The Minimum Effective Dose for Gym Work: Quality Over Quantity

PETE: “Many clients come to us trying to mimic influencers or bodybuilding routines, thinking they need five days a week in the gym. I’ve rarely encountered a client who actually needs that much gym work to achieve their goals. For most clients, three full-body sessions per week is sufficient.

There’s plenty of scope to experiment with different setups to keep it fresh, but it doesn’t need to be more than that. Even Dorian Yates said if you’re a natural athlete training hard, you can’t effectively train more than three times a week. Only assisted bodybuilders can handle five or six days weekly.

For a 45-year-old executive, three days a week hits all the bases—you get the frequency, exposure, and enough volume. Most don’t have advanced physique goals requiring adding inches to specific muscle groups. Three hours in the gym per week is sufficient, and then they can scale up their efforts outside the gym.

Do you ever have to tell clients to pull back on training if they’re overdoing it?”

JEREMY: “I don’t have clients who overdo strength training, but from my experience, more volume doesn’t yield proportional benefits. If I do a 90-minute session versus 50 minutes, it drains me more and causes more muscle soreness, but I don’t get extra results in terms of strength or muscle gains. Three hours of properly structured strength training per week is enough to get the benefits.”

PETE: “There was initially research from Brad Schoenfeld’s camp suggesting three drivers of hypertrophy: mechanical tension, metabolic stress, and muscle damage. Later research revised this, concluding that mechanical tension is the primary driver, and muscle damage isn’t a mechanism in its own right but comes along when you apply enough tension.

However, excessive volume digs a hole that you must recover from before building new tissue—you’re busy healing and replacing damaged tissue. I’ve found that the minimum effective dose approach, though initially frightening because it feels like being lazy, is remarkably efficient. Going to the gym and doing just six work sets before leaving can yield impressive progress.

For example, doing one set of dumbbell bench press with as many reps as possible, then trying to add a rep each workout until reaching a target, then increasing weight and starting over—the progress from such a simple system with 20-30 minute workouts is incredible.

For beginners, there’s value in doing more sets to learn movements properly, perhaps three or four warm-up sets followed by one or two challenging sets pushing to failure. But looking back, I wish I could reclaim hours of pointless volume in the gym and reallocate that time to conditioning or literally anything else.”

JAY: “It’s good learning though. When I explain to coaches how I’ve made progress on low volume, I have to acknowledge that knowing exactly where your volume and intensity limits are comes with experience. People training three or four days a week might compensate for not approaching the appropriate intensity threshold by adding more volume.

A good experiment I did once was asking: if you only had one working set per exercise, how much would you commit to that one set? This helps you discover how hard you can actually train in a single set. Many people, especially in commercial gyms, do a lot of volume within their comfort zone—they’re taking a zone two approach to resistance training, but a resistance training approach to their cardio by doing sprints.

I see young trainers in the gym five days a week, but the biggest hindrance is recovery—whether it’s sleep, diet, or insufficient aerobic conditioning. They’d be better using that extra time to address those factors rather than adding another day of training.

What we’ve earned through experience is knowing which exercises give the most bang for your buck—carrying the most tonnage and stimulation—which many beginners haven’t figured out yet. We also recover quickly between sets because we’re aerobically fit.”

PETE: “That’s a great point about exercise selection. Many fitness-minded clients overvalue performance in key lifts like bench press, deadlift, and squats, thinking those are the answer to their goals. But personally, if I were to follow a powerlifting program, I’d break down within a week—my deadlift is weak, my back squat isn’t great, and my bench press is just okay.

The thing is, I don’t need to do any of those lifts in the traditional powerlifting way. For lower body, I prioritize single-leg work and heavy split squats, particularly front-loaded split squats, because that setup keeps my lower back and hips healthy while still allowing heavy loading. I rarely do conventional deadlifts anymore—I’ll do Romanian deadlifts and go heavy on those, but not deadlifts from the floor.

It’s about finding what works for your body and goals, rather than forcing yourself into a training template that might not be appropriate for you.”