The Absolute Minimum You Can Work Out While Still Seeing Results

healthierbiggersmarter

May 5

Written By Adam Fisher

workout-minimum-effective-dose-HIT-HIIT-gym

Takeaway Points:

Any kind of movement or exercise is better than doing nothing! There is basically no lower limit when it comes to getting results from exercise.
It takes more effort to build strength and other qualities, and less effort to maintain them. This means that even as returns diminish, or if you have to do abbreviated routines, you can still have efficent workouts.
Programs that use short, intense, and infrequent workouts can provide reasonable, long term results. As long as the program is followed consistently and progressed smartly, there will be improvements.

What is the absolute minimum you can work out, and still see results?

This is obviously an interesting question, and one that I’ve tackled a lot in my previous writing. It was a big fascination of mine when I first started writing seriously for this blog, and one that has a lot of nuance. If you’re interested, here are a lot of those posts on that topic:

Here’s a short version of a lot of the content above:

Fitness is dose-dependent - the more you work out over time, the more your body adapts by developing strength, muscle mass, endurance, and other desirable qualities.
The natural tendency for humans is to lose fitness over time as we get older - exercise significantly slows this reduction, and enables us to maintain quality of life into our later years.
When we stop training, we shortly begin to lose a lot of the gains that we’ve built - however, if we then return to training, there’s a “muscle memory” effect, which causes us to rebuild those gains much more quickly a second time.
There are diminishing returns to exercise - each additional workout (and each additional exercise in a workout) theoretically provides more results (provided that we aren’t overwhelming our bodies’ recovery capabilities), but smaller results relative to our first workout or exercise. Thus, we can get highly efficient (though not necessarily optimal) workouts simply by doing 1-2 workouts per week, hitting the major muscle groups and avoiding isolation exercises, and still get something like 60% of the results with much less than 60% of the time investment of a more serious program.
When building a quality, it takes a lot of consistent training over a long period of time to accomplish - however, to maintain a quality and prevent loss, it takes a significantly smaller amount of training - about ⅓-½. In this way, if you’re used to training 5 days per week in order to build a certain amount of muscle mass or strength, it can be maintained for a long period of time with no loss, simply by training 1-2x/week. This is useful when you know that you will go through phases where you don’t have time to train like you used to, or when you want to shift training to focus on something new for a while.

I’ve mostly written all that there is to say on the topic - or so I thought!

A New Study

More recently, a study set out to answer a related question I hadn’t thought to ask - again, what it would look like to train at the absolute minimum, purposefully, for a long period of time.

In this study, participants were instructed to complete an absolutely bare-bones program. This program consisted of just 1 training session per week, of six exercises - chest press, lat pulldown, leg press, abdominal flexion, back extension, and either hip adduction or abduction (alternated each session) (all done on machines). They were guided by a trainer during their sessions at all times. For each exercise, a load was selected that corresponded to roughly a 4-6 rep max, and then completed one set to failure with a purposefully slow cadence designed to make it challenging. Over time, weight was added whenever the previous weight grew too easy. Due to the fact that there were only six exercises of a single set each, such workouts only lasted about 15-20 minutes.

The participants in the study trained in this way for a VERY long time - around 7 years - and the fact that they stuck with such a program for so long, tends to suggest that they were not “elite athletes” or anything resembling it. Instead, they were probably the exact model of the “busy general population client” - someone who has a life that doesn’t revolve around fitness, and who wants to get decent results without spending forever in the gym.

The results? The trainees gained about 30-50% strength in their first year (of course, genetics would play a big role in the variability here), and overall about 50-60% across six years. This is a pretty massive result for a group that only trained once per week.

The authors were careful to note that most of the results occurred within the first year, with the subsequent years showing significant diminishing returns, continuing to progress albeit much more slowly.

I would argue this is primarily due to two factors:

First, there’s simply the fact that the volume of training was kept constant. When you’re doing the same thing over and over again, without increasing training volume over time, you’re not going to continue getting robust gains simply because further volume is required to continue seeing strong results. Thus, we would expect that these trainees would probably have performed better in future years, had they utilized a program that added training volume steadily over time.

Second, there’s just the fact that diminishing returns are real and a known factor - with virtually any training program, even one where you’re regularly increasing volume to continue driving results, you’re going to get rapidly diminishing returns after the first year or so, simply because you’re getting closer to your genetic limits and there’s less space left to continue developing. So, even with a perfectly progressed program, you would expect a similar plateau to eventually develop.

Further Thoughts

This kind of program is VERY reminiscent of the HIT (high intensity training, not to be confused with HIIT or high intensity interval training) bodybuilding programs that were originally inspired by the Colorado Study, and effectively represents a good validation of its methods, at least, as far as being “a decent program that doesn’t require a lot of time” goes.

HIT recommends super high intensity exercises, typically just 1-3 sets of a single exercise to complete failure per body part, and infrequent training sessions. Ostensibly, the high intensity provokes better strength and muscle mass adaptations than normal, less intense training, and so much resting/infrequent training is absolutely required due to that high intensity.

Another claim of the HIT programs is that they are actually superior to programs that involved more training time - a claim that has since been debunked by plenty of studies showing that more training is generally better. In particular, of course, this specific study should help to show that HIT is not a superior training method, it is simply one that takes advantage of the high efficiency of short, intense, infrequent workouts.

Proponents of HIT include Arthur Jones (who ostensibly invented the concept, and created the Colorado Study in part to validate this training method), bodybuilders like Dorian Yates, Mike Mentzer, and Casey Viator, and even more recent revivals like Tim Ferriss in his 4 Hour Body book.

Takeaways

This study is ultimately a very good validation of the fact that there’s basically almost no practical lower limit when it comes to getting results from exercise. So long as an exercise program is followed consistently and progressed intelligently, you’re going to see results no matter how little time you spend in the gym.

Certainly, you’re not going to get world class results from such a minimal program. It’s not going to make you lose a ton of weight, build a ton of muscle, or set powerlifting world records. However, it is more than enough for the average individual, even to train just 1x/week, to develop sufficient strength and muscle mass adaptations in the long run, and thus to reap the health benefits of exercise.

I have often told my clients that “something is better than nothing” when it comes to exercise - meaning, that if it’s a choice between doing absolutely nothing for a week or getting in even one halfhearted workout, that halfhearted workout is still a huge success.

Now, I think I would feel confident further strengthening that statement to say that literally anything is better than nothing, even if it’s a low volume routine without a ton of fancy additions.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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