The vast majority of my personal training clients don’t have grand ambitions. They want to look better, feel better, be healthier, and not be limited by their strength in their day-to-day lives. In other words, almost all of my clients are doing this because they know they are supporting some other aspect of their lives, not because they are lifting hobbyists doing it for the love of the game.
I start most clients with two days per week of in-person training and then gradually push them to add more days over time. I would say at least half of my clients never have any interest in moving beyond those two days. This led me to a lesson that it took me a long and painful time to learn: as a personal trainer, your clients are never going to care about fitness the way that you do. And that’s okay. That’s how it should be, and that’s why they hire you. You’re supposed to care more.
I learned to set expectations early, and I realized that what I want for my clients rarely aligns with what they want for themselves. So most of them come for those two days, get it done, and move on with their lives. That’s how they like it. So with expectations tempered on their end and mine, we go about our business and everyone is happy.
But every once in a while, I will get a client who commits so completely to those two days that they redefine what I thought was possible despite those constraints.
The client and the results
I had a client reach out to me in late 2020 when COVID was very much still in full swing. For the sake of anonymity, I will call him John Doe. I knew John was different from our first conversation. He had a great attitude and seemed excited to start but not like he was riding a temporary wave of motivation like some training prospects.1 He seemed ready to buy in one hundred percent to whatever path I was about to place him on. He never balked at price, didn’t have to talk to anyone, and was ready to get to work.
John trained with me for around four years. Before he struck out on his own, he got to the point where he was doing sets of 8 on bench press with 235 lbs, was doing sets of 5 with 170 lbs on overhead press, and had similarly respectable numbers for squats, Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, pull-ups and chin-ups, you name it. The guy got seriously strong.
How did he do it?
In John’s four years of training with me, I doubt he missed more than five percent of his sessions. Any time he ever did need to miss, he immediately scheduled a makeup session. He had a demanding corporate job working long and odd hours—he was sometimes taking calls late at night or into the wee hours of the morning due to time differences—yet he always prioritized his 7 a.m. sessions. And I never once heard him complain.
His four-year journey was not without its bumps. He dealt with some nagging injuries yet never used that as an excuse to miss sessions. He trusted me to help him work around them, so he never lost momentum. At several points throughout his time with me, he needed to back off movements to allow his body to recover and heal, but he always recovered and ended up stronger on the other side.
Lifting is often about taking one step back to take two steps forward. I will never lie to clients about the possibility of pain or injury during training. The level of risk they’re willing to accept is up to them, but the risk is never absent. Building significant strength and muscle requires effort applied consistently over time and often means pushing at the edges of your capacity. It’s almost impossible to do that without a misstep at some point. What separates the people who persevere from people who quit is that the former use pain and injuries as learning opportunities. They see them as bumps in the road rather than signs that they’re broken, are doing something wrong, or shouldn’t be training. And John was amazing at recognizing this.
What to take away from John’s results
Genetics matter
John put on significant muscle from only two days of training, but that won’t always be the case for every trainee. You could create identical conditions for two different clients, and they may see markedly different results. That’s the nature of genetics. But that should never preclude people from putting in the effort. It just means you need to manage expectations. John still put in the work. For four years. Genetics are not a substitute for that.
You should also never assume that you are a genetic outlier. It’s not within your control, and blaming your lack of progress on poor genetics gets you no closer to being where you want to be. It would not have mattered one iota if John had piss-poor genetics. He would have shown up anyway.
Two days can be enough
It is possible to see incredible results in a couple days of training provided you can keep increasing the stimulus within those two training sessions over time.
When volume is equated, muscle growth appears to be nearly identical despite differences in weekly training frequency.2 The reason most lifters need to increase training frequency as they advance is so they can accommodate more volume, which can lead to greater muscle growth.
Strength is a slightly different story as it may independently benefit from higher training frequency.3 But this provides a valuable lesson in optimality. Many people assume that because something isn’t optimal, it’s not worth pursuing. Luckily John never let theoretically optimal get in the way of putting in the work.4
Fewer training days = less margin for error
John demonstrated that you can do a lot in two days if you are consistent as hell, train with high effort during your sessions, progress as much as you can within those sessions over time, and you are patient. John understood the process and was committed to making small improvements in load, reps, effort, range of motion, etc.
He knew the impact of missed sessions, especially on someone only training twice per week. I often tell my clients that missing a session when training twice weekly means missing fifty percent of your workouts for the week. Fifty percent. A miss literally cuts your work in half. This leads us to one of my training axioms:
The impact of a single missed session is inversely proportional to the number of weekly sessions you have.
If you actually want to see and maintain results but don’t have many days to train, you cannot afford to regularly miss sessions.
Major takeaway(s)
The all-or-nothing mentality is common among people trying to build a workout habit. They try to do too much, get overwhelmed, and do nothing. Obviously, the doing nothing is the problem, but that phase would never happen if people didn’t try to take on too much in the first place. Consistency is more about sustainability and working within your constraints than it is daily effort. John understood this implicitly.
Of course he pushed himself in the gym, but not excessively so. He understood that each day was part of a bigger picture and that the overall process was far more important than any one day. That’s what drove him. He signed up for the process, not just the results. But he trusted me enough to know that the former led to the latter.
If John’s journey illustrates anything, it’s that we can do far more than we think in a relatively small space if we act consistently in it. But that’s the thing; you have to act. And although he had no aspirations to move beyond those two days during our time together, John showed up. Over and over again. For years. And that was what mattered.
In my experience, prospects that burn brightest are most likely to burn out quickly. They have “motivation” and expectations, but when the mundanity of training sets in, they lose steam big time. The best clients are always the ones that have a sort of blue-collar work ethic. They care little for immediate results and commit to showing up every day and putting in the work.
Volume in this case can be thought of as the number of hard sets, and frequency is the number of days you train. So if you’re doing nine sets of squats across two days, we would expect to see similar growth if you break those sets up across three days.
Possible explanations include distributed practice or higher-quality reps. These mechanisms weren’t tested in the linked study, but are my own suppositions.
Higher-frequency training can still be superior as you can better manage fatigue, improve set quality, potentially reduce diminishing returns per session, better distribute stress, etc.