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For most of my twenties, I went to the gym six days a week. North of thirty-five, I’m lucky if I manage half that.
It’s not due to a lack of motivation. The problem is finding time between a nine-to-five job, family commitments and attempting a social life. The result: I’ve put on a bit of weight and lost a bit of strength over the last calendar year. As a younger man my response would be to jump into the deep end, download some extreme bodybuilding program and subsist on a diet of egg whites and energy drinks. Lately, I’ve been wondering if there is a way to do more with less.
Looking to be healthier in 2026? Ask us the fitness and wellness questions you want answered
Ahead of the new year, I asked several fitness professionals: What is the minimal amount of effort a person could put in to be in shape? This question led to bigger conversations about our relationship to exercise, the role it plays in body composition and why it’s important to be strategic (and realistic) about your goals.
First, figure out what being in shape means for you
Dan John is a strength coach and author. The creator of the 10,000 Kettlebell Swing Challenge and The Armour Building Formula, John’s ideas about fitness are more approachable than either of those titles suggest. What he cares about is making workouts – in his words – doable, repeatable and reasonable for the long term.
“Consistency is the most important thing you can do in an exercise program,” said John. “If you ate within your caloric limits, you slept eight hours every night, walked, and lifted weights occasionally... do that for ten years and maybe not all your dreams fitness dreams would come true, but a lot would.”
For John, there are huge benefits to deciding what feels like “enough” in your own body rather than chasing a bodybuilder or superhero physique. The gap between feeling and looking good with simple exercise and the amount of effort it takes to reach peak physical condition is monumental. According to John, constantly trying to do more often leads to diminishing returns. An extreme diet or trying to train for more than an hour a day is not sustainable for most people.
If you want to grow muscle, make sure your time in the gym counts
Jeff Nippard.Nicole Aubrey/Supplied
With efficient programming, you don’t have to live in the gym to build muscle, especially if you’re a beginner. That’s the perspective of Jeff Nippard, one of the most popular fitness influencers on YouTube and a former Canadian natural bodybuilding champion.
Nippard’s latest program emphasizes a min-max approach, advocating for workouts of about 45 minutes, done three to five times per week. This is enough time for most people to make big changes in their body composition – with one important caveat.
“If you’re going to spend less time in the gym, you need to make sure that that time you’re spending in the gym is used as efficiently as possible. And what that basically means is you need to train really hard,” said Nippard.
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Training hard means pushing exercises until you are close to failure. For instance, if you were doing a bicep curl, you would pick a weight and perform the exercise until you could no longer continue. “You can ease your way into it with some machine based exercises, some isolation exercises and exercises for smaller muscles,” said Nippard.
The idea of approaching failure on an exercise can seem scary if you haven’t been to a gym in a long time or have never worked out at all. For anyone beginning their fitness journey, Nippard suggests taking some time to first learn proper exercise form and acquaint yourself with the space. From there, finding a training program and testing out your limits can lead to big returns.
In addition to his personal experience with this type of training, Nippard points to a number of papers supporting the claim, including a 2023 study published on SportRxiv showing that, on a low volume program, pushing to failure leads to greater muscle hypertrophy.
For fat loss, the gym is probably less important than you think
If your goal when exercising is to get lean, the amount of time that you spend in the gym has a minimal impact compared to both your diet and your Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, or NEAT. The term is used by researchers to talk about the calories people burn in day-to-day movement. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Exercise Nutrition & Biochemistry noted a low level of NEAT is associated with obesity.
“For folks who find it difficult to get in structured movement, it really requires us to make small choices throughout the day and to engage in more of the activity we’re already presented with,” said Jeremy Fernandes, a health coach at Precision Nutrition in Toronto.
A great place to start is walking. While adding some extra steps won’t get you ripped, the Heart Foundation in Australia noted that walking a half-hour or more each day can lower the risk of stroke, heart disease and type two diabetes. A study in the Journal of Endocrinological Investigation found that after six months of dietary counselling and gradually increasing their daily step count, participants’ BMIs decreased by 3.7 per cent.
Taking care of your body should not feel punishing
Abbey Sharp.Matthew Guido/Supplied
While there can be value in occasionally pushing hard, beating yourself up physically or mentally doesn’t help with long-term goals. For exercise to become a habit and something you’ll actually make time for, find a movement routine you enjoy doing.
“When we associate movement with punishment, we’re far less likely to stay consistent, and consistency is the most important driver in us accessing the benefits of exercise,” said Abbey Sharp, a Toronto-based registered dietitian.
Sharp has amassed a huge social media following by dissecting diet culture and pushing for a balanced approach to movement and nutrition. “In order for a behaviour change to be sustainable, it has to be grounded in self-care. That goes for both our exercise routine, and the diet that supports it.”