What is minimalist training and why should I try it?
Minimalist training is a method that prioritizes high effort and high impact exercises to induce the adaptive response while minimizing the amount of time and energy spent training. Minimalist training acknowledges that our time and energy are valuable and limited resources. While spending time and energy training is a worthy and worthwhile pursuit for your health, it does have a cost. In other words, the time and energy spent training could be spent some other way (working to become financially independent, spending time with family etc.). So for busy people who want to train for health and longevity, but don’t necessarily want to spend a long time every day or every week training, minimalist training might be a good idea.
All good training is designed around the progressive overload principle. This principle is a fundamental concept in exercise physiology and refers to the idea that if you want to improve physical performance, you must progressively increase the intensity, duration, and/or frequency of your workouts. This can be done by gradually increasing the amount of weight you lift, the number of repetitions you perform, the length of your workouts, and/or the number of days you exercise each week. Once we have adapted to an increased training load, we increase it again and the cycle repeats indefinitely.
It should be obvious that we simply cannot continue to increase these training variables indefinitely for pragmatic reasons. Everyone has limits. Even olympic athletes can’t train all day every day at a really high intensity. So progressive overload is something to strive for, but it is a concept tempered by pragmatism.
The two main pragmatic constraints I have already mentioned is time and energy spent. Often, people who are training for health and longevity are busy people with full time jobs and families to look after. For these reasons, the idea of minimizing the amount of time spent training while still getting the health benefits is very enticing. This is why High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is so popular. Minimalist training captures the essence of training efficiency with HIIT, but is broader in scope because it also encompasses different kinds of training modalities (lifting, calisthenics etc.).
There are several ways to maximize efficiency of a workout (i.e. the stimulus to adapt): 1) Prioritizing certain types of movements over others, 2) Using fewer sets, & 3) Higher intensity & effort.
1) Prioritizing certain types of movements over others. Compound movements are king. A compound movement is any movement that requires you to move more than one joint to complete the movement. For example a seated overhead press is a compound movement because you are moving the shoulder and elbow joint together to complete the lift. This is compared to an isolation movement where only one joint moves at a time. One example of an isolation movement is a tricep extension where only the elbow joint is moving.
The reason you prioritize programing a compound movement over an isolation movement if you are trying to minimize the amount of time spent training is because the compound movements give you more of a stimulus per rep/set and are generally done with heavier weight (i.e. it is more intense). This is simply because compound movements require that you activate more muscle to complete the movement than an isolation movement. If efficiency is a priority to you, then compound movements >> isolation movements.
Bench press, squat, and deadlift are some of the best compound movements in this regard because they all require muscle activation from a large number of muscles - the large primary muscles and smaller postural muscles involved in stabilizing the body during the movement.
Deadlifting
2) Using fewer sets. Another tenant of minimalist training is to simply use fewer sets of an exercise. Studies show that there are diminishing returns on increases in muscle mass and strength with each increase in set number. In other words, the main benefit of increasing strength and mass come from the first 1-3 sets of an exercise. The benefits decline even after the first set of an exercise. So stopping the exercise and moving on after 1-3 sets of an exercise is probably a good idea if you are trying to maximize your benefit and minimize the amount of time spent training.
Cut out excessive sets to save time. The majority of the benefit comes from the first few sets performed.
3) Higher intensity & effort. This is somewhat ambiguous because there are many ways to increase intensity and effort, but generally you can modify the amount of weight you lift, the number of reps you do in a set, the number of sets you perform, the rest you take between sets, or the amount of time you spend performing each repetition (longer time spent doing the exercise = more effort). We’ve already established that 1-3 sets of an exercise gets you most of the way there in terms of benefit. So the remaining variables to manipulate are: weight, number of repetitions, rest between sets, or time spent performing the exercise.
I can lift more weight for the same number of repetitions, or I can keep the weight the same and increase the number of repetitions I perform. I can also keep the weight and reps the same and decrease the rest time between sets. Decreasing the rest time between sets can also change the stimulus somewhat to be more of a cardiovascular stimulus compared to the original rest time. Finally, I could keep the weight, reps, and rest the same, and simply increase the amount of time I spend performing each rep. For example, if it takes me 1 second to perform a single rep of a bicep curl exercise, I could perform that rep over 6 seconds instead, which means raising and lowering the weight much slower. This is sometimes referred to as increasing time under tension (the amount of time the muscle is actually activated). Increasing time under tension is one of the best ways to illustrate how manipulating effort can change the adaptive stimulus because you can pretty easily feel the difference immediately after the set is finished. If you haven’t done this before, I encourage you to try it! Although I would recommend only doing one set with light weight to start. You can get very sore using this method!
Increase the time under tension by slowing down on each rep (think 6 count instead of 1 or 2 count)
Generally it is a good idea to manipulate one variable at a time in a training session or training block rather than many of these at the same time to avoid injury or burnout.
Okay so why should I try minimalist training?
If you are someone who struggles to exercise regularly, who starts training but finds it difficult to maintain, you might consider trying minimalist training.
The main reason I promote minimalist training is because it could reduce perceived barriers to regular exercise and get more people to exercise more often. Less than 30% of people in the USA meet the recommended weekly exercise guidelines. Yikes! I speculate that a large part of this is because the perceived effort and time spent exercising is just too much for them – I do not think it is because 70% of the population is lazy or lacks motivation to improve their health.
Exercise is a behavior and behavior change is very difficult. So how do we successfully cultivate behavior change? One way to do this is by introducing just manageable tasks that are not overwhelming for the individual. It has to feel easy for them to incorporate the new behavior into their daily routine for them to successfully build the habit. In today’s world people are busy, or at least they say so. Lack of time is a barrier to performing the exercise behavior, so minimizing that barrier by decreasing the time spent training and simplifying the training are potentially useful tools to promote and increase exercise behaviors. Minimalist training fits this description so promoting it may help to encourage more people to start an exercise routine because it seems more sustainable to them.
With that in mind, I would encourage anyone to try minimalist training! Initially, focusing on the process of completing a workout rather than the nuts and bolts of training is a good way to build the habit. If you can string together several weeks of doing even just one set of 1 exercise (less than10 minutes a day) - count that as a win towards building a sustainable exercise habit. After you’ve strung together a few days or weeks and you are building some momentum, then you can worry about adding some complexity to your training. But even then, you don’t need to do a lot to get solid health benefits.
It may not be for everyone, but overall minimalist training is a viable training method for those who want to improve their health and longevity but don’t want to spend a ton of time exercising each week.
I would love to know if you give minimalist training a try! Drop me a message on social media to let me know how it’s going or send me an email.
If you need an online personal trainer please reach out using the Contact Form on my website or Email me at: ethan@ethanlostromphd.com
Best of luck!
– Ethan
