Are Two Workouts Per Week Enough?
Meeting & exceeding physical activity guidelines is one of the most health-promoting activities a person could undergo.
Despite this, most Americans fall short of this goal.
One of the most commonly noted reasons is a lack of time available to exercise.
In line with this, people often say “I can only do 1 or 2 workouts per week, so I might as well not do any; because that’s not enough.”
Before saying this, it’s work asking… what if this is enough?
So, the menu for this article is the following:
What to understand first
Are two workouts per week enough to lose weight/fat?
Are two workouts per week enough to build muscle?
Are two workouts per week enough for endurance?
Are two workouts per week enough for health?
Time-efficient strategies to improve the effectiveness of just two workouts per week
Understand this first:
The general trend you’ll see to all the questions of “are two workouts enough for x” is that more may be better, but yes two is enough. More details and practical tips are given in each section, but that’s the general theme you’ll find.
In other words, no, you might not be “maximizing” or “optimizing” results for each of the following goals… but does that mean you shouldn’t work toward them at all?
Do not let an “all-out” or perfectionist mind-set stop you from making any progress at all in your health & fitness.
During this period of life, you may only have time for two workouts per week.
At some point in the future, you might find yourself with more time available to dedicate to your health + fitness.
If you were to zoom out 1, 5, or 10 years from now; the progress you will have made will be significantly less if you only take action during the periods of life when you “have more time.”
Hopefully, that alone is enough to answer the question of whether two workouts per week is worth it; likely the real reason you stumbled across this article.
Nevertheless, let’s dive into the specifics of each point listed above:
Are two workouts per week enough to lose weight/fat?
When you go into a weight loss phase, your goal should not be to lose weight of any kind; it should be to lose fat specifically.
In line with this, the purpose that your workouts serve is to provide your body with enough of a reason to maintain the muscle it has; ensuring minimal muscle loss and maximal fat loss.
So, the question here really is: are two workouts per week enough to maintain muscle during a fat loss phase?
The answer to this is a resounding yes.
Maintaining muscle mass is a far easier endeavor than building muscle mass is.
Research seems to suggest that 4 sets total per week for a muscle is enough to maintain strength for up to 32 weeks. [1]
With a good program, hitting more than 4 sets per muscle per week is more than doable.
The key point to note here, though, is that this assumes a few key nutrition parameters are being met. Specifically:
A slight calorie deficit (~300-500 calories below maintenance)
Sufficient protein intake (~0.72 grams of protein per lb bodyweight or more)
Creatine supplementation (~5 grams per day)
Are two workouts per week enough to build muscle?
The two goals that comprise body composition change are fat loss and muscle gain.
It’s generally most productive to pursue one of these at a time, so for the purposes of this article I decided to separate them.
When it comes to training volume and muscle building efficacy, what matters most is total # of sets performed per muscle per week.
Whether these sets are split up into 2,3, or 5 workouts seems to make little difference. [2]
Certainly, there is less room to perform strength training volume in 2 workouts per week compared to more workouts per week.
So, the question here really is: can you perform enough total strength training volume in 2 workouts per week to build muscle?
It’s first worth answering… how many sets does a muscle need per week to experience growth?
It does depend a bit person to person, but for most people 5 sets per muscle per week is the lowest you can go and still experience growth. [3]
Getting above this mark is very doable with 2 workouts per week. Here’s a quick example of what this could look like:
Workout 1:
Goblet squats superset with machine leg curls
Flat dumbbell bench press superset with bent over dumbbell rows
Dumbbell side raises superset with machine calf raises
3 sets of all exercises (after warm up)
Workout 2:
Dumbbell romanian deadlifts superset with machine leg extensions
Lat pulldowns superset with push ups
Shoulder press superset with russian twists
3 sets of all exercises (after warm up)
Time permitting, you could increase this to 4 or 5 sets each. Nevertheless, 3 sets would put you at a sufficient volume to see results.
How to improve this:
When it comes to getting more out of less time with your strength training, there are two strategies I most commonly recommend: supersets and drop sets.
Supersets are when you alternate between two exercises that are either opposite or have no overlapping muscles.
The idea is that if you were to do straight sets you would need ~2:00-3:00 rest between sets to maintain set quality, but with super sets you can rest 1:00-1:30 between sets and still have good performance.
By slashing your rest time in half without hampering performance, you enable yourself to complete much more volume than with straight sets.
Drop sets are an intensity technique where you go to near failure with a given load on an exercise, decrease the load by ~30%, and immediately keep going.
The idea here is that the reps toward the end of the set are the most stimulating for muscle growth. By continuing more reps with a lighter load after hitting failure with a heavier load, you enable yourself to crank out more reps at this intensity.
One example of this could be simply decreasing the weight of an exercise. Or, you could perform push-ups to failure and then immediately start performing knee push-ups.
Are two workouts per week enough to build endurance?
The question posed here is similar to the question posed as to whether or not 2x/week workouts are enough to build muscle.
Overall weekly volume of endurance training matters more than training frequency (how many times per week you workout).
So, the question is: can you fit enough volume of cardio into 2 workouts per week to build your endurance?
The answer, again, is yes.
Now, what “enough volume” looks like is vastly different depending on your current fitness level.
For someone brand new to training endurance, two sessions of 15-minutes per week may be a good enough starting point to start seeing some results.
Over time, this individual may build this up to two 60, 75, or 90 minute sessions.
Performing such durations twice per week is perfectly sufficient for most people, even relatively advanced trainees, to see continual progress; so long as there is an attempt to perform more work within these durations over time.
Are two workouts per week enough to improve health?
Again, yes.
The general trend in regard to the relationship between exercise/movement volume and health is that more is typically better, but the greatest improvements in health are found at the first bouts of movement done. [4,5]
For instance, going from 0 to 2 sets of strength training per week may bring more health benefits than going from 2-4.
So, yes, more is always better but with diminishing returns.
How to get more out of just two workouts per week:
Exercise snacks.
They’re a novel approach to movement with emerging evidence giving them good support.
If you’re someone with time for only two workouts per week, they can make a great addition to your program with virtually no time added.
Exercise snacks refer to <30 second bouts of high intensity activity at regular intervals throughout a day or week.
For instance, one study [6] had sedentary subjects ascend 30 flights of stairs as fast as they could, 3x/day, on 3 days of the week.
After 6 weeks, the subjects saw an average of 12% increase in power production and a 5% increase in cardiorespiratory fitness.
An exercise snack does not need to be this protocol to a tee.
It could involve running, jump rope, air squats, push-ups, etc. for ~30 seconds straight or so.
It could be done 2x/day, 1x/day, 2 days per week, 4 days per week, or whatever else you need/prefer.
Maybe you take a shower before work every day.
Maybe, on the days you don’t perform one of your two workouts per week, you do a 30-second set of air squats before getting in your shower.
This can be customized 1000s of ways to fit your lifestyle.
The point is: having regular, short-duration bouts of movement can greatly help your health/fitness goals for a very little time investment.
If you’re someone performing just two workouts per week, it’s worth considering.
