I believed strength training covered what mattered. Build muscle, get stronger, and everything else was optional.

I spent a lot of time in rooms full of powerlifters and bodybuilders. In those rooms, that approach made sense. People were training to move enormous weights or build as much muscle as possible.

The mistake was carrying those priorities into everybody else’s exercise plan.

Including my own.

Colorado offered some feedback

A trip to Colorado with my wife and dogs helped change my mind.

Staying at 13,000 feet kicked my ass. My heart rate wouldn’t settle the way I expected. When I exercised, it skyrocketed.

The mountain was unimpressed with my lifting routine.

Now, altitude deserves its share of the blame. Reduced oxygen makes exercise harder even for well-conditioned people, and physical fitness doesn’t protect you from altitude illness. That trip wasn’t a controlled test of my cardiovascular fitness.

But it made me question something I had taken for granted: how much of the fitness I wanted for my life was I actually training?

I had put most of my effort into one capacity and assumed it would cover the others.

My clients’ experiences were raising the same question. For many of us, more lifting wasn’t the missing piece. We needed more cardio, more mobility work, and enough room in the week to do both.

I had confused specialization with a baseline

Powerlifters and bodybuilders have specific goals. Their training reflects that.

Most of my clients want to feel better, look better, stay capable, and keep doing things they enjoy as they age. More and more of them were asking about longevity.

That deserves its own exercise plan.

Looking back, the minimums I prescribed were specialist numbers applied to generalist exercisers.

Six days of lifting might suit someone who loves lifting and wants to prioritize it. Making that the baseline for someone trying to improve their overall health was a different proposition.

Research gave me more reason to reconsider. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis found that resistance training was associated with lower mortality risk, with the largest estimated reduction in its dose-response analysis around an hour per week. These were observational findings, so they don’t establish a perfect dose or prove that more lifting is harmful. But they do challenge the idea that obtaining meaningful health benefits requires living in the weight room.

The broader exercise guidelines also include both aerobic activity and strength training. The standard adult targets are at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, plus muscle-strengthening work on two or more days each week. Benefits begin below those targets, too.

I had been asking people to do a lot of one thing while leaving other useful things optional.

Start with the week someone actually lives

Today, I start by looking at how much exercise someone has demonstrated they can sustain.

What has their wearable recorded, on average, over the past three months?

That gives us somewhere concrete to begin. A promise to exercise six days next week tells me much less.

Watches and phone apps for measurement are requirements for working with me. I want a record we can review together, use to make decisions, and compare against what happens next.

Your feelings belong in that conversation. How you feel during exercise, how well you recover, and whether you enjoy the plan all matter. We also need to know what you actually did.

“I think I’ve been pretty consistent” is difficult to evaluate. Three months of recorded activity gives us something to work with.

If you’ve been averaging three hours a week, those three hours are our starting budget. Before asking for more, I want to see how we’re spending them.

My framework: divide the time into thirds


My starting framework gives roughly equal space to:

Strength training

Cardiovascular exercise

Stretching and mobility, including practices such as yoga

For someone exercising three hours a week, that means about an hour in each category, spread across the week.

This is my coaching framework. Research has not established equal thirds as the universally ideal exercise split.

Its purpose is to make room for capacities that people—including me—have neglected. Giving mobility a place in the plan makes it harder to keep postponing it until some imaginary day when there’s extra time.

The framework also needs context. An hour of cardio alone falls short of the usual weekly aerobic targets. Brisk walking outside formal workouts may contribute, and we review the whole week before deciding what needs to increase.

The thirds give us a way to allocate existing time. They don’t make the rest of the evidence disappear.

What happened when we changed the mix

A lot of clients reported feeling better.

People who hadn’t been doing cardio started doing it. Some discovered they enjoyed it. In the weight room, we put less emphasis on the amount of weight moved and more on working the intended muscles, feeling the effort, and getting a productive session.

Across my client base, I saw people get leaner and saw encouraging changes in resting heart rate, heart-rate variability, and estimated aerobic fitness. Some also reported needing fewer medications as their health improved; medication decisions belong with their prescribers.

Those are coaching observations. Nutrition, weight changes, sleep, medication, and other parts of life were changing too. I can’t credit an exercise split for every improvement.

What I can say is that reducing the emphasis on lifting didn’t produce the collapse I once might have expected.

People were enjoying a wider range of exercise. They were reporting benefits that mattered to them. The approach was easier to sustain.

That gave me reasons to keep going.

What are you training to be able to do?

I still value strength training. It remains part of my own routine and my clients’ programs.

But I ask more of an exercise plan now.

Does it prepare you for the activities you enjoy? Does it leave room to develop what you’re missing? Can you keep doing it alongside work, relationships, travel, and everything else that occupies a normal adult week?

If one type of exercise consumes nearly all your time, it’s worth asking whether that reflects your goals or simply your habits.

I spent years getting better at the thing I already prioritized. Colorado helped me notice the gap.

These days, I want the time we spend exercising to prepare us for more of life.

The people I coach have lives outside the weight room. Their training should help them participate in those lives for as long as possible.