20 Minute Strength
Getting strong on a schedule
We’re all busy. I get it. You don’t want to spend an hour in the gym, and even plans that say they take 30 minutes quickly balloon out when you add in warmup sets and accessory work.
So if our goals in the gym are to improve our overall fitness for use outside the gym, we want to optimize our time spent there, to allow more time doing the things we love. This article will cover how to regulate lifting to get the most out of it, and will develop a 20 minute program to put that into practice.
Requirements
Before I get into how this all works, I need to note two requirements for this method. This is basically rehashing strength training basics.
First, you need to use big, whole body exercises that use as much musculature as possible. There’s a lot of options here, so I’ll name a few of my favorites:
Trap Bar Deadlifts cover the muscles of the leg, the core, the lower back, the lats, the forearms, and much more. Deadlifts with a trap bar tend to combine the benefits of a traditional squat and deadlift in one exercise, while also removing potential shoulder issues from the equation. It’s also often safer for the lower back in a lot of people.
Sandbag Shouldering is another favorite of mine that covers a lot of the same ground the deadlift does, but seems to emphasize the arms and core a bit more than the lower body. It’s also much more explosive — training speed under load is one of the best ways to get stronger.
I’m very partial to the Dumbbell Snatch, though actual olympic lifts would work well if you’re skilled in them. But the reason I like the DB Snatch is because it needs no real learned skill, and it provides full body explosive work much like shouldering does. And DBs are plentiful in most gyms.
Weighted Chinups and Dips are not the first thing one things of when they think “whole body”, but they still hit the core musculature very well on top of the upper body. These have a place in most lifting programs as long as they’re not the sole exercises you do.
And many more. All variations of deadlifts, squats, cleans, and snatches are great. You can marry overhear presses with barbell rows in the same way I’ve linked chins and dips. You can include keg tosses, or stone lifts, or any number of things.
The second requirement is that you need to be able to vary the load. And this is important. Barbells are made for this — add or remove plates. Dumbbells at most gyms also allow this, assuming there is a big rack of different weights. Using a dip belt for chins and dips is the same as a barbell — add or remove plates.
If you use a sandbag or some odd object, it’s harder to vary. Personally, my main bag is full of rubber mulch which isn’t messy and gives me the opportunity to slip plates in and out of the bag with relative ease. I’ve seen others create small duct taped bags of 10–25lbs of sand each, and then fill their main sandbag with whatever they can.
There’s a lot of options, but if you can’t figure out how to vary the load, you might wish to use a different tool for this program.
Now that we have our requirements in hand, let’s talk about the techniques we want to use to optimize our time spent in the gym.
Auto-regulation
In our context, auto-regulation simply means that how well you perform sets in a workout is going to manage the intensity of the following sets. It is how we will know to switch gears like an automatic transmission in a car.
The basics I’m going to lay out from here is based Michael Tuchscherer’s RPE for lifting, but simplified for a more general strength trainee.
When you perform a set of repetitions of some exercise, and stop, you should generally have a feel for how many more reps you think you can do. It takes some experience to get it right, but it’s okay to be wrong — we just want a guess. You should be recording your sets and reps already (right?!), so we’re going to write this guess next to that performance using the abbreviation “RR” for Reps Remaining — 5RR, 2RR, etc.
This RR value is crucial to the way we’re going to auto-regulate. The rules for autoregulation are straightforward:
Stop each set at the 2RR mark or 5 reps, whichever comes first.
If your set ended at 3RR or greater, increase the load by 10–20%.
If your set ended at 1RR or 1 rep, decrease the load by 10–20%.
If you set ended at 0RR, meaning it was an all out effort, decrease the load by a significant amount (40–50%) and work back up using the rules above.
The specific number of reps will vary from set to set, that’s okay. But some trainees might be more comfortable with a different target number — 5 is a good base for strength work, but there’s nothing wrong with an 8 or 10 rep target if that suits you better. Just know that these reps will drop with fatigue.
The Program
Ok so we have two requirements (whole body exercises and the ability to vary load) as well as a system for auto-regulation. Now what? Easy.
Pick one big exercise to do each day. You can do 2 exercises in a circuit fashion if they’re smaller and less taxing, like chins and dips.
Start a timer for 20 minutes.
Begin with a very light load, and slowly increase to a point where you hit that 1–3RR range for auto-regulation to kick in. This ramping up can take 5–10 minutes depending on how you feel for a given day.
Keep going using auto-regulation, allowing weight to increase and reps to decrease as you fatigue. Near the end of the 20 minutes, you will probably be doing sets of 2–3 reps.
When the time is up, the session is over. Total up the overall weight lifted by multiplying reps times load and adding that all together. This is our session’s volume and it is the primary number you want to focus on from session to session. Volume will go up and down in waves, but over time, it should be trending higher and higher to show you are getting stronger.
This method is quick and simple, and doesn’t need a lot of planning or forethought. It removes a lot of anxiety that can cripple lifts sometimes if you’re not feeling up to it. Working with auto-regulation means you can cap your top weight each session if life has got in the way of your recovery.
Try doing this 3–4 days a week, rotating through 2–3 different exercises, for a few weeks and see how you feel.
Sign up for more posts from Everyday Fitness: