The most common reason people don’t go to the gym is time. With work, family, and life in the way, it’s hard to come to the gym every day to get fit. However, you don’t have to come to the gym every day to be healthy. In fact, you don’t even have to come multiple times a week if your schedule is really that tight.
Working out twice a week is good starting point for beginners. Starting here can help start healthy habits, help get you comfortable with the gym, and can provide far greater benefits as oppose to not going at all. It’s recommended that your twice per week workouts be a strength training routine because it has the most long-lasting benefits for the rest of your week.
Benefits of Twice a Week Workouts
Starting Healthy Habits
The best way to start a life-long habit is one step at a time. Too often people will throw themselves into fitness by starting with 6 days a week, 2 hours a day, all while eating a super restrictive diet. It’s easy to follow this routine when you’re motivated, but motivation never lasts forever. As soon as reality sets in, they’ll give up and think fitness just isn’t for them.
The “fitness isn’t for me” mindset is never right. Fitness success comes from starting small then working your way up. Your first fitness goal should be to come to the gym twice a week for at least 30 minutes. Once you’re there, you can do whatever you want. This will be a chore at first, but it will quickly turn into a habit you may look forward to doing. This is the time to add extra days or trying new diets.
Learn more about building fitness discipline for life-long results.
Getting Comfortable With the Gym
The gym is a very intimating place for many people. If you’re out of shape and don’t really know what you’re doing, it can feel like everyone is looking and judging you. This feeling can be the number one deterrent for people coming to the gym at all. By only showing up twice a week though, you won’t have to put up with as much anxiety compared to going 3 times a week.
Some tips to help reduce gym anxiety include:
- Educating yourself through fitness videos, articles, and podcasts
- Creating a routine so you know what to except each time
- Coming with friends or family
- Trying the classes to get guidance from instructors and positive feedback from fellow members
- Getting a personal trainer you can trust
Something Is Better Than Nothing
This may sound obvious, but the all-or-nothing mindset mentioned before makes this worth repeating. Just because you can’t go every single day doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother going at all. It may not feel like much now, but if you can maintain your twice a week workouts for months or years, you’ll set yourself far beyond your peers as time goes on.
Twice a Week of Strength Training
Why Strength Training?
Strength training is recommended because:
- Scalability – you can use the same routine for months and still see progress
- Muscle – the muscle building benefits enhance all goals and life outside the gym
Learn why strength training is not only recommended by the CDC to anyone over 30, but also how it can promote youthfulness and overall health.
Scalability
Scalability is an underrated yet important aspect of fitness. As mentioned, scalability refers to the ability to make your same workout more and more challenging over time without risking injury or losing progress.
This is very important because there are many types of exercise that work for the first few weeks, but then you suddenly stop seeing results. This is especially true for cardio focused routines like running, cycling, bootcamp workouts, etc.
Muscle Building
There are tremendous benefits to building muscle outside of looking good. Muscle can both speed up your metabolism and make your workouts more effective.
The speed of your metabolism is primarily based on two factors: how active you are and how much muscle you have. Activity is obvious because the more you move, the more calories you burn. Muscle also speeds up the metabolism because it’s the most expensive tissue on the body, meaning your body burns a lot of calories every day just to keep it from atrophying (breaking down). So while activity helps you burn calories manually, muscle burns them automatically 24 hours a day.
It even helps improve the activity side of metabolism by making your workouts more effective. More muscle means you can lift more weight, move your body faster, and last much longer throughout the workout.
Lastly, building muscle does not have to mean being a bodybuilder. Most people are turned off of strength training for this reason, especially women. In reality, building muscle does not make you look super bulky and huge overnight. Instead, the muscle you do build will help shape your body to look more sculpted. For example, building muscle in the arms can help develop distinction between the shoulder, the biceps, and the triceps. It won’t make the arm bigger, it just makes it look more defined as oppose to one cylindrical mass.
Building a Twice A Week Strength Routine
There are three elements to a good twice a week strength routine:
- Compound movements
- Full body workout
- Progressive Overload
Compound Movements
Compound movements are exercises that use more than one joint at a time. For example, a pushup is compound because the shoulder and elbow joint are both moving, but a bicep curl is not compound (it’s an isolation movement) because only the elbow is bending.
Moving multiple joints creates a better exercise because more muscles get involved, making the exercise hit more of your body at once. On top of this, compound movements allow different muscle to synergize. Muscle synergy occurs when the cooperation of different muscles produces an output greater than the sum of each individual muscle. For example, a pushup primarily uses the chest and triceps (arms). If your chest can produce a maximum of 200 units of energy by itself, and the triceps can only produce 100, the pushup movement can produce more than 400-500. These are arbitrary numbers, but it gives an idea of how much more effective it is to work groups of muscles rather than individual parts.
Here’s a list of compound movements for each major muscle group:
| Legs and Hips | Squats, deadlifts, lunges |
| Chest and Arms | Bench Press, chest press, pushups |
| Back and Legs/Arms | Pullups, deadlifts, rows |
| Shoulders and Arms | Overhead press |
| Glutes and Legs | Hip Thrust, deadlift |
| Core and Arms/Legs | Plank variations |
Full Body Workout
People often focus on individual body parts or muscle groups when they work out. Sometimes it’s to “get rid of that stubborn gut,” or simply because having a “leg day, chest day, arm day, etc.” is so common in fitness culture. This does not work if you’re working out twice a week. In fact, splitting the body is only recommended when working out at least four times a week. Instead, focus working the entire body each session.
There are over 600 muscles in the body, so don’t take this too literally. Just be sure to use compound movements to hit general areas. For example, doing a squat for legs, a bench press for upper body, and a row for back will hit the entire body; and that’s just 3 exercises.
Progressive Overload
As mentioned before, scalability for workouts is important to see long term progress. The way you scale your workouts is through a process called progressive overload. Progressive overload is the gradual increasing of either weights, reps/sets, or exercises week after week.
Progressive overload is important because doing the exact same workout every time will yield results only for the first couple of weeks. After that, the body gets use to the workout and stops seeing a need to progress. To combat this, each workout has to be slightly harder than the last so your body is constantly challenged as it gets more fit. It’s easiest to do this with compound movements because of their muscle synergy effect.
As a generally rule, you can do one of three things each time you workout. Either add 1-4 reps to an exercise, add 5-10 pounds, or reduce the rest period slightly to add another exercise or an extra set. The goal is to make very subtle increases in difficulty each time. If you feel like the workouts are becoming too difficult too quickly, try reducing how much intensity you add each week or add intensity every other week instead.
When Progress Stalls
Even if you’re doing everything right, there will be a time when your twice a week workout stops yielding results. This is called a plateau, an inevitable point of every workout routine. At this point, the absolute most effect way to get out of the plateau is to work out more often (3+ days a week), or to change up your routine. It usually takes about 2-8 weeks for a plateau to hit. By that time, you would have gained the time management skills and the exercise knowledge to get out of your plateau.
If you’re still too busy to add more training, then adding more activity (as discussed below) will be you’re second best option.
Adding Activity Throughout The Week
Whether or not your routine is still giving results, adding activity throughout the week will only add more benefit to your overall goals. Activity represents anything that gets you moving, so it doesn’t require going to the gym extra days if you don’t have time.
Here are list of ways to make your non-workout days more active without taking time from your busy schedule:
- Parking farther from the workplace, grocery store, etc. to get extra steps
- Taking the stairs
- Walking or stretching during your breaks
- Standing up and moving between long periods of sitting
Steps are one of the best measures of activity since most smartphones track all the subtle movements you make. Although a lot of people don’t like that they’ll capture non-walking movements as “steps,” any movement is good movement. Use the Health app on your phone to see how many steps you normally get a day and make a goal to increase it steadily over time. Most people get 2,000 a day if they have sedentary jobs, so making an effort to increase this by 1,000 a week will help keep the body much more active outside the gym. A great long term goal would be 10,000 steps a day, which is very realistic if you use the tips above.