Minimalist Weight Training for Strength & Muscle

by Tom Venuto

How do you get stronger, improve your maximum lifts & improve your physique overall if you only have 2 days a week to dedicate for lifting? What’s the best approach to weight training when increasing both strength & muscle is the goal but you have extremely limited time?

Some people might tell you that twice a week training is not enough to make gains, but there is research on low frequency weight training showing very good gains can be made with just 2 well-designed workouts a week.

It’s true that you would certainly make even better strength & muscle gains with more frequent training. However, studies have shown that 70% or 80% of the gains that were made from more frequent training were achieved with only 2 full-body workouts per week.

Of course, serious athletes want 100% of the possible gains they can get, but getting 80% of the potential gains from an extremely modest time commitment is a pretty amazing trade off. This is valuable information for busy people. It helps you avoid “all or nothing thinking” like: “If I can’t train 5 days/week, I might as well not train at all.”

If you’re going to scale back to only 2 workouts/week & you want to keep the workouts short, you have to limit yourself to a small handful of exercises, as few as 3 or 4 per workout. All your exercises should work large areas of muscle mass, mostly barbell & dumbbell basics and powerlifts.

Extra exercises for small muscle groups like arms & calves could be added if you feel you’re weak in any of those areas or if you have the time, but they’re not mandatory. You’ll mainly focus on the major movement patterns such as squatting, pushing and pulling.

Many people call this abbreviated training or minimalist training. It doesn’t seem like much at first glance, but while the big exercises don’t require much time, they demand a lot of effort from you. If you work hard at progressive overload, keeping a training journal & adding reps or weight at every workout, you can make really solid gains with minimum time invested.

When you’re only doing a few basic movements per workout, it’s also a good best practice to rotate exercises. Instead of doing the same exercises on both days, you alternate 2 different workouts. Each workout trains your whole body, but with different exercises each time. This gives you more variety so more movements and muscle areas are worked each week, it may prevent overuse injuries & joint pain, it helps prevent you from getting bored & lets you keep making progress longer before you reach a plateau.

The most basic 2-day a week program has just 3 exercises per workout for 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps, It doesn’t take long at all to finish 3 exercises for 3 sets each, so even the busiest person can do this. But, it is hard work because these are tough exercises and you have to keep progressing (more weight or at least more reps every workout).

If you have a little more time available, a 4th or even a 5th exercise could be added & the workouts would still be very brief, though additional exercises are optional. You could also get extra exercises done quickly by super-setting.

Your goal is to add weight at every workout when possible & when you can’t increase the weight, try to do just one more rep with the same weight. The double progressive system is a great way to slowly but surely keep moving forward. Start with the lower number of reps at a given weight – which is 8 reps for most exercises – keep adding reps with the same weight until you hit the upper repetition number – which is 12 in most cases – then increase the weight and drop back down to 8 reps. Then keep repeating the process. When you reach a progress plateau, you should make some program changes to help restart your gains again.

One last thought: This kind of minimalist 2 days/week training is not just good for busy people, it’s a good option for people who are very active in other sports who spend a lot of time practicing or playing their sport. For example, cyclists, runners or martial artists might do so much training for those activities that lifting weights 4 or 5 days a week is overkill. Trying a twice a week program might be ideal, & the exercises could be tweaked slightly to make them more sports specific.

PS. By the way, this 2-day minimalist strength and muscle program can in fact be performed 3 days a week & there is a good chance you will get even better gains from a 3^rd workout, yet the time investment is still quite modest. In the other direction, if you only did this type of training once a week, it would be even further from optimal, but it could be enough to maintain the muscle you already have.