The Simplest Maximally Effective Workout Program
What is the simplest workout you can do and it still be effective? Lot’s of people want to know the answer to this. They don’t love going to the gym, but they do want the results. They want to lose some weight, be able to play with the grandkids without getting out of breath, or just be able to walk up a flight of steps to meeting on the third story without arriving in a heap of huffing sweat. People have jobs and kids and other priorities, still they’d like to reap some of all those benefits exercise scientists and journalists are rave about in the magazines.
It is true that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. This applies to fitness just as much as it does to economics and, unfortunately, you can’t build muscles and grow six pack abs just by thinking about it. You do have to put in some effort. The question is, though, what is the minimum amount of effort to get the maximum amount of benefits.
If a client comes to me with that question. First, I’d say, right now, you’re doing nothing, ergo any amount of exercise is going to build some muscle, burn some fat, and increase you cardiovascular fitness. To optimize it, you probably need to be able to commit to about one hour a week. You could split this up into three 20 minute sessions: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In these 20 minute sessions, you’re going to do supersets of squats, overhead presses, and deadlifts and bench presses. Your doing these compound lifts because - compared to machine or isolation exercises - they send the largest anabolic (muscle building) stimulus to your body. This queues your organs and body to repair, recover and lay down new muscle on the days and hours you are not training. This, by the way, is a big misconception in weightlifting, you do not build muscle at the gym, in fact you stimulate, weaken and create micro-tears in muscle tissue whenever you train. Its like tilling the soil, it lays the groundwork for muscles to grow, but these muscles are built after working out at the gym, during the rest and recovery phase. It is then that your body lays down new muscle fibers and uses protein to strengthen and augment your existing muscle tissues. This is also why you wouldn’t want to train three days in a row - you need time for your body to recover and adapt to the training stimulus. It won’t have time if you just jump right in to training again.
The reason, you are doing supersets (quickly going from one set of one exercise to a set of another exercise and repeating with little or no rest between exercises) is because this modality will simultaneously train your cardiovascular system and with just 20 minutes you don’t have time to go hit the treadmill. Interestingly, this program, can work wonders. If you want to focus more on losing a bit of weight and revealing those six pack abs, you can do the workouts in tandem with a slight calorie deficit. Conversely, if you want to focus more on building strength make sure you have a small calorie surplus.
The reason I emphasize “slight” and “small” here, is that in order to build muscle or lose fat in a way that is maintainable and most importantly healthy, you should at all costs avoid “starving diets” or “bulking diets”. In a “starving diet”, you eat basically nothing or so little that you are actually malnourished. These diets destroy your metabolism and your ability to burn fat and build muscle, not only while on the diet but also in the future as well. “Bulking diets” are diets in which you eat extreme amounts of food, to the point where your body is just layering on fat because it simply can’t build muscle fast enough. These put unneeded stress on all the organs in your body and are just a waste of money (after a certain point everything you eat is going directly to those love handles), but they can also lead to all the diseases and problems we know are correlated with obesity and very high BMIs. So, let’s say you have a decent diet nailed in. The workout is as follows:
Workout A:
- Superset: 1 minute rest (total time ~ 15 min)
- Squats - 2x5 warm-up sets, 3x5 working sets
- Standing Overhead Press - 2x5 warm-up sets, 3x5 working sets
- Superset: 1 minute rest (total time ~ 5 min)
- Barbell Row - 2x5
- Lunge - 2x5
Workout B:
- Superset: 1 minute rest (total time ~ 15 min)
- Deadlift - 2x5 warm-up, 3x8 working sets
- Bench Press - 2x5 warm-up, 3x8
- Superset: 1 minute rest (total time ~5 min)
- Pull-Up - 2x5
- Dip - 2x5
The workout cycles every two weeks. So in the first week, You’d have: Monday (Workout A), Wednesday (Workout B), Friday (Workout A). And then in week two, you’d have: Monday (Workout B), Wednesday (Workout A), Friday (Workout B). In terms of progression you start out with sets of 5 reps. I would err on the side of these five reps being easy. So pick a weight that you could do maybe 10 times if you pushed with every ounce of energy in your body. You want to be able to move the weights in a slow and controlled manner, keeping perfect technique - you don’t want the weights to control you - at any time really but especially at the start. So having started with five easy reps per set, build up to sets of 12 controlled reps with a full range of motion and excellent technique before increasing the weight. Then increase the weight a couple pounds of kilograms (perhaps 5kg/11 lbs) and start over again at 5 reps.
This program trains every muscle in your body, all the major movement patterns and due to the supersets it will build up your VO2 Max as well, that’s why I think its the simplest workout you can do that simultaneously optimizes all the main fitness vectors of strength, muscle mass and cardiovascular endurance. Give it a try for 8 weeks - its just 20 minutes - and let me know what you think about it?