Realistic Time Commitment for Fitness

I ran a poll on twitter the other day with the following question:

How much time per week can be reasonably put towards health and fitness for a non-competitor, regular person with career/kids/social life, who wants to be and look strong and fit, but not make their whole life about it? Include time for lifting, cardio, steps, meal prep, etc.

The options were:

1. 7 hours or less (1 hour a day, max)

2. 7-15 hours (1-2 hours per day)

3. 15-20 hours (2-3 hours per day)

4. 20+ hours (3 or more hours per day)

What do you think the results were? My answer would’ve been Option Two, 7-15 hours per week, with 9-12 being the sweet spot for most people.

Turns out, my intuition was correct, as you can see from the results here:

Out of 477 respondents, the biggest chunk of 47% chose the second option. A total of 87% chose one of the first two - meaning 15 hours or less per week. Meanwhile, only 4% of people think 20+ hours a week is a reasonable expectation for a normal, busy, working person to spend on his fitness, all-in.

These results are roughly what I would’ve expected, and explain a lot about why I’m such a consistently strong advocate for basic barbell training. For the regular person who just generally wants to be strong and fit, and has to work within a realistic time-schedule due to work, family, and life commitments - basic barbell training remains the best, most efficient way to train for lifetime.

In other words, nothing beats it for the 99.9% of general population of people who aren’t pursuing competitive or highly specialized goals. And for those who are, it is still the best way to first build their base.

Contrasting a Realistic Sample Week with an Unrealistic

Here is a realistic sample week using back of the envelope math for someone who trains and takes his fitness seriously, but doesn’t want to make his entire life revolve around training and fitness:

• Train 3x80 mins + 15 mins total commute per session = 255 mins

• Walk 15 mins each after 21 meals per week = 315 mins

• Cardio 30min x2 or 20 min x 3 = 60 mins

• Meal prep 2 hours total (most meals prepped, eat out a few times a week)

That’s 12.5 hours. Almost 2 hours a day over the week. It adds up fast, doesn’t it? This is back of the envelope math and it’ll break out slightly differently for each person, i.e. one person can more easily get to the gym 4x/week, but can only stay 45-60 mins; the next person can only get to the gym 3x/week but once there, can train for 80 mins no problem. Some people can only do a 10 min walk after meals, instead of 15. Others can spare 20. And so on. But the basic numbers roughly work.

To people who make this stuff their whole life, who spend 15 hrs a week at the gym alone before even getting to stuff like walking and meal prep - this may seem laughable. But as the poll above suggests, they represent a tiny % of even the lifting population who read my tweets, much less the general population.

This kind of sample week above may not achieve absolute peak human physical development that we’d see in a competitive athlete, or maximize the absolute genetic potential for any one specific muscle group or area, but the whole body will be trained more than adequately for the needs of a normal person who wants to be generally strong and fit. And you eat right, you’ll also look good doing it. This is what the normal person wants and has realistic time to achieve.

Training Split

Someone who has already completed a linear progression and a run of early intermediate weekly progress using the basic lifts, can then make a lifetime of progress and look better and be stronger than 99% of people - not just of the general population, but the gym going population - with a heavy-light-medium variant and something like the following split:

Monday - Low bar squat, bench press, chins.

Wednesday - Press, deadlift, arms, abs.

Friday - Pause or high bar squat, incline or close grip bench, RDL, rows.

Is this the most ideal advanced program in the world? No. But you can do it in 60-90 mins, 3 days a week in perpetuity.

Don’t get too wrapped up in details. What about dips? Swap them in for a 2 month cycle on Friday in place of CGBP.

WHAT ABOUT UNILATERAL WORK?! Obviously you’ll die if you don’t do any single leg work, as everyone knows, so throw in Bulgarians for 6 weeks in place of high bar squats on Friday if you really want to. Don’t major in the minors and get overly caught up on the details.

This lifting program can slot perfectly into the sample week outlined above of ~12 hours total time commitment for lifting, cardio, meal prep, and general activity (steps). Realistic and sustainable for years, even decades.

In Contrast

I was inspired to run my initial poll based on a post that I thought was rather ridiculous. It’s someone who posts a lot of stuff that I generally like so don’t want to put on blast, so I’ll re-write it here without attribution:

- 30 mins fasted cardio with fat burners 5x per week

- Lifts 4-5x per week

- 15k steps per day

- Low fat diet

You will realize, very quickly, that your metabolism isn’t the problem. Your diet and inactivity are the problem.

This is asking for a 25-30 hour per week time commitment.

It breaks down something like this:

1. 30 min cardio x 5 = 150 mins (plus it has to be fasted, pigeon-holing you even further)

2. 5x week x 75 min lift + 15 min commute per session = 450 mins

3. 15k steps/day = 120 mins x 7 days = 840 mins

4. Meal prep = 180 mins (all meals prepped on a normal week)

Total = 1620 mins, or 27 hours. Math is back of the envelope, but 25-30 hours will be about right in most cases.

This is unrealistic and unsustainable for almost everyone. 96% of the mostly already-seriously-lifting population who read my twitter rejected it as unrealistic. I bet of the 4% who voted for it, a bunch couldn’t actually do it for more than a few months of “shock therapy,” if they tried and saw how much time it takes.

Consequences For Training

Based on this breakdown, a lot of what I advocate for should make a lot more sense. If you have a family, career, etc and want to be generally fit, strong, and look good, but the demands of your program exceed 15 hours a week in total - including time for meal prep and basic general activity, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

A 3 day per week basic barbell program, or 4 day split, using a few structural exercises to train the entire body, slots into this schedule much better than the typical 5 day per week body-part split that trashes the tris and obliterates the back. That’s the kind of programming that I grew up with reading in Flex Magazine, and that is still pushed today by most of the online influencers I see, who apparently don’t coach any real people with jobs, families, or responsibilities.

Raise Your Standards, But Realistically

Me and fellow twitter pal Coach Sam Krapf often catch a lot of flak online for telling people to raise their standards, that most men can achieve a 135 press/225 bench/315 squat/405 deadlift in about a year, by committing to training hard and not missing workouts and eating. And the same man, given another year or two of consistent hard training, will often get to 200/300/405/500, respectively, if he keeps going.

We have collectively done this with hundreds, perhaps thousands of men at this point, and while there will always be people towards the left side of the genetic bell curve, it remains true that most men can do this by simply showing up and working hard for 60-90 mins, 3 days per week and eating enough to recover.

Here’s an example from a few months ago:

We do this with average, normal guys all the time, yet always receive pushback as if it’s completely unrealistic, absurdly beyond the bounds of realistic expectations.

Yet for some reason I really don’t see people get pushback for asking for 25-30 hours a week of time commitment. There wasn’t a single such comment on that post above, for example, but we get this kind of pushback all the time.

I don’t understand exactly why this is.

Whatever the case may be, our ask is realistic for the vast majority of the population. If you want it bad enough, you can make 7-15 hours a week for it. But asking for 25-30 hours a week isn’t going to work for most, outside a tiny subset of people.