The Minimum Effective Dose: When Less Is More

If you’re like most successful people, you might be tempted to approach your fitness the same way you approach business challenges…with an aggressive, all-in mentality.

After all, more is better, right?

More sets, more reps, more workouts per week, more sweat and more sacrifice.

Unfortunately when it comes to strength training, this mentality often backfires spectacularly.

There is a strength training concept that might save your sanity and will actually improve your results…

The Minimum Effective Dose.

What Is The Minimum Effective Dose?

The phrase itself comes from the world of pharmacology. It’s the smallest dose that produces the desired outcome.

My favorite analogy for explaining the Minimum Effective Dose is a headache.

You could take two aspirin and you might feel better. If it’s really bad, you might need three.

For those of you still believing that more is better, you could take the entire bottle of aspirin too.

It will likely eliminate your headache…but the solution causes bigger problems.

Pavel Tsatsuiline, the man who brought kettlebells to America and founded StrongFirst, applies this principle brilliantly to strength training. As he states in Easy Strength, the goal is to find “the least amount of work necessary to produce the desired training effect.”

This isn’t about being lazy. It’s about being smart.

Why More Isn’t Always Better

Here’s a concept that many people struggle to grasp with respect to their training: you don’t actually get stronger during your workouts. You get stronger during the recovery from your workouts.

Every training session create stress that requires your body to adapt. The actual adaptation (getting stronger, building muscle, improving conditioning) happens when you effectively recover from the training.

The problem is your body has a finite capacity to recover from cumulative stress.

When you’re juggling a demanding career, family responsibilities, and the general chaos of adult life, your recovery bucket is partially full before you ever walk into the gym.

When you add too much training volume into the mix you’re no longer building yourself up…you’re breaking yourself down.

Remember that it’s not about how much exercise you CAN do…it’s about how much exercise you can recover from.

I’ve witnessed someone who almost never runs actually finish a marathon.

Yes he physically could do it…but he paid for it with severe pain for more than a week as his body attempted to recover.

Before you write this off as a ridiculous example, what would have been an acceptable distance for a non-runner?

Ten miles? 5 miles? Maybe a 5K?

For a non-runner, anything over a mile was probably excessive.

The Minimum Effective Dose is about finding the right training volume and intensity needed to produce the desired result.

The Real Secret

The Minimum Effective Dose isn’t about finding the bare minimum you can do and still make progress (though that’s useful when life gets chaotic).

It’s about identifying the optimal stimulus-to-recovery ratio that allows you to train frequently and consistently without accumulating fatigue or injury.

There’s a saying in StrongFirst that you should aim to train as fresh as possible, as frequently as possible, and as heavy as possible.

The real secret is finding the right balance with those 3 variables.

This approach produces significantly better results than sporadic heroic efforts.

When you’re trying to reach a goal, it’s tempting to add another set, another exercise or another training day. You might even be considering training twice a day.

Before you do this, ask yourself if the additional training is necessary to produce the desired result? Or are you simply doing more work because it mentally feels productive?

If there’s room in your schedule to consistently add training volume, that’s fantastic. Just increase the volume intelligently.

Overtraining can easily set you back from reaching the result you’re seeking.

The best training program isn’t the one that looks most impressive on paper or makes you throw up on a regular basis.

The one you can actually stick with for the next decade should serve as your baseline.