Weight Training for Normies — The Minimum Effective Dose for Size and Strength

If you want the latest and greatest routine to get you SHREDDED, pick up a fitness magazine or buy a program from your favorite influencer. That is not what this is. This post begins from a different premise altogether which is: what is the least amount of work I have to do and still see results?

I don’t know about you, but I’m no Arnold; I don’t get orgasmic pleasure from weightlifting. I don’t want to spend two hours a day in the gym aggressively dropping dumbbells so everyone knows how jacked and tan I am (plus, I’ve learned it doesn’t have the same effect when you’re using pink 5lb dumbbells).

There are health benefits to resistance training though: it decreases your chance of injury as you age, improves heart health, strengthens your bones, improves insulin sensitivity, and MORE!! So I went on a quest to find a workout that would get me all those goodies with the shortest amount of work time possible.

That’s when I found the strategy outlined in Doug McGuff’s Body By Science and have been using it successfully for several months. The stated purpose of this protocol is to optimize exercise to maximize your genetics, your health, and your longevity. A great routine to add to a Health Basics Program.

I won’t go into the science here, if you want to learn about that a bit more I suggest you pick up McGuff’s book or watch this video where he outlines the science himself . To give you the quick overview: your body physiologically can’t tell the difference between a pushup or a barbell, it simply sees them both as muscular stress which, when pushed beyond it’s current capabilities, forces an adaptation. Whether you do this in 1 set or 5 sets doesn’t matter, just that you push your body beyond it’s current limit.

Before I give you the workout, we need to go through some guiding principles to set you up for success.

Principles

• Train to Muscular Failure — Intensity is Key
• Maintain Constant Stimulus on the Muscle — Slow Cadence
• Utilize Compound Movements
• Low Volume
• Adequate Rest and Recovery

The most important component is the intensity you bring to your workout, the rest will flow from this first principle. If you bring the right intensity to your workout, you will be truly unable to perform another repetition of the exercise, and you will need to ensure adequate rest between workouts to give your muscles enough time to recover. Here’s a video to illustrate what we’re looking for:

In this set of chest press he maintains a slow cadence, a constant state of stress on the muscle, and trains to muscular failure. Exactly what we’re looking for to induce an adaptive response. Alright, let’s go into these principles in a bit more detail.

Train to Muscular Failure — Intensity is Key

This workout protocol outlines one set per muscle group to failure. Although this should actually be beyond muscular failure. At the end of your set your target muscles should be so fatigued that you would be unable to perform another rep even if someone had a gun to your head telling you to do one more.

Important to mention that we want to ensure we’re failing only with the prescribed muscle. Maintain that mind muscle connection and if your form starts to break down due to muscular fatigue end the exercise. We’re going for longevity here, the last thing we want is to injure ourselves from cheating those last few repetitions.

Once you reach the point where your muscle is unable to complete another repetition, you want to continue to use all your efforts to lift the weight up for another 10 seconds or so and only after that you can relax. A full 10 seconds is the goal, though you’ll likely have to work your way up to that, it feels like a lifetime.

This simulates a life or death situation in your body and is what causes the adaptive response we’re looking for. Your body says “phew big poppa that was a close one, you nearly died. Next time we gotta make sure to prepare you for that crisis so it doesn’t catch you unprepared again”.

Most of us won’t have enough experience to know what this actually feels like and will quit prematurely. If you’re not used to it, it almost feels like you’re having a panic attack. Your body is screaming at you to stop, it’s telling you it has nothing left, yet you insist on pushing it beyond that level. I promise you’ll feel really good once you’re able to push past that split second of panic though.

One tip for this is to imagine a life or death situation: if you’re doing a pull-up imagine pulling yourself up from a cliff; if you’re doing a press imagine pushing up a giant boulder that’s about to crush you.

As you get better at this you will be able to tax your muscles more effectively in each set, which means you’ll need to space out the time between your workouts more and more to ensure proper recovery, we’ll talk about that more below. But while you’re getting the hang of it you can easily aim to do each muscle group two or three times a week. If you’re consistently improving, you’re on the right track. If you plateau for two weeks straight, add an extra day or two between your workouts. McGuff says you can theoretically do this workout as infrequently as once every two weeks if that’s how long your body needs to recover from the thrashing you gave it. But I’m not there yet, I do my workout roughly every 5 days.

Maintain Constant Stimulus on the Muscle — Slow Cadence

We’re aiming to maximally stimulate the muscle throughout your set, allowing a state of deep fatigue to develop until failure. McGuff prescribes a very slow 10-0-10 cadence (10 seconds up and 10 seconds down, stopping just shy of lockout to maintain a constant stimulus on the muscle) and using a weight that means you’ll hit failure after 90 to 120 seconds.

I encourage you to experiment with this a bit. Longer cadence means you can lower the weight, which is useful if you’re stuck with limited equipment or you’re worried about overexerting yourself. Personally, I’ve landed on my ideal cadence to be roughly 4-6 seconds in the eccentric (lowering) and 4-6 seconds on the concentric (raising). While I’m pushing the weight up I try to imagine myself explosively pushing it, but as I fatigue the time it takes for me to get to the top is longer and longer. Most of the muscle damage is done on the lowering portion of the lift, so if you choose one piece to lengthen it should be that one.

So for example if I’m doing a pushup, once I begin my set I will count 6 seconds down, then the second my nose touches the ground I begin to raise myself up, then just shy of locking my elbows out I immediately begin to lower myself again. After about 30 seconds or so I start to have to grind to push myself back up, and once I get roughly to the minute mark I am likely trying to get that last push up in for 10 seconds or so. I don’t usually count the 10 seconds as I notice it takes my mind away from the task at hand (pushing the giant boulder that my imagination is telling me is about to crush me), but that means I likely don’t get to the full 10 seconds; like I said it feels like an eternity.

Utilize Compound Movements

It’s important to pick exercises that utilize the most body parts possible, but it’s also important to pick simple exercises because as you fatigue and reach failure you don’t want to be in a position where you might hurt yourself. As an example, I wouldn’t recommend barbell squats or deadlifts here as the complexity of those movements and the weight of the barbell may result in your form breaking down as you reach failure and if you don’t have a spotter you’re gonna end up stuck in a very compromising position.

McGuff recommends machines for this reason. Since you’re drastically slowing down your cadence, you’ll be using much lighter weights than usual, or even just your bodyweight.

Pick 1 exercise in each of these categories:

• Hip dominant leg movement
• Quad dominant leg movement
• Vertical push exercise
• Vertical pull exercise
• Horizontal push exercise
• Horizontal pull exercise

With the leg movements, I’ll pick either the hip or the quad movement and alternate that in each workout, as doing them both in the same workout is too damn hard.

I encourage you to experiment here as well. If you find yourself too fatigued halfway through your workout to give the last few exercises your best effort, divide the workouts however is most convenient for you: perhaps a push, pull, legs bro split.

Feel free to add any other exercises to this that you want. These workouts will be shorter so you’ll have more time to work on mobility and flexibility if you want; I like to add several corrective exercises and other movements to plug weak links.

Low Volume

As mentioned, intensity is the key here. If you are training at high intensity your volume will have to be low as a consequence. Think of the difference between an all out sprint vs. a leisurely jog. If you are able to do more than one set that means you are not reaching the level of intensity we’re looking for in this protocol.

Here’s a test to see if you hit the right intensity: incorporate a rest pause set. Once you finish your set, rest 15 seconds and try to do a few more reps. Ideally, you should not be able to complete even a single rep. That means you truly fatigued the muscle. I usually can grind out one or two, which means I’m still not quite adept at reaching true muscle failure.

Adequate Rest and Recovery

Going along with low volume, you must ensure you rest enough between workouts to allow the muscle to fully recover. If you bring stimulus again before the muscle has had a chance to completely redevelop, you block that improvement. McGuff says this takes between 5-10 days, with average of 7, but depending on your body and your intensity this could mean you can workout as often as twice a week or as infrequently as every two weeks.

Here’s an example to illustrate the importance of this process of adaption. When your body is exposed to UVB rays, the skin gets damaged and it responds by adapting so that next time it won’t get damaged as quickly (you develop a tan). However, if you do that too much and too often, it’ll be unable to keep up with the damage/adaptation and you get a sunburn.

Let your body guide you here, if you’re seeing consistent improvements you’re on the right track. If you plateau for more than two weeks, add a rest day.

The Workout

Remember: you will always be strongest in your first two exercises, so switch up the order as you see fit or split your workouts into two. In between sets I’ll do some accessory and corrective movements to give myself time to be adequately rested before I start my next exercise. Here’s the workout/exercises I currently use:

Parameters

• Continuous movement: 6-0-6 cadence. 6ish seconds up, 6 seconds down for each exercise
• Aim for roughly 8-12 reps, between 90 to 120 seconds of time under tension. If you reach beyond this, increase the weight or slow down the cadence.
• When you reach failure, try to keep pushing the muscle for another 10 seconds or so (while maintaining good form); use your imagination to simulate a life or death situation.
• Have a lower set of weights ready so you can immediately do a drop set or rest pause set. Repeat until you’re unable to complete a single rep
• Rest as long as needed between movements, basically until you catch your breath and feel your strength coming back. However, aim to reduce this rest period as you increase your stamina.

Exercises

• Leg movement (one per workout)
  • ATG Split Squat
  • Nordic Hamstring Curl
  • Barbell Squat
  • Stiff legged deadlift
  • Goblet squat
• Optional: After my leg exercise I like to immediately do an explosive movement following the same movement pattern as this has been shown to promote athleticism (example: stiff legged deadlift -> 3 broad jumps).
• Pullups
  • Lat pulldowns will work here as well
• Shoulder press
  • Feel free to do one at a time or both at once with dumbbells or, if you’re a beast, handstand pushups. I notice I am able to do more weight if I’m seated vs. standing
• Bent over row
  • Any horizontal row will do, with one or both hands at once. Cable row, T-bar row, etc. are all fine as long as you are able to maintain form and fail safely.
  • The main cheat people do here is jerking the weight or rounding the back as they fatigue which we want to avoid
• Dips or Dumbbell Bench Press
  • I mostly do Dips because my gym has an assisted dip machine, but any horizontal press movement will work

The work portion can be finished fairly quickly depending on how much you rest between your exercises. After finishing this workout you should feel like you just did several hill sprints or completed a marathon.

As mentioned, I like to add some more exercises to help round out the workout, here are some I recommend:

• Any movement outlined by Ben Patrick, aka the Knees Over Toes Guy
• Posture correcting exercises like rotator cuff exercises, face pulls, prone cobras, etc.
• Farmer’s carries or front carries
• Overhead carries, overhead squats, etc. (helps with thoracic extension)

Conclusion

This protocol, along with the health basics I outline here, should set you up for strength and vitality well into old age. A workout takes me about 30 minutes once or twice per week, which gives me plenty of time to do other things around the gym. It’s not easy by any means, but the continuous growth you experience is a good motivator and the feeling you get in your body while working out and after you’re done is very exhilarating, like you beat up a lion or something (don’t do that though, what did lions ever do to you? Simba has suffered enough, thank you very much).

Another benefit of this is you can perform this type of workout pretty much anywhere: if you’re stuck using your body weight because you’re traveling, slow down the cadence as much as you need to reach failure in roughly 8-12 reps.

I’d recommend you pick up Doug McGuff’s book if you want to dive deep into the science of how this works; Jay Vincent and Drew Baye on YouTube also have some demonstrations of this protocol that could be useful.

Thanks for reading!