VOL. 15 — SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2026

The Research

Is more better when it comes to training?

When it comes to guidelines for training, they can be laid out simply.

This is your floor: two lifting sessions a week, total body, and 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic activity.

Those numbers come from the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The current version is the second edition, released in 2018 — the first came out in 2008, and the third isn't expected until 2028.

(Piercy KL, et al. The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. JAMA. 2018 Nov 20;320(19):2020-2028. PMID: 30418471)

So if you're not hitting that, you have to start there. The majority of the benefit comes from that prescription. That's the first wring of the towel — most of the good stuff comes out right there.

But is doing more than that going to give you better results? If the floor is the floor, is there any point in doing more?

The answer is yes. And potentially no.

There are certainly points where you can't do enough, and there are points where you're doing too much and are going to struggle to recover. What that number actually is, though, is very hard to know — because of the sheer number of factors feeding into it. How you're sleeping. Your stress. What's happening in your life. How you're eating. Your age, your training history, what you did last week.

And that number moves. It isn't a fixed line you cross once. The volume you handled easily at 28 with eight hours of sleep is not the volume you handle at 44 with a newborn and a deadline.

So I can't give you your ceiling. Nobody can. What I can do is show you what the research says about the direction of the curve, because different outcomes have completely different dose-response relationships — and almost nobody separates them out for you.

Let's start with size, because this is the cleanest finding we have.

The foundational work here is Brad Schoenfeld's. In 2017, Schoenfeld, Ogborn, and Krieger pooled 34 treatment groups across 15 studies and ran the meta-regression that essentially set the terms of this whole conversation. Their conclusion was a graded dose-response: more weekly sets produced more muscle growth, right across the range they examined. Roughly a 0.38% increase in hypertrophy per additional weekly set.

(Schoenfeld BJ, Ogborn D, Krieger JW. J Sports Sci. 2017 Jun;35(11):1073-1082. PMID: 27433992)

That paper is nearly a decade old now, and it's been prodded hard since — as good papers should be. So the obvious question is whether it holds up with better methods and a lot more data.

It does.

This past December, a group out of Florida Atlantic published the most comprehensive analysis of training volume ever assembled — 67 studies, more than 2,000 participants, modeling weekly sets against both muscle growth and strength using multiple functional forms rather than assuming a straight line.

They landed in nearly the same place Schoenfeld did: roughly a 0.24% increase in muscle growth per additional weekly set at an average of around 12 sets a week. Diminishing returns, yes. But the curve keeps climbing.

For strength, it's a different curve entirely. Same paper, same data: strength showed strong diminishing returns and what the authors described as a functional plateau. Past a certain point, more sets stopped buying more strength.

(Pelland JC, Remmert JF, Robinson ZP, Hinson SR, Zourdos MC. Sports Med. 2026 Feb;56(2):481-505. PMID: 41343037)

Here's the distinction you should walk away with.

Strength responds to heavier relative weight, good technique, and specificity in the lifts you're trying to improve. You can get very strong on a modest amount of work. But you cannot get the greatest muscle growth on modest volume.

Now, there's obviously crossover between the two. Hypertrophy happens anywhere from about 5 to 30 reps, and strength work generally lives at the lower end of that — so a man training heavy is building some size, and a man training for size is getting stronger. They aren't separate worlds.

But when we ask the specific question — is more better? — the answers diverge. For strength, not as much. For muscle growth, yes.

What about the cardio side?

There's a well-known finding in the mortality literature that returns flatten out past the guidelines — that once you're hitting 150 minutes, more activity doesn't buy much additional protection against dying. That's true, as far as it goes. But mortality is not the only thing worth measuring, and it may not even be the most useful thing for a man in his forties.

A UK Biobank analysis published this spring used accelerometer data — actual measured movement, not what people claimed on a questionnaire — plus Mendelian randomization to test causality. What they found has reframed how a lot of coaches and men approach that 150-minute number.

Hitting the guideline produced roughly an 8 to 9% reduction in cardiovascular disease risk. Real, but modest.

Getting a greater than 30% reduction required three to four times that volume — somewhere around 560 to 610 minutes a week.

(Br J Sports Med. 2026. PMID: 42156172)

Now, realize that 560 to 610 minutes is a LOT. That's 9 to 10 hours of moderate aerobic activity every week. Most men I work with have two or three hours at most for their total training. Not aerobic work — total.

So the point here is not "you should be getting 9 hours of cardio a week." Almost nobody reading this can, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

The point is that doing more than 150 minutes will benefit you, and the curve keeps rewarding you well past the floor. How much more you do is your decision, made against your actual life.

That direction lines up with everything we know about VO2 max, too. Cardiorespiratory fitness has one of the most linear dose-response relationships with mortality in all of preventive medicine. Every increment of fitness buys you something, and fitness keeps responding to training long after the mortality curve has flattened.

150 minutes is a floor, not a target.

But what about overtraining?

Overtraining gets a lot of hype, and some men use it as a hedge. Well, I don't want to do too much and hurt myself.

I used to think that was an appropriate position. But is it a scientifically supported one?

Well — nope.

In 2022, a group set out to systematically review the physiological and psychological changes caused by overtraining syndrome. They set reasonable criteria: original research, objective evidence of performance decline from before diagnosis, performance suppressed more than four weeks, documented psychological symptoms.

Zero studies met the criteria. Not a few. Zero.

(Weakley J, Halson SL, Mujika I. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2022 May 1;17(5):675-681. PMID: 35320774)

Let me be honest about what this does and doesn't mean, because I don't want to overstate it.

It does not mean overtraining is fake. It means the syndrome is poorly defined, hard to diagnose, and nowhere near as well documented as the confidence around it suggests. Overreaching — the shorter-term version, days to weeks of degraded performance — is real and common, particularly in endurance athletes. And the biomarkers the fitness industry sells you to detect this, the cortisol-to-testosterone ratio and the rest, don't hold up. A review of 38 studies found resting hormone levels were mostly normal in overtrained athletes.

What it does mean: overtraining syndrome is overwhelmingly a condition of elite athletes training at extreme volumes for extended periods. If you're a man lifting three or four days a week with a job and a family, the syndrome is not your problem.

But under-recovery might be. And that's the honest distinction. You are not going to develop a diagnosable syndrome by adding a fourth day. You might absolutely be sleeping five hours, eating badly, carrying a hard month at work, and asking your body for more than it can give you right now. That's not overtraining. That's under-recovering, and it's far more common than the thing men are actually worried about.

The guy worried about overtraining while training four hours a week has been sold a concern that doesn't apply to him.

So is the "less is more" thing viable?

There's a whole movement built around minimum effective dose right now. Three hard sets. Two short sessions. Train less, recover more.

A good portion of that is not only defensible — I use it with my own clients all the time. If two sessions is the time a man has to train, then two sessions is what we build. That isn't a compromise. That's the correct answer for his life.

Some guys don't actually believe less is more. They just don't like working hard, and "less is more" showed up at exactly the right moment to make that feel like a strategy.

It's a comfortable place to land. You get to keep the identity of a man who trains without the part where it's difficult. You've got a study in your back pocket. You can explain, at length, why the guy doing twenty sets is wasting his time — from a bench, between sets, on your phone.

And here's what the research says about that particular dodge. That same Florida Atlantic group ran a separate analysis on how close to failure people train — 55 hypertrophy studies, 67 strength studies, modeling proximity to failure as a continuous variable instead of the usual binary. What they found: muscle growth increases as you train closer to failure. You don't have to grind every set to the bitter end, and there are diminishing returns at the very top. But effort is doing real work in that equation.

(Robinson ZP, Pelland JC, Remmert JF, Refalo MC, Jukic I, Steele J, Zourdos MC. Sports Med. 2024 Sep;54(9):2209-2231. PMID: 38970765)

So you can do less. But the less you do has to be hard.

Three sets taken close to failure is a real stimulus. Meanwhile, three sets where you stop early because it starts to feel a little difficult — where you had six to ten reps left in the tank — are of almost no use to you.

So where does this land?

The boulders don't move. Two resistance training days a week, total body, and 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity. That's the floor, it's defensible, and it captures a large share of the health benefit for very little time.

But I'm not going to tell you that's the ceiling, because the evidence doesn't say that. More volume builds more muscle. More aerobic work builds more fitness, and fitness is one of the strongest predictors we have of how long and how well you live.

Your ceiling exists. It's just going to be pretty hard to find. This is dictated by your sleep, your stress, your job, your age, what you're eating, and what else is going on in your house. It's going to move week to week and season to season in your life.

So build the floor first. Make it boring and automatic. Then, when two days genuinely feels easy, add the third. Add intensity before you add hours. Let it grow because you want it to grow.

More is better, right up until it isn't.

Worth Remembering

Rippetoe wrote that after watching a friend survive three and a half weeks in the ICU following a serious surgery — considerably longer than the doctors expected. His explanation was blunt: the man was very, very strong.

I love this line because it refuses to be about aesthetics. There's no mention of how you look. There's barely a mention of health as we usually discuss it.

It's about capacity. What you can absorb. What you can carry. What you're able to do when someone needs something done and you happen to be the one standing there.

More useful in general. Strength isn't a private good. It's what makes you the man who can help move the couch, carry the kid the last mile, hold the ladder, take the shift. Nobody builds that on the day it's needed.

Try This Week

Eat your protein first.

This week's challenge is simple. Keep your normal diet routine, but for every meal you eat, get your protein in first, then your vegetables, then your carbohydrates.

That's it. No new food, no new grocery list, nothing to count.

The gist of it: protein carries the building blocks your body actually needs — amino acids — and those are what your muscle is made of and repaired with. Making sure you get them in first should always be the priority, because they're the thing you're most likely to run out of room for. Leading with protein and vegetables will also help blunt the blood sugar spike coming off the carbohydrates.

Five days. Same food you were already going to eat. Just start with the chicken.

From the Bookshelf

Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End David Gibson

The premise is right there in the title. To live the most effective life, you have to live with the end in mind and work backward from there.

Ecclesiastes is my favorite book in the Bible and one I recommend to every man. It says everything is vapor — your work, your wealth, your name, all of it thin and passing and gone faster than you'd like. Gibson's argument is that this isn't despair, it's clarity. God made the world for us to enjoy, and once you accept that you're going to die and that most of what you're chasing won't outlast you, you're finally free to actually live in it. You stop grasping. You eat your bread. You enjoy your wife. You do your work without needing it to make you immortal.

I'd really recommend reading this one with a friend and going through it piece by piece. It's very short and won't take you long, but there's plenty in it to think on.

Closing Thought

Extremes are almost always where the trouble is.

Medications, training, work, food, politics — pick your subject. The men shouting from either end of it are usually the least useful people in the conversation, and they're the loudest by a wide margin.

Aristotle called it the golden mean. Not the average of two positions, and not splitting the difference to avoid a fight. The mean is its own thing — courage sitting between cowardice and recklessness, both of which are failures, just in opposite directions.

Here's what I've come to believe: there is usually something true at both ends of a serious argument. The man who says lifting is everything is onto something. So is the man who says you can't outrun a bad diet. So is the man who says stop obsessing and go live your life.

Our job is not to pick a team and defend it. Our job is to find what's true in each and hold the tension.

Nothing is as black and white as we want it to be. We want it that way because it's easier.

It is not, in fact, easier.

That's all for this week, fellas.