This is a bit of a general question, so my apologies if this is not quite specific enough. In general, for someone who is training for general strength/hypertophy and health (not competitive), is it acceptable to increase overall training frequency in exchange for decreasing the number of exercises performed per session? I ask this because I cannot seem to get the length of workouts on most of the BBM programs down under 90 mins. I already am not using many warmup sets, and I am capping my rest times to 3 mins, but in general performing 3 exercises at the prescribed volume of most of the programs I am still struggling to get this all done in time and find myself having to frequently switch the last exercise to a myo-rep type setup. Would it be advisable to say, take something like the bridge and add a 4th day and reduce the number of exercise slots to 2 per session? Are there any considerations to make if this is done? Its just a lot easier for me to get in the gym more often, but with less overall time in a session. I understand this may be non-optimal but I am trying to make training as desirable as possible and keep motivation as high as possible to optimize long term compliance and success (because what am i gonna do? not train?). As a father of 2 young daughters, taking 1.5 - 2hr long sessions is destroying my motivation and desire to train and I don’t want to just bandaid it with a “break” like running the time crunch template. I would like more options to keep training sustainable. Thoughts?
Sure, you could do this. I would just make sure the 1st scheduled exercises always come first in a given training session and the 2nd scheduled exercises always come before the 3rd exercises. So consider the following:
Day 1:
exercise 1
exercise 2
exercise 3
Day 2:
exercise 1
exercise 2
exercise 3
Day 3:
exercise 1
exercise 2
exercise 3
NOW BECOMES
Day 1:
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Day 2:
Exercise 1
Exercise 3 (day 1 originally)
Day 3:
Exercise 1
Exercise 2 (day 2 originally)
Day 4
Exercise 2 (day 3 originally)
Exercise 3 (day 2 originally)
Exercise 3 (day 3 originally)
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Dear Dr. Feigenbaum,
On the four-day Bridge, would you still recommend doing 2 days of GPP?
Or would one day of GPP suffice if one opts to do the four-day variation?
In Strength,
Eddie Mun