Minimalist Workout No.3
If you’re busy, finding time to work out can be an ordeal. You want to get bigger or stronger, but your schedule feels more packed than a New York subway car on New Year’s Eve. To get where you want to be, you’ll have to strip away all of the fluff. Anything that’s not absolutely essential has to be tossed out. With that in mind, here’s the third in a series of workouts that you can do twice a week, from warm-up to finish, in less than 45 minutes. The first was good for all around strength and conditioning. The second was about getting bigger. This one’s all about pure strength.
Start by doing the warm-up. You’ll do the 3-5 minutes of cardio and the hip flexor, groin, and lat stretches. If you need a reminder, check out the first minimalist workout. Once that’s done, you can go right to the workout itself. As with the other two, it’s got two days per week. Let’s start with A Day. After the warm-up you start warming up the squat. The idea is to start with a light weight at sets of five. Keep adding weight. Once five reps become a challenge, drop to three. Keep adding weight. Once three becomes a challenge, drop to one. From here, keep going until you hit a weight that feels very difficult, but you could do another rep if you really needed to. Think of it as being a 9 out of 10 in terms of difficulty. You must succeed on your heaviest rep of the day. Do not fail any reps. All that does is teach you that you can’t do it. This is your heavy single. From there, you’ll drop the weight to 80% of whatever that heavy single was. You’ll do two sets with it. Each set you’ll do as many reps as possible (AMRAP.) Rest 90 seconds between sets. Next you move on to the bench press. You’ll repeat the process, working up to a heavy single. This time, though, you won’t do the AMRAP.
From there, it’s on to the assistance lifts. For the Romanian deadlift, dumbbell bench press, and dumbbell row, you’ll do three sets of ten reps. The last reps of each set should be tough, but still doable. No failing reps here either. As for the rest between exercises and sets, that’s up to you. Work at your own pace and “take your time, but hurry up.” This isn’t a cardio session, but you shouldn’t take half an hour to do your assistance work. Once you can get all the reps in all the sets for an exercise, increase the weight. Don’t take massive jumps. Five to ten pounds is plenty. Think of it as slowing building up instead of taking leaps and bounds from workout to workout.
The B Day is just like the A Day. The difference is that on A Day you did an AMRAP for the lower body, and just the single for the upper body. On B Day you’ll reverse that. The assistance lifts are also different. They are the front squat, dumbbell overhead press, and pull-downs. Just like the A Day, three sets of ten. Work at your own pace. People often slack on the assistance work. Don’t. Put real effort into it because it builds the things that make your squat, bench, deadlift, and press better.
There’s nothing fancy about this one. It’s five lifts in the whole workout. Make sure you do each one with great form and push them hard. This program can be run for three weeks, then take a deload week where on the A Day you only do the squat and bench press to 70% of the last heavy single you did for three sets of five reps. You’ll do this for the deadlift and press on B Day. Do not do the assistance work. Once you’ve done that, you can run this again. After that, take another deload and run a different program. This one is pretty intense and should not be run for long or you’ll start burning out or getting injured. You’ve already got enough going on outside the gym, so now isn’t the time to be a hero.
