08/29/2026
Workin out or building muscle, is actually more about efficiency than anything else.
Let me explain....
Building muscle is a cumulative process. The more efficiently you can produce meaningful stimulus, the more productive your training becomes. The more productive your training the more more recoverable progress over time, and more progress means more muscle.
Training isn't about impressing people with your PRs, it's about forcing adaptation while managing the cost of creating it.
That's what I mean when I say train "optimally."
Optimal doesn't mean easy. It doesn't mean complicated. And it definitely doesn't mean doing less because it's too much and your lazy or tired. It means getting the largest useful stimulus for the amount of fatigue, volume, and time you're spending to create it.
I'm doing Rest Pause sets here because they're time efficient. Take a hard set close to failure, rest, then keep doin hard reps while the muscle is already fatigued. You can pack a lot of high effort, high tension reps into a relatively short period of time by doing this and you can do this type of thing with a bunch of intensifiers.
Drop Sets, Super Sets, Myo-Reps, Pause Reps, EMOM Sets, whatever. Intensification techniques are tools, not requirement but they do help make the job easier, and by easier I mean faster.
Efficiency isn't necessarily doing more work in less time, it's really about doing the right amount of work in the right amount of time.
More isn't automatically better.
Every additional set has a cost. As fatigue accumulates, the return you get from additional volume eventually starts falling. At some point you're not really improving the stimulus, you’re mostly increasing the recovery cost, and I'll let you know now, it ain't in your budget.
When I say get in, work as hard as you can, and get the f**k out, I don't mean rush.
Take your rest.
Control your reps.
Use appropriate load.
Maintain technique.
Recover between sets.
I mean make the sets you do MATTER!
If you're doing endless easy sets that never approach meaningful effort, you're probably gonna need a lot more volume to accomplish what fewer hard sets could have accomplished in half the time.
If you spend and hour on one muscle with set after set after set, you're probably well past the point where additional work is giving you the same return on investment. You don't get bonus points for saying you did chest for an hour. 🙄
time in the gym isn't the goal. Adaptation is.
For hypertrophy, you can build muscle across a surprisingly broad range, like 5- 30 reps per set, provided the sets are sufficiently hard and progression is occurring over time. You also don't really need enormous amounts of volume. For most people, a handful of good hard sets per muscle, repeated multiple times throughout the week, can produce the best results.
Exactly how many sets you need depends on the person, the exercise, training experience, proximity to failure, and recovery, etc. but the principle stays the same...
Do enough to force the adaptation. That's it. At a certain point, extra work doesn't mean extra growth.
There are a thousand ways to make training "optimal" but I try to keep it easy for my clients..
Come in, work hard, and get the f**k out.
Training extra is like having 2 girlfriends, it's a lot more work, for a lot more fatigue, and very little stimulus.
