Duck-Chul Lee played a key role. Back in 2018, he also published a study of 12,500 patients from the Cooper Clinic in Dallas which found that those who did resistance training were healthier鈥攂ut that the benefits maxed out at two workouts a week, and were reversed beyond about four workouts a week. At the time, I assumed the result was a fluke. But the new article collects a larger body of evidence to bolster the case. The newer data suggests that about an hour of strength training a week maximizes the benefits, and beyond two hours a week reverses them. Lee and Lee hypothesize that too much strength training might lead to stiffer arteries, or perhaps to chronic inflammation.
Now, when Duck-Chul Lee and others produced data suggesting that running more than 20 miles a week is bad for your health, I was brimming with skepticism and . I鈥檓 similarly cautious about these new results, and have trouble believing that there鈥檚 anything unhealthy about doing three weekly strength workouts. But they do put the idea of minimalist strength training in a different light. Maybe you鈥檙e not maximizing strength or muscle gains, but it鈥檚 possible that you鈥檙e optimizing long-term health鈥攅specially if the reason you only hit the gym once or twice a week is that you鈥檙e too busy hitting the trails.
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