The number one reason given for not training is lack of time. Often, after an opening sentence like that, you’ll see a pithy motivational quote.

When you look at the mainstream Health and Fitness industry, it’s easy to understand the lack of time reason. The industry seems to be almost evenly split into two camps; weight loss and body shaping. Noble goals, each, but the protocols used have a lot of moving parts, from programs with a lot of exercises to menu planing and food preparation. It’s easy for a beginner to get overwhelmed. Consider, too, that failure to get the desired results, either fast enough or at all, can be a real blow to motivation. Training is hard when you’re discouraged. Sometimes in posts like these, you’ll see a picture of Hugh Jackman.

However, if you train for strength, you make your goals measurable and attainable, because the process is simpler. Consequently, it’s easier to embrace the program. If you embrace the program, compliance is easy. Well, easier, anyway.

As you train and grow stronger, there’s an excellent chance that your weight will regulate, and your body will change shape. While it’s important to monitor the quantity and quality of your menu, with a strength training plan, it’s not the focus. As your knowledge increases, and your body changes, you’ll make some natural shifts in how you eat.

“The Four Hour Work Week”, by Timothy Ferriss, introduced me to the minimum effective dose. Essentially, you look for the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome. Not a small effort, an efficient one. For physical training that will get and keep you strong, mobile, well conditioned, able to save the world daily and still have a life, general physical preparedness is the minimum effective dose. Batman is often used as an example of G.P.P

He’s down with G.P.P

In the strength faction of the Health and Fitness industry, just as in society at large, there is a minimalist movement afoot. Power lifting legend Jim Wendler uses four lifts and a simple set and repetition scheme. Pavel Tsatsouline, the Russian evil genius behind the kettlebell movement, has reduced it to two twice. “The Naked Warrior” uses two body weight exercises, the Pistol squat and the One-armed Push-up to build and maintain strength anywhere, anytime, and his “Simple and Sinister” plan uses one kettlebell and two movements, the Get-up, and the Swing. These guys experimented with all they knew about strength training and reduced it to the minimum. Photos of Madonna are used a lot in motivational posts.

Madge is, too…

Now getting as big and strong as you possibly can does require a lot of time, although not necessarily a lot of exercises, but gaining the strength to be healthier and more productive overall really doesn’t take much time. Riddle me this:

You’ve decided to start training. You’ve tested, and you can manage a set of five push-ups, twenty body weight squats, and you can even manage one pull-up. Pioneering mid-century modern minimalist that you are, you’ve allotted thirty minutes a day, three days a week for physical training. Because it takes a little time to recover from the maximum effort you must make to execute the pull-up, you get only two sets done in your thirty minutes. Ten push-ups, two pull-ups, and forty squats. For the week, thirty, six, and one hundred and twenty movements. Not bad.

Because you feel pretty good, you persevere, and after four weeks, you test yourself, and you can do three sets of each exercise in thirty minutes. Your work capacity increases, and in a couple of more weeks, you get four sets in thirty minutes, and now your maximum pull-up set is two. People are asking you if you’ve been working out.

Flash forward a year. Now, you sometimes do push-ups with your feet elevated twelve inches, sometimes with a diamond hand position, sometimes with your hands staggered. Your one set maximum is twenty-two, and in your still thirty minute program, you often do three sets of fifteen. You can do three sets of five pull-ups, and because you saw a cool YouTube video, you bought a kettlebell and now you can do a hundred swings in five minutes. The coolest thing, though, is that you are crushing your buddy Baxter on the tennis court regularly.

Now, it won’t last this way forever, because progression is never strictly linear for long, but you will make progress. You will train a theory, test it, train some more, re-test, refine, add, subtract. You will develop a process, in this example, based on three simple exercises. You work on you.

Be your own experiment. If you wonder how strong you are, find out. Test yourself. Develop a plan, work it, and see what happens. Keep what works, toss what doesn’t. Tinker, as they say.

 

Allow for surprise.