Forty minutes, whole body

Our whole approach to training is eight words long. Compound movements, forty minutes, full body, then rest.

Compound means movements that use most of you at once. A squat, a press, a deadlift, a pull-up, a carry, a sprint, rather than a machine that works one muscle while you look at your phone. Six or seven of these, done properly, is a complete session, and you can do them with a barbell or a rucksack or your own weight and the difference is smaller than the fitness industry would like you to think.

Forty minutes is the length because it is long enough to do real work and short enough to do before anyone else in the house is up. If a session is running to ninety, something in it is not training.

Full body every time, rather than chest on Monday and legs on Thursday, because that is how a body is actually used, and because if you miss Thursday you have not missed legs for a fortnight.

Then rest. The shape we like is hard sessions with a proper day between them, and the rest is the half everyone skips.