A Hybrid Framework for athletes who don’t have 10 hours a week
My bike training for my last Ironman 70.3 last Sunday was riding to work. That’s it. Some weeks two times, some weeks once, depending on the weather and what real life allowed. No structured intervals, no power meter, no computer, no carefully periodized base-building block. Just pedaling to the office and back, 60km total.
I finished the race. Not fast, not chasing a podium, nowhere near a World championship slot or anything. Again, I finished, felt strong doing it, and that was the actual goal the whole time: show up, execute, enjoy as much as you can every minute of it and get back to my life. Now, if you set my training log next to a 6-day periodized plan from a triathlon magazine, you’d assume I was cutting corners, but I wasn’t. I was applying the same rule I use with every athlete who asks me for help: most of what the fitness industry sells you is optional.
Something perhaps you don’t want to hear and should bother you more than it probably does. Complexity sells because it’s easy to sell. A 12-exercise split across 6 days looks like more value than 2 sessions covering the basics. It fills a content calendar for example, it gives a coach something new to post every day. None of that has much to do with whether it actually builds you strength, and you hear people quietly drowning in programs they can’t sustain, blaming their own willpower for a plan that was never built for a real week.
Now, let’s talk about the real Strength work that gives a good foundation and what actually produces the result.
The five patterns that do the work
Five movement patterns cover almost everything your body needs from a strength standpoint. A deadlift, a squat, horizontal push (bench or push-up) and a horizontal pull (row). A loaded carry (farmer’s walk). Again, that’s the list, not a guess. A 2021 review in Sports Medicine on designing time-efficient training programs lands on almost the same minimum: at least one lower-body pressing movement, one upper-body push, and one upper-body pull, with weekly volume mattering more than the number of days you show up (Iversen et al., 2021).
Frequency matters less than you’ve been told, too. A meta-analysis out of Brad Schoenfeld’s lab found that training a muscle group twice a week produces the hypertrophy and strength gains most people assume require far more days than that (Schoenfeld et al., 2016). One working set. Twice a week. Most people spend years too afraid to test whether that’s actually enough. This is what I did the previous weeks to build a proper structure for over 6 hours of racing! Nothing else…
Two sessions covering those five patterns, with real effort and some progressive overload, is enough for the vast majority of the athletes I talk to, including the ones training for something like a Ironman 70.3 on the side of an already full life. Layer in whatever sport-specific work your race or your goal needs, and you have a program that fits inside a real week instead of demanding you rebuild your week around it.
What I actually want you to take from this
This isn’t a permission to be lazy. It’s a permission slip to stop punishing yourself for having a life.
If you miss 4 or 5 hours out of some imagined 10-hour week, that doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong! It means you’re a person with a job, a family, a commute that eats the morning. Again, I’m not training for a World Championship slot, but if you are, well, all power to you! I’m training so I can be present for my girls and my wife on a Saturday and still feel like myself on Monday and most of all, be one strong man in my 70’s and 80’s.
The plan has to serve that, not compete with it. Family, friends, the actual shape of your week, that’s the point of getting strong in the first place, not something you sacrifice to chase it.
The best program was never the one with the most exercises, but it’s the one you’re still doing in a year, because it never asked more of your week than your week could give.
Next time you’re deciding between adding a sixth training day and just doing the hinge, the squat, the push, the pull, and the carry twice this week, pick the second one. Then go make your kid’s lunch for summer camp or play in the pool with them in a hotel after an Ironman 70.3!
Getting strong is never just about the gym. The strength carries into your endurance, your energy, your ability to keep showing up when it would be easier not to. That is what I am interested in. Strength that transfers, not strength that lives on a spreadsheet.
[Get the Endurance Foundation Check →Endurance Foundation Check]
Sources
1. Iversen, V.M., Norum, M., Schoenfeld, B.J., & Fimland, M.S. (2021). No Time to Lift? Designing Time-Efficient Training Programs for Strength and Hypertrophy: A Narrative Review. Sports Medicine, 51(10), 2079-2095. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8449772/
2. Schoenfeld, B.J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J.W. (2016). Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine, 46(11), 1689-1697. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27102172/
This hits the same wall I run into constantly with recreational pickleball players.
They come to me overwhelmed — serve, return, third shot, footwork, positioning, dinking, resets, all at once. And they wonder why nothing improves.
The answer is always the same. Pick one skill. Train it until it's automatic. Then move to the next one.
Your five patterns idea is exactly this. Not because it's minimal, but because it's sustainable. A plan that fits a real week beats a perfect plan that doesn't.
I write about the same principle for pickleball players at Elevate Your Pickleball Game on Substack — one skill per week, in the right order. Different sport, same logic.
Sharing this one with my players.