Meat and Potatoes Strength Training

Chances are you're not a professional athlete.

You're a regular person with a full-time job. Maybe a family. Maybe a side hustle, hobbies, a few too many plates spinning at once. Like most people, you've got a lot going on.

For people like us, training is both a necessity and a luxury. Time is finite, and the older you get, the more you feel it. Some days you're lucky to carve out an hour. Some days, 20 minutes is all you get.

So if your time in the gym is limited, you'd better make it count. You need to min-max your training.

What min-maxing means

Min-maxing means getting the most out of the least. In training terms, that means doing the most efficient exercises, with the fewest wasted reps, for the greatest return.

The easiest way I know to think about it? Your training should look like a good meal.

Not a fancy gourmet dish with ten garnishes and a drizzle of truffle oil. Meat and potatoes. A thick steak and a baked potato. Maybe a side of greens. Simple, filling, effective.

The meat: compound lifts

Every training session should be built around at least one big compound movement: the squat, bench press, overhead press or deadlift.

Why? Because compound movements train your whole body. The clue is in the name.

• The squat isn't just a leg exercise. It trains your entire posterior chain from your traps to your calves, plus your core, shoulders and arms.
• The overhead press isn't just a shoulder exercise. I'd argue it's a glute exercise. To press well, you have to stand rock solid with your legs, glutes and core locked in while your shoulders and triceps drive the bar overhead.
• The bench press isn't just a chest exercise. With proper leg drive, glutes squeezed, lats engaged and a death grip on the bar, your whole body is part of the lift.
• The deadlift, the king of the lifts, needs no explanation. Anyone who's done one knows it hits everything.

You can walk into the gym, do three heavy sets of five squats at around 85% of your one-rep max, and go home. That's a solid workout. The same goes for a few heavy sets of deadlifts.

Walking in, doing some leg press and leaving? Not so much.

There are endless variations of each lift: front squats, high-bar, low-bar, sumo, and so on. Pick one main version for each lift and treat the rest as accessories. (I prefer low-bar squats and conventional deadlifts, but that's a discussion for another day.)

The potatoes: accessories

Accessory work is any assistance exercise that supports your main lift.

The key word is supports. If you're squatting today, your accessories should complement the squat. Heavy squats followed by bicep curls doesn't make much sense. Train the squat's supporting cast on squat day so it doesn't eat into tomorrow's press or deadlift.

Accessories can be smaller compound lifts, like barbell rows or Romanian deadlifts, or isolation work, like leg presses, leg curls and tricep extensions.

No one cares how much you can leg press. I want to know how much you can squat. That's why it's a potato and not the meat.

Choose efficient accessories

To min-max, pick accessories that score well on two things:

• Loadability: can you move serious weight with it?
• Stability: can you perform it in a safe, controlled position?

Leg extensions are stable but not much use for the squat on their own, and they demand a partner exercise (leg curls) to balance them out. That's two exercises and twice the time.

A Bulgarian split squat hits quads, hamstrings and glutes all at once. It's one of my favourites and I do them religiously. If you want more hamstring emphasis, add Romanian deadlifts on deadlift days, which are both loadable and stable.

What it looks like in practice

Here's a simple three-day week built on the meat-and-potatoes model: one or two main lifts and a couple of accessories, done in about an hour.

Add weight to the main lifts whenever you hit all your reps, and take the accessories close to failure. Only got half an hour? Eat the meat and skip the potatoes.

Intensity beats variety

Two principles to take away:

1. Prioritise the compound lifts. Accessories come second.
2. Focus on effort and intensity, not variety.

There's an old idea, often credited to Bruce Lee, that the fighter to fear is not the one who's practised ten thousand different kicks once each, but the one who's practised one kick ten thousand times.

Ten exercises with pitiful weights won't get you far. Two exercises done with real weight, real intensity and real focus will.

Keep it simple. Meat and potatoes.

Keep your kit as simple as your training: our gym essentials are the tees, hoodies and shorts we reach for every week.