I’ve been running your templates for the past ~4 years and have had great results.
Over the last ~6 months (after a layoff) my training consistency and motivation have slipped. My goals right now are mainly health, staying active, and maintaining strength/muscle. I’m not really motivated to work back to my previous numbers and I don’t have a good reason why I should.
I’m currently on PB I (2-day) with biking for conditioning (and for being in nature), and while the lifting frequency is fine, each session still feels longer/more fatiguing than I’m realistically willing to do right now. I’m looking for a “minimum effective dose” approach.
What would you recommend for supplementing that with resistance training in a time-efficient way (e.g., 2x/week, ~30-45 min sessions – even shorter than “time crunch”)? E.g. I’m thinking of only doing the first two exercises of each day of the 3-day PB1. Or I’ve considered adding 2-3 CrossFit classes per week at moderate effort (RPE ~7-8), but I’m not sure it’s the right tradeoff versus a simpler lifting setup.
Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!
I wouldn’t have an issue with you doing the first two exercises on PB1’s 3-day template for your resistance training. You could also do the time crunch template, which has additional modifications to the rep schemes in order to make sure the workout doesn’t take a long time. I also like the conditioning elements there, which is another area of concern I have regarding reduced training load.
As far as the minimum effective dose approach, I’d like to push back on that a little bit. Mainly because it never really made sense to me. We know that virtually any exercise is effective for improving health and/or performance. While the improvement may be too small to measure, it’s still something. We also know that most health and fitness adaptations improve more with a higher training load as compared to a lower training load. From that perspective, I’m not really looking for the minimum effective dose, but rather the maximum achievable training load.
In other words, how much can you realistically do? I’d like to max that out
I think exercise selection is a possible option here as well. I don’t know if anyone else experiences this, but I find deadlifts and bb squats unusually demanding. If I start a session with either it generally takes me longer to work up to a real first work set, and typically requires a bit more time to transition to work sets of whatever comes next.
That means if I’m in a period where I’ve got to get through things a bit quicker, or get through it without going so deep into the well of motivation, a period where I start off with a different variation (like hack squat machine or RDLs) can knock off a meaningful amount of time for a session for me without having to scale back on anything else.
