More doesn’t always mean better. When thinking about how to get in better shape, that is a widespread misunderstanding. Most people starting their fitness routine think that they must workout every single day, or as often as possible in order to achieve their goals. This is the same thought process when they hit a plateau from their workout routine. When results aren’t meeting expectations, doing more is the answer. The problem is just that you haven’t been doing enough. But that’s not true.
More isn’t always better, and it definitely isn’t always possible. It is hard enough to commit some time in your weekly schedule to exercise. Your life is busy enough and you have enough stress before trying to force exercise as your top priority. Doing too much ends up being a recipe for disaster.
The good news is that you can get better results from your workouts while committing less time to them. Two workouts per week is enough to improve your energy levels, lose fat, gain muscle, gain strength, or achieve whatever fitness goals are important to you.
There are a few main reasons why 2 workouts per week is all you need.
The Obvious Benefit Of Only 2 Workouts Per Week
The most obvious perk of working out less is that you get time back in your life. The stereotypical workout program requires 5 workouts per week of an hour each. The High Intensity SAFE Strength Training® workout routine that we preach reduces that requirement to 2 25-minute workouts per week. That is a saving of 4 hours and ten minutes each and every week.
Think of all that you could do with that time! Get more sleep. Spend more time with your friends or family. Enjoy one of your hobbies that you never get to do. Time is the one thing we can never get back in our lives, and you should be able to spend it doing what you love with who you love.
You avoid burnout while only performing 2 workouts per week. Routines are great and make our lives easier, but doing the same routine of getting to the gym every single weekday, sitting in the same traffic, and not having any wiggle room to rest on days that you don’t feel great will leave you feeling burnt out. And the things you miss out on will burn you out as much as that routine you are always doing. Life gets stressful when you keep missing out on doing the things you love because of too many other commitments.
Avoid Wear And Tear On Your Body
Working out every day may not cause damage to your body in the first week, the first month, or the first year of doing it. It may not show up for many years. But it is bound to catch up to you eventually.
The two mechanisms of injury are from excessive force and from overuse. Reducing how much your body needs to perform in order to earn the results you want to achieve greatly reduces that risk of overuse injury. Over time, all of those recovery days will do wonders for your joints, tendons, and ligaments. We believe that strength training is the single most important thing you can do for lifelong function, but you have to be able to do it consistently. Nothing sets a trainee back more than injury.
The other body systems that you are sparing by working out less are your recovery systems. Most tend to think that only our muscles need a break from working out too often. If you workout your just legs on Monday, then you should be fine to train your arms on Tuesday because they were unaffected by the workout, right? This may be true for your arm muscles, but it isn’t true for your body’s recovery systems.
The recovery from a workout doesn’t come from the muscles themselves. There isn’t something in your leg muscles that is solely responsible for repairing the work that you did on your last leg workout. The recovery actually comes from your lymphatic system, your endocrine system, your liver, and your kidneys.
These systems need to be considered when thinking about overtraining. They don’t know the difference between training on your back and biceps day vs. training on your leg day. They will be working all the same to help your body recover, and they too need a break in order to function at optimal levels.
Even with the perfect workout routine, your results are determined by your habits outside of the gym. The 4 keys to optimal health are to train right, eat right, rest right, and manage your stress right. It takes a balance of all 4 to get your optimal health. If you are working out, but don’t have the results you are striving for, you may just need to tweak your habits outside of the gym. We have a series of tips to help you get on track with your goals without overcomplicating things.
Give Your Body Time To Build and Burn
The changes to your body actually occur when you are resting. Active resting between your workout days, and rest from sleeping, are when the magic truly happens. The workout itself is just the stimulus to make your body build muscle and burn fat, but it isn’t the time period that your body is adjusting.
If your goal is to gain muscle, that process of repairing muscle tissue and adding more muscle is happening during the days following a workout. After a workout with proper intensity, all that is needed is rest and consuming sufficient protein. Your muscle protein synthesis in your body is increased for a few days in order to promote repairing the muscle tissue stressed during your workout, and add more muscle to make you stronger for future workouts.
We like to think of working out and resting in this analogy: Think of your workout as digging a hole in dirt, and of your rest time as filling the hole with dirt. If you workout again before you are fully recovered, you are just digging that hole deeper and deeper. If you give yourself enough rest between workouts, you will fill that hole completely and even start building up a mound of new dirt. This is why you need to give your muscles time to grow before you break them down again.
It takes work to build more muscle. Work requires calories. Your metabolism is increased for days after your workout because your body is burning more calories to work on that muscle. When you are eating the proper amount of calories, and not overeating, your body will take these calories from stored body fat. The workout itself burns calories, but you will burn more from the days of increased metabolism than you will in the time in the gym.
If your exercise goal is to lose fat, you should also be giving your body time to rest and burn it from your increased metabolism. You could do cardio exercise, or other daily activities that require movement to assist in this fat burning. But if you don’t have the time to spare, you’d be wiser to focus on eating less and getting more sleep to improve your results with fat loss.
How To Make 2 Workouts Per Week Enough
Doing more isn’t always better, but doing less has to be intentional in order to be better. You can’t expect to get better results by just doing less if you avoid working hard. Doing less isn’t the key to success, intensity is.
Your body doesn’t want to change. It wants to stay the exact same. You have to force it to change. The way to do this is to give it a challenge that tells the body that it has to adapt in case it has that same challenge in the future. This challenge is best achieved when you workout to the brink of momentary muscular failure. In other words, doing as many repetitions of an exercise as you possibly can. The goal of every exercise should be to be too tired to possibly do any more. Every exercise should end with trying another repetition and getting stuck. Every time you finish a rep, you try another rep, until you fail on the final one.
There is nothing magical about doing 10 or 15 of something. Your brain can count, but your body can’t. Your muscles don’t know to just get stronger because they flexed a certain amount of times. If anything, you should be counting backwards. If you finished your exercise but you could have done 3 more if you HAD to, then you likely won’t see any improvement. If you could have done 2 more, maybe you’ll get a bit stronger. If you could have done 1 more, you’ll get stronger, but your results won’t be optimal. If you know in your heart of hearts that you did every possible rep in your exercise, you will get the best results because you did your best.
Once you have done your best in an exercise, doing more doesn’t do much in getting better results. You have already done everything you need to improve, and everything after that gives you diminishing returns. That’s why we do just a single set for each exercise. Once you’ve stimulated your quads to grow, your time is better spent moving on to another muscle group rather than trying to do extra for your quads. This style enables you to train your full body in that 25-minute workout rather than just focus on a single body part.
Each workout should involve your entire body. At Rock Solid Fitness, we train the body as a whole and rest it as a whole. When you contract a muscle, hormones like myokines are released from your muscle fibers. Systemic hormones, like Growth Hormone, are also signaled to be secreted in your body. These hormones will aid in making changes to your body. By working out the whole body at once, and contracting more muscles in your body in one workout, you will increase the amount of hormones being released.
Proven Results From Just 2 Workouts Per Week
Don’t just take our word for it, come experience how just 2 workouts per week can help you achieve your fitness goals. We see results in members of our community that are just starting out in their fitness journey. We even see great results in people who used to train every day at their own gym and drop down to only 2 workouts per week with us. Bobby was a perfect example of this. He saved hours in his life every week and managed to gain strength and gain muscle by cutting down his time in the gym (and he was already in incredible shape to begin with). In his first month of less frequent training, he gained 3.1 pounds of muscle and decreased his body fat percentage by 1.3%.
No matter where you are in your fitness journey, we know we can save you time, keep you safe, and show you tangible results in strength, muscle gain, and fat loss. Try out a free workout with one of our expert Fitness Coaches if you are interested.
