Is it possible to work out half as much as you are right now, do just a few 30-minute workouts per week, and build just as much, if not more muscle? According to the latest science, yes. There's three time-saving strategies that have been shown to be most effective. I'll show you how to properly apply them to your workouts to get more gains in less time.
So the first strategy has to do with your workout volume. During a workout, the first few sets you do for a muscle give the most gains. But as you do more and more sets, you get less growth relative to the additional effort you're putting in.
Eventually, you actually reach a point where you don't get any additional growth from doing more sets, and may even result in muscle loss if you take it way too far. So to save time in the gym, you want to do the least number of sets that still gets you a solid return in gains. And there's a few studies we can look at to find what that amount is.
One study from back in 2002 had trained subjects do just one set of bench press and one set of leg press three times a week for 12 weeks. Despite the extremely low volume, in this case just 3 sets per muscle per week, they were still able to build a bit of muscle. Another study took a different approach.
They had subjects do 27 sets for their quads every single week. After 4 months, they measured how much muscle was built, and then split the subjects into one of three groups. One group dropped their volume to just 9 sets per week, another dropped to just 3 sets per week, and the final group didn't lift at all.
After 8 months at this new volume, the no lifting group's muscles returned back to normal, the 3 set per week group were able to maintain their new gains, whereas the 9 set per week group ended up gaining even more muscle. Now the last study I want to look at before providing some recommendations is a meta-analysis led by Brad Schoenfeld. They compared 1-5, 5-9, and 10 plus sets per muscle per week.
What they discovered is a dose response relationship between muscle growth and the number of sets performed, with 10 plus sets per muscle per week resulting in the most growth. But what's interesting is that the 5-9 set group still experienced about 80% of the max gains, and the 1-5 set group were still able to get about 60% of it. So based on the research we have so far, it seems likely that 3 sets per muscle per week is probably enough to maintain your gains and maybe even build a little muscle depending on how inexperienced you are.
But 4-7 sets per muscle per week is likely the sweet spot to get the most gains with the least amount of time and effort. But for now, here's an example of what this could look like with a 3 day per week full body workout that would train each muscle with around 6 sets per week.
Assuming 2 minutes rest between sets and 1 minute transition time between exercises, the whole workout could be completed in as little as 30 minutes. And you can also just apply this strategy to your current routine by cutting down the number of sets and or exercises on all your workouts or just do so on days where you're busy or just not feeling it and need a quick workout. However, if you are going to go with this minimal volume, there's 3 things you need to start doing in all your workouts to continue making almost as much or possibly even more gains than you were before.
First off, research has shown that the closer you train to failure, the more growth you'll get but also the more fatigue you'll create. In your case, you don't have that many sets to recover from. So to get the most growth possible, every single set, you should be pushing at least 1-2 reps short of failure and even going all the way to failure on exercises where it's safe to do so.
Second, since you're only doing a limited number but effective exercises, your workout will be efficient for sure and it's crucial you pick the ones that are most likely to give the most gains. And there's a really exciting area of research called long muscle length training. Basically, it seems like some muscles may respond better to exercises that challenge them the most when they're in a stretched position.
Now, some of you may be wondering, what if I don't want to do less? What if I still want to train at the optimal volume and use others to cut down my time? Or what if I want to make my minimalist workout even more time efficient? This is where the next two time-saving strategies come in handy. So you've probably heard of supersets, where you do two exercises back to back with no rest. While this can cut your workout time down in half, most people don't do them properly and end up compromising their gains.
The key is to use what's known as compound supersets. This involves doing an exercise that works one muscle and then that works the opposite and associated muscles. This way, one we can target different muscles or muscles groups while working on one muscle.
One study showed that keeping the transition time as short as possible, no longer than a minute, led to a unique benefit where subjects could actually do more reps than they could when they took longer rest or just performed the exercises without supersets. However, keep in mind that supersets will only work if you're still pushing your muscles close to failure every set.
So just take as long as rest as you need to prevent your cardio from holding you back.
You can basically superset any two exercises that train the same muscle group and wouldn't be overly fatiguing when done back to back.
Strategy 3, use a bit lighter weights to ensure better form, posture and an easy to perform mode. This will certainly disallow pitfalls and you can push or pull up to nicer rep range which will torture your muscles quickly and you don’t need to perform more sets. This will save your time and is effective as well.
But with strategy 4, you do your first set until you can't do any more reps, decrease the weight and immediately do as many reps as you can, and continue dropping the weight until you complete about 2 or 3 drop sets in total.
Drop sets take advantage of what's commonly known as effective reps. Let's say you're doing a set of 10 reps to failure. The first few reps you do contribute very little to muscle growth.
It's the last few reps when the muscles are being pushed to their absolute limit where the most growth happens. So even though you're decreasing the weight during each drop set, your muscles are already exhausted from your previous set to the point that every additional rep it does now is far more effective for growth. This is likely the mechanism behind why a handful of studies and a recent 2022 meta-analysis, which is basically a study of studies, have all shown drop sets to provide the same and in some cases even more growth despite cutting workouts down to a third of the time.
But you should only use this on certain exercises. Keep in mind that during every set, you have to train to failure. So you need to use exercises where it's safe to do so and also really quick to decrease the weight for each drop set.
Lateral raises, arms exercises, dumbbell chest presses, calf raises, and many machine exercises are all great options. I wouldn't apply this to squats and deadlifts and only would bench press if you have a good spotter. Now as for how many drop sets to do, one study replaced 3 normal sets with 1 normal set followed by 2 drop sets, whereas another study replaced 3 normal sets with 1 normal set followed by 4 drop sets.
In both studies, the drop set group led to similar growth as the normal group. So I'd say try to at least match the total number of sets including your drop sets with how many normal sets you usually do. Lastly, as for how much to lower the weight during each drop set, the study protocol is usually decreased by 20% at a time.
So don't drop by too much or too little. You probably won't be able to do as many reps as you could do during the previous set, but you should definitely be able to get more than a few. Just make sure you're still tracking how much weight and how many reps you're doing and try to progress this over time just like you would with normal sets.
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