Doctor of strength training shares a 40-minute weekly dumbbell workout plan for building strength and mobility

Most people exercise because they want to trigger changes, whether that’s a change to their health, body or even mood. But the uncomfortable truth about exercise is that, to prompt positive physical changes, you usually have to do more of it, or at least progress it in some way – running further or lifting heavier weights for more sets.

This requires time, which is something most people are in short supply of. But there are ways to achieve more in your workouts while taking a smaller chunk of your day – particularly when it comes to strength training.

“People assume that when you’re working out you need to spend hours and hours in the gym to get benefits,” says Dr Milo Wolf, a fitness coach and founder of training app MyoAdapt, who holds a PhD in sport science specialising in strength training.

“In reality, you don’t need to spend that much time in the gym to start seeing results. If you employ certain strategies, you can get away with as little as 30-60 minutes in the gym each week and still see really solid progress, even if you’ve been lifting for several years.”

Below, he explains the theory behind six of these strategies, and shares a two workouts per week plan you can follow with just a few dumbbells to develop strength, boost bone density, build muscle, improve mobility and experience the plethora of other benefits strength training has to offer.

Technique one: Maximise the efficacy of each set

Strength training is a victim of diminishing returns, so performing more sets of an exercise in a bid to build more muscle will not necessarily be the smartest move for efficiency or overall results.

“Let’s say you do five to 10 sets per week on each muscle group – you’re going to get a solid amount of your potential muscle growth and results from the gym,” Wolf says. “But when you go from five to 10 sets per week for each muscle group to 20, 30 or more, that’s where the benefits really start to taper off. You’re getting less bang for your buck.”

For this reason, he recommends focusing on a few heavy sets per week on each muscle group, and trying to make them as effective as possible.

“To make these sets as effective as possible, you want to take those sets close to failure [where your muscles have tired to the point you cannot perform another rep with good form],” says Wolf.

A good signifier of reaching this stage is that your movements should involuntarily slow down during the last few reps of a set as a result of muscular fatigue.

“How close to failure you should go is still a topic of ongoing research,” Wolf adds. “From my reading of the research, if you only do a few sets per week on each muscle group, you probably want to take them at least to failure, and potentially even past failure.”

This can be done through techniques such as drop sets, which he explains in one of the sections below.

“Across dozens of studies, we see that the closer you go to failure overall, the more muscle growth you see,” Wolf adds. “Because training to failure doesn’t take any additional time, it is one of the strategies you can employ to grow muscle more efficiently.”

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Technique two: Antagonistic supersets

“The two techniques we have the most research on for saving time and still getting the same amount of muscle growth are drop sets and antagonistic supersets,” says Wolf.

He has co-authored a paper on this topic, with the take-home message being that they can deliver similar levels of muscle growth in approximately half the time of a traditional strength training set-up – ie performing a set, resting for 60-plus seconds, then performing another set.

But what is an antagonistic superset, and how can it streamline your strength training efforts?

Most muscles exist in antagonistic pairs. This simply means the muscles in this pairing contract and relax to deliver opposing functions – for example, the biceps contract to flex the elbow and bend your arm, then the biceps muscles relax and the triceps contract to extend it again.

An antagonistic superset involves working these muscles back to back with no rest in between. After you have completed both exercises, you take a break before repeating the sequence, thus cutting out half of the usual rest intervals you would have during your strength training session.

“Effectively, while one muscle is resting, the other one is training,” explains Wolf. “Because a biceps curl targets the biceps on the front of your arm, then a triceps extension targets the triceps on the back of your arm, performing the opposite joint function, they are not going to overlap.”

Further examples of antagonistic supersets could be a chest exercise like the press-up and a back exercise like the bent-over row, or a quadriceps-dominant exercise like the squat and a hamstring-dominant exercise like the Romanian deadlift.

“You don’t need to pick two exercises that target antagonistic or opposite muscles either,” adds Wolf. “You can also superset any two exercises that don’t have any meaningful overlap. Something like a calf raise and a lateral raise [for the shoulders], for example.”

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Technique three: Drop sets

“We have around six to 10 studies now comparing drop sets with traditional strength training,” Wolf says. “In these studies, we see that drop set training leads to the same muscle growth [as traditional strength training] in 30-70 per cent less time, depending on the research. So if you were previously working out for an hour-and-a-half, you could be looking at spending more like half an hour in the gym instead and still seeing the same results – which is great.”

But, as with the antagonistic supersets above, it’s important to understand what a drop set is, and how you can use them to build muscle more efficiently.

“With drop set training, you start with a heavy set to failure, then immediately after finishing this, you drop the weight you’re lifting by roughly 20 per cent and complete another set to failure with this new, lighter weight,” Wolf explains. “Straight after this second set, drop the weight by about 20 per cent again and complete another set to failure. Continue this until you have completed your target number of sets.”

The first set will usually have a target number of repetitions to aim for – usually between eight and 12 – then for the subsequent sets, your goal is to perform as many reps as you can with good technique.

“Different people might get different numbers of reps on the drop sets because of their physiology,” Wolf explains. “Some people might be able to hit 10 reps on that second set, while others may only manage six. To prescribe a set number of reps is probably doing a disservice to how unique each person is.”

Research suggests that, for every one normal set you would usually do, you should typically do 1.6 drop sets to see similar results, he adds.

In practice, this means if you would usually do three sets of 10 on an exercise, you could swap this for a drop set with five subsequent lighter sets in quick succession – a taxing but far more time-savvy procedure.

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Technique four: Exercise selection

This might seem obvious, but it is a point that is often overlooked. Choosing exercises that require less prep work will save you time in the gym.

For example, rather than biding your time for a turn on the bench press, could you hit your chest with a few hard sets of press-ups?

“Dumbbell exercises are going to be more efficient than the barbell alternatives,” Wolf says. “With a barbell, you need to warm up, load the plates, then unload them and put them away afterwards. While that might not seem like much, that’s a few minutes you could spend doing an extra one or two sets of a dumbbell exercise.

“The same applies for stack-loaded machines and bodyweight movements, as long as the resistance is sufficient to get a solid stimulus [ie you can take each set close to failure].”

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Technique five: Do a no-frills warm-up

Some people spend a lot of time on their warm-up, which is an honourable endeavour – no one wants to pick up an injury.

But recent research trumpets the physical and mental merits of a shorter warm-up. This is particularly true in a controlled environment like a gym, where injury risk is relatively very low when compared to the dynamism and unpredictability of field sports such as football.

“If you want to save time, warming up should be kept to the bare bones,” says Wolf. “Warm-ups can be important, especially for sports, but for lifting, there are a few points to take note of.

“Firstly, the research we have suggests just one fairly heavy set [between 70-90 per cent of your one-rep max] of one to three reps, before your first actual training set, tends to be all you need to elicit a boost in performance. It’s heavy, but it’s a very feasible set, and it should make your first training set feel a lot more manageable. If you’re already walking or cycling to the gym, that one fairly heavy set might be enough to cover your warm-up.”

Wolf also points out that any time spent warming up is time not spent on your actual workout.

“If you go to the gym for 60 minutes and spend 20 minutes warming up, that is 40 minutes where you are not working hard,” he says. “If your warm-up takes five minutes, you have 55 minutes of actual working out, and so you’re likely to see more health benefits, muscle growth and overall progress.”

For this reason, when training with sub-maximal loads and a primary goal of building muscle, Wolf likes to keep his warm-ups to just a few minutes. He has found a set of six to 10 reps of the exercise he is going to be doing, at 40 per cent of his one-rep max, followed by a set of one to three reps at 70-80 per cent of his one-rep max, works well.

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Technique six: Workout frequency

The most important factor in finding an effective workout routine is identifying one that suits your schedule – the workouts you do are always going to deliver greater results than the workouts you miss.

But for those trying to maximise their training efficiency, Wolf says two to three weekly full-body workouts hits the sweet spot.

“From the research, we generally see that training a muscle twice a week is a bit better than training it once a week,” he explains. “So, doing one hour-long workout might be slightly worse than doing two 20-30-minute workouts. For this reason, I would suggest adopting a full-body routine where every major muscle group gets hit at least twice per week, and I would focus heavily on compound movements – exercises that target multiple muscles at once.”

In each workout, Wolf recommends including exercises covering four movement patterns which, between them, “cover most bases”.

“These are the hip hinge for the lower body, so things like deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts and even hip thrusts,” he says. “The other important movement pattern for the lower body is some sort of squat or lunge pattern, so we’re talking about a high bar squat, Bulgarian split squat or dumbbell step-up.

“Then there’s a horizontal press, training your chest, triceps, front deltoids and even your lateral deltoids with things like the dumbbell chest press, dips and deficit press-ups. And the final movement pattern to include is going to be a horizontal pull. The reason a horizontal pull is so important is because it gets a good amount of stimulus to the latissimus dorsi, rhomboids, mid trapezius and lower trapezius [the muscles across your back].

“So if I was constructing two or three full-body workouts per week and I wanted maximum bang for your buck in terms of bone health, overall resilience, better functionality in day-to-day life and muscle growth, I would just focus on getting those four movement patterns in and doing two or three sets of each per workout.”

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Dr Milo Wolf’s two-day workout plan for busy people

The two workouts below should take roughly 20 minutes each, and they are to be performed on different days of the week. When arranging them in your week, leave at least one full day between the two workouts. Beyond this, you can be flexible as to how and when you incorporate them into your routine.

Each workout comprises four exercises, to be performed as two supersets – paired movements are signified by the labels A and B. In practice, this means you will start the first workout by performing five to eight repetitions of the flat dumbbell press, immediately followed by five to eight repetitions of the incline dumbbell row. After this, you rest for 45 seconds then repeat this sequence.

When you have completed this sequence three times, you move on to the second set of exercises. All movements have been demonstrated in the video above. You can also find a video of a beginner workout which follows the same base principles underneath the tables below.

Day one

Day two

What are the benefits of strength training?

“Just doing these two workouts per week is going to be really beneficial to your physique and your health,” Wolf says. “The research on lifting for health also generally suggests that the benefits are maximised at around two hours per week.

“Whether you would get additional benefits by going past that is still kind of contentious within the research. So, in contrast to things like getting your steps in or activities like running and cycling, where you generally see more health benefits the more you do, it seems like you can get most, if not all, the health benefits of lifting weights from around two hours per week.”

Here, the term health encompasses myriad metrics including a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and all-cause mortality. In Wolf’s words: “Strength training lowers your risk of basically every conceivable disease.”

“Most forms of activity do a similarly effective job, provided you do them consistently, at improving your health,” he continues. “But there are going to be slight additional benefits to lifting.”

For example, lifting weights has a relatively low injury rate when compared to high-impact activities like running and field sports such as football and tennis. It is performed in a controlled environment with a large emphasis on control and technique.

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It has perks to offer people of all ages, too.

“Especially as you get older, the body remembers,” says Wolf. “Even if you lifted, say, for a few years in your twenties or thirties, you will be better off for it in your sixties and seventies compared to someone who never lifted weights.

“It’s going to improve things like bone mineral density, which, as you age, helps reduce your risk of fractures and osteoporosis. Sarcopenia – the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength – is another big one [strength training helps to combat].”

For these reasons, Wolf describes lifting weights as the “single most powerful thing you can do for gaining muscle” – even beyond diet. And a strong body tends to be a robust body.

“It is the first line of intervention for improving sarcopenia, bone density, muscle, and generally improving nearly all of your health markers, while reducing the risk of virtually every disease,” he says.

“I believe you can get the vast majority of health benefits from exercise by simply lifting a few times a week and aiming for a daily step count of 8,000 to 12,000. That can be a really simple approach for not overthinking exercise.

“Because as much as many people focus on things like VO2 max and mitochondrial health, this is fixating on correlates of health rather than actual all-cause mortality risk. So I think focusing on behaviours that make you healthier, rather than the metrics that are associated with good health, is probably a good thing.”

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