Absolute Fitness

🦵 How often should you program unilateral exercises?

Following on from yesterday's post. There are no solutions in life. Only trade-offs.

Single-arm and single-leg exercises are great. Possibly even the best.

They can help expose strength differences between sides.
They can improve balance and coordination.
They can often be more joint friendly.
They can often help you achieve a deeper stretch.
They are less systemically taxing on the body.
They can help address weaknesses that bilateral exercises occasionally hide.

The downside?

⏰ They take ages.

A set of split squats isn't really one set. It's a set on the left and a set on the right. If you're short on time, that matters.

If I only had 1-2 hours per week to train, I probably wouldn't build the entire program around unilateral exercises.

I'd likely have one or two appear regularly to expose and improve any gaps. The rest of the program would probably be built around exercises that train both sides at once.

Squats.
RDLs.
Rows.
Pulldowns.
Presses.

Because at some point you have to ask: "Is the extra benefit worth the extra time?"

Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes the answer is no.
There are no solutions in life. Only trade-offs 👊

💪 If you only had 1-2 hours per week to lift weights, how should you structure it?

My answer, annoyingly, would be: it depends.

First. What are you training for?

📅 How many sessions can you realistically do? If it's one session, that's easy.
➡️ Full body.

If it's two sessions, then ask:

📅 How far apart are they? Monday and Tuesday?
➡️ Upper body / Lower body might make more sense.

Monday and Thursday?
➡️ I'd probably lean towards Full Body / Full Body.

🏋️ Are you trying to build muscle, get stronger, lose fat, or just stay healthy?

If your goal is general health, you probably don't need much volume.
If your goal is maximum muscle growth, the answer changes.

💪 Are you prepared to train hard?
One hard set taken close to failure is worth far more than three half-hearted sets while scrolling your phone.

🏃 What else are you doing?
Running 4 times a week?
Playing football?
Training for a triathlon?

The weights need to fit around the rest of your life.

🤕 Do you have any injuries?
The best program on paper is useless if it aggravates your shoulder, knee or back.

⚖️ Is the program balanced?

Upper and lower body balanced?

Pushing and pulling balanced?

Muscles on the front and back of the body balanced?

🦵 Is there any unilateral work?

I'd generally want some single-arm or single-leg work appearing regularly to expose and improve any gaps between sides.

📈 Can you track progress?

If you're not gradually lifting more weight, doing more reps or improving performance over time, the structure probably isn't your biggest problem.

A good program done for a year beats the perfect program done for three weeks 👊

🥣 Will women lose muscle if they skip breakfast?

Not automatically.

Skipping breakfast doesn't automatically make you lose muscle.

If total daily protein, calories and resistance training are adequate, skipping breakfast does not guarantee muscle loss.

Many women already struggle to eat enough protein.

💪 Remove a meal and you've removed one of the easiest opportunities to get it in.

If someone needs 120g of protein per day and eats between 12pm and 8pm, It's still possible.

🍗 40g protein at lunch
🍗 40g protein at dinner
🍗 40g protein in snacks

Technically, you can get all your protein in between lunch and dinner.

But many people end up full before they get there.

So the issue is often protein compliance, not breakfast itself.

👩 Is it worse for women than men? Potentially.

Women generally:
💪 Have less muscle mass to begin with
🍽️ Tend to eat less total food
🥩 Tend to consume less protein than men

That means they often have less room for error.
A 95kg man can accidentally eat 130g protein.
A 60kg woman trying to get 100-120g protein while dieting may have to actively plan for it.

🏃 Does fasted cardio cause muscle loss?

Not directly.

A 30-45 minute walk before breakfast is unlikely to cause meaningful muscle loss.

The concern becomes greater when multiple factors stack together
❌ Large calorie deficit
❌ Low protein intake
❌ Lots of cardio
❌ No resistance training
❌ Significant weight loss

👨 Is it the same for men?

Largely, yes.

Men don't have magical protection against muscle loss.

However, men carry more muscle and consume more protein, they often get away with poor meal timing more easily

💉 Muscle wastage on the Jab.

Over the last few months we've had an influx of new clients coming to us with significant muscle wastage on weight loss injections.

I am (mostly) for these jabs when used appropriately. But a lot of people don't seem to realise that without appropriate resistance training and protein, their muscles are on the way out with their fat.

Muscle is far easier to keep than it is to rebuild.

If you're on weight loss injections, or thinking about starting them, don't wait until you've reached your target weight to start resistance training, and please make sure you're getting enough protein.

If you lose a large amount of weight rapidly, while eating relatively little protein and doing no meaningful resistance training, you will almost certainly lose a meaningful amount of muscle alongside the fat.

Less muscle doesn't just mean being weaker in the gym. It can mean lower strength, lower resilience and a harder time maintaining your weight long term.

The goal shouldn't just be to weigh less.

The goal should be to come out the other side lighter, healthier, stronger and still carrying the muscle that helps you move, function and stay independent.

If you're considering weight loss injections, the best time to start protecting your muscle is before you need to rebuild it 👊

❤️ Be kinder to yourself.

I've seen people miss a personal best and act like months of training were wasted.

I've seen people have one takeaway, one holiday, one busy week and decide they've ruined everything.

You haven't. You're not supposed to be perfect.

You were never going to suddenly become someone who never misses a workout.
Last week I bailed on a workout. I was a little sorer than I'd like and wanted to rest my muscles an extra day.
Or never drinks alcohol, and never has a bad week.

Signing up to the gym did not make you instantly perfect. You're a human being.

Progress is rarely as fast or as tidy as you imagined it would be.

The only real failure is quitting.

A bad day isn't failure.
A bad week isn't failure.
Even a bad month isn't failure.

Giving up is.

🎾 Tennis elbow is one of the most common injuries I see.

Despite the name, most people who get it have never played tennis.

It's usually irritation of the tendons on the outside of the elbow that help you grip things and extend your wrist.

Often it starts after
💪 A sudden increase in training volume
🎾 Racquet sports (shock) or sports where grip is required
🔨 DIY or manual work
🖱️ Lots of gripping, typing or mouse use
🏋️ Doing more pulling exercises than you're used to

The first mistake people make is trying to "stretch it away."

The second is continuing to hammer the things that irritated it in the first place.

For a few weeks it can help to reduce:
❌ Heavy gripping
❌ Pull ups
❌ Heavy rows
❌ Heavy deadlifts
❌ Racquet sports
❌ Exercises that reproduce the pain

That doesn't mean stop training.

It means train around it.

What I usually want people doing is:
✅ Gradual loading of the wrist extensors
✅ Wrist extension exercises
✅ Slow eccentric wrist extensions
✅ Isometric holds
✅ Exercises that strengthen the forearm without constantly flaring symptoms

The goal isn't rest forever.

The goal is teaching the tendon to tolerate load again.

One of the frustrating things about tennis elbow is that it often hurts during everyday activities more than it does during exercise.

A coffee cup can hurt more than a deadlift.

The good news is that most cases improve very well when load is managed properly and the tendon is gradually strengthened rather than completely rested 👊

🚂 Not looking after yourself is like getting on the wrong train.

The longer you stay on it, the further away you get from your destination.

Most people don't suddenly become overweight, unfit or unhealthy.

They slowly drift there. The same is true in reverse.

A few better choices repeated consistently can take you somewhere much better

❤️ Today I marry Laura.

She's incredibly lucky.

Not everyone gets a husband who can explain the benefits of a hip hinge, calculate protein requirements, and spend 20 minutes discussing the correct height of a cable attachment.

Dream man, really.

💍😂

🥩 "If you don't eat straight after exercise, you'll lose muscle."

Not really.

Your muscles are not sitting there waiting to self-destruct if you don't get a protein shake into your system within 17 seconds of finishing a workout. Your body isn't that fragile.

💪 If you lifted weights this morning and don't eat until lunch, you're probably not losing a meaningful amount of muscle.

Could you be missing out on a tiny amount of potential growth? Maybe.

Are you undoing your workout? No.

🏃 If you went for a run and don't immediately eat afterwards, you're probably not losing a meaningful amount of muscle either.

Protein matters.
Eating after training helps.

But the importance of timing is massively overstated.

Protein priorities for building muscle ranked.
🥇 Daily protein intake
🥈 Total calories
🥉 Training quality and progression
4️⃣ Protein distribution throughout the day
5️⃣ Exact post-workout timing

Don't worry about 30 minutes after training.
Worry more about the other 23½ hours of the day.
That's usually where the results are won or lost 👊

🏋️ What is the most important part of an exercise for building muscle?

🥇 Deep stretch under load
🥈 Effort (getting close to failure)
🥉 Control and technique
4️⃣ Full range of motion (You'd expect this much higher)
5️⃣ Peak contraction / squeeze
6️⃣ Time under tension

That's one of the reasons you'll see us use things like:

🏋️ Deep squats
🦵 Romanian deadlifts
💪 Incline dumbbell curls
🤝 Rows with a good stretch
🦶 Calf raises through a full range

That's not to say the squeeze is useless, control doesn't matter or you should throw weights around like a lunatic. They all have value.

Deep stretches under load are the most important part for muscle growth. But they have a secondary benefit.

🦴 They often improve mobility too.

If you're regularly taking a muscle through a large range of motion, under control, whilst it's producing force, you're effectively strength training that range.

That's one of the reasons I rarely prescribe much static stretching after training.

Many people spend 45 minutes lifting weights through half a range of motion, then 15 minutes trying to stretch back the mobility they never used.

I'd rather just use the range during the workout.

A deep squat is often a mobility exercise.

An RDL is often a hamstring stretch.

A deep split squat can be a hip flexor stretch.

The difference is you're getting stronger there too. You're training your body to know that it is strong in that deep position and recover form it. Which results with your brain allowing you to move into that position in the future. Your brain trusts that it's not going to get hurt.

Most people are obsessed with adding weight to the bar.

Very few are obsessed with making the muscle work hard in a deep stretch.

I generally think that's the bigger opportunity 👊