I'm on the mailing list of Paul Ingraham, a science writer who's lived with chronic pain since 2015. His work is thorough and evidence-based across the exercise and pain science space, with a very dry, self-deprecating kind of humour. His newsletter is one of the many ways I stay current with exercise research. As a business owner, I don't have the time to wade through the literature myself, and critically reading studies is a skill I'd much rather pay someone else to do and learn from.
Last week a piece of his landed in my inbox and I've been so excited to share it, because the gist was that less is more than enough.
What 20 Years of Research on Strength Training Frequency Reveals about Realistic Exercise Routines
Paul took a tour through roughly twenty years of research (between 1988 and 2007) on strength training frequency, looking at how much muscular strength people gained depending on how many times a week they trained. He's very upfront that his article is a roundup of research and not a formal science review. But across older adults, exercise beginners, teen athletes and experienced lifters, he summarised that training once or twice a week produced really good strength gains, often close to what three sessions did.
In one study of older adults, a single set of exercises done once a week, taken to muscle fatigue, built strength as well as doing it twice a week. In another, which looked at lower back strength, adults who trained just once every two weeks still got about 26% stronger, compared with about 40% for those training three times a week (six times as often). These are pretty respectable results for a fraction of the time!
Paul writes of his search, "All of this data is remarkably consistent. I simply could not find any research showing that twice as often is twice as good, let alone three times as often being three times as good."
It's important to clarify here that training more often does come out with better results. In a study of experienced lifters, the same amount of work done in a single weekly session gave about 60% of the strength gains of spreading it across three sessions. So less is definitely not more here, but it's not a lot less either. And that's what I loved about Paul's article. It asks how much better? And what does that cost us in time, energy and mental load?
Real-Life Systems and Sustainable Movement
Research is so important for us to understand what's possible and to help us feel more confident about certain things, but it also needs to make sense in the real world. Studies that focus on one variable are often run over short time frames and with close supervision, which makes them really useful for understanding an effect but usually under controlled and optimised conditions. We all know real life is not controlled and optimised. Gender diversity, people in larger bodies, disabled people and culturally diverse communities have all been under-represented in sport and exercise science research, so what this data tells us is only ever a starting point.
The World Health Organisation physical activity guidelines recommends muscle strengthening activity on two or more days a week, but the wider circumstances we're each living in shape what we have access to and what we're able to prioritise. The guidelines also ask for 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week on top of the muscle strengthening, so it's fair to ask where this time is all meant to come from. Nearly four in five Australian adults are not meeting both the physical activity and muscle strengthening recommendations. If we want people to move more, advice that assumes this much time and access is available is like handing everyone the same recipe and expecting they all have the time, the ingredients and a kitchen to cook it in. These are population-level challenges that are systemic, cultural and economic, and they're not a failure of the individual.
For those of us non-bodybuilders who like to move our bodies, or who have the means to commit to some sort of resistance training, even if we may not love how we get it, this piece was a relief to read.
With bills to pay, dogs to walk, meals to make and people to care for, I wanted you to know that you can still see good strength results from less time at the gym or Pilates studio, and perhaps gift you a chunk of your energy and peace of mind back to yourself.
Please don't mistake this for me advising you to move less. Much of my intention for my work is to loosen the bootstraps in people's minds, so you can trust that if you're doing some kind of strengthening activity regularly, you're ahead of the game and it's benefiting you. And if you're not right now, the best form of exercise will always be the one you're willing to do, that you enjoy and that works for your life to do consistently.
One of my closest friends, a mum of twins, told me the other day that she's doing personal training fortnightly. I was so impressed by her acceptance in what works for her right now, while still wanting to commit to building her strength. Knowing we can still build strength on a lighter schedule leaves more room for us to fill our cups in other ways. It also makes an exercise routine much more realistic to sustain long term.
Strength training is getting a lot of hype in the media at the moment, and rightly so. Stronger muscles quite literally improve every system in our body as well as helping us remain independent. But I want you to know that you don't need to give up the art class you love, volunteering at your community centre or an afternoon with your kids to squeeze in multiple un-relenting strength sessions every single week. It really pains me to see a continuous all-or-nothing fear mongering narrative in the media and online.
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