With the launch of our new two-day-a-week strength program, BUILD, I thought it might make sense to talk a bit about two-day-a-week training. I sometimes hear folks get very stuck on what is “optimal” or “enough,” and as with so many things, what is “enough” probably depends a bit on your goals. If you want to go to the Arnold, two days a week probably won’t get you there. If you’re looking to get a little stronger and feel a little better, two days a week might be plenty. Sometimes hitting the sweet spot of a workout plan that is realistic and doable for your life and schedule is far superior to some “optimal” plan that does not work with the demands of your life.
The secret to making two days of training effective isn’t that much of a secret. You need to hit the fundamentals and make sure you’re making good use of your time on those two days. You need it to be challenging. And you need to progress week by week. This is called progressive overload, and we talk about it a LOT because it is one of the most widely accepted principles in strength training. We build all our programs using progressive overload.
One of the biggest things that matters when you only have two days to train is making sure those two days actually cover the things you want to improve. If you only have two hours a week to lift, you probably don’t want to spend one of those hours doing six different variations of biceps curls.
That doesn’t mean you need to cram every possible exercise into every workout, either. It means choosing exercises that give you a good return on your time. A well-designed two-day program will generally include movements that train the major muscle groups and movement patterns, rather than spending a lot of time on things that don’t add much to the overall picture.
It also means that you probably want your two workouts to be reasonably full-body. If you train four days a week, you have a lot more room to divide things up. You can have a squat-focused day, a bench-focused day, a deadlift-focused day, and so on. With two days, you’re going to get more mileage out of training your whole body each time you come in.
And then there’s the part that is probably the least exciting but arguably the most important: you have to actually do the two days.
A perfectly constructed program that you do once every three weeks isn’t going to help you much. A two-day program that you can consistently fit into your life for months and years is going to get you a whole lot farther.
This is where I think we lose the plot with the idea of “optimal.” Optimal for what? Optimal under what circumstances? If the theoretically optimal program requires you to spend five days a week in the gym, but you have a job, kids, a dog, a house, approximately 900 errands, and a life outside of lifting, it may not be optimal for you.
A good training program has to exist in the real world. That’s a big part of why we created BUILD.
BUILD is a two-day-a-week strength program designed for people who want to get stronger but don’t necessarily want their entire lives to revolve around getting stronger. You get two coached strength sessions each week, with programming designed to make those sessions count.
That means we’re not just picking two random workouts and calling it a program. We’re thinking about what you can realistically accomplish in two sessions, making sure you’re training your whole body, giving you enough work to actually make progress, and then building in progressive overload so you have somewhere to go from week to week.
If two days is what fits your life, two days is a perfectly legitimate amount of training to build from. You might be surprised by how much stronger you can get training two days on a consistent basis!
