If you haven’t read Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek, I would highly recommend it.  Aside from the fact that he discusses a dozen very effective methods for being more productive, as well as ways to find purpose with spare time, he talks about something called the “80/20 Principle.” This is something that was initially called the Pareto Principle, as well as the “Law of the Few,” “Principle of Factor Sparsity,” or whatever else you want to call it. Vitaly Pareto was an Italian economist who initially observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by only 20% of the population, and that 20% of his garden’s pea pods contained 80% of the pea yield for the year. It was then picked up by the business world to say that 80% of sales would come from 20% of customers and a whole host of other business topics.

The funny thing is, this can actually be applied to personal training, strength training, sport performance, and whatever else you want to include in the realm of fitness. From a fitness business perspective, you could say that the average trainer has 80% of their sales coming from 20% of their clients: those who consistently train with them 3 or more times a week, every week for the entire year. 80% of headaches will come from 20% of clients, and conversely 20% of your clients will have 80% of the best results possible.

We could also apply this principle for any of the training programs, goals, and physical outcomes you can achieve in the gym. For instance, weight loss typically requires that the majority of your efforts be given to nutrition, not simply to the components of exercise. A paper published in the Journal of Obesity HERE looked at the effects of diet, diet plus aerobic exercise, and aerobic exercise only in their effects on weight loss, and found that the diet-only group lost 8.5% of their body weight, the exercise-only group lost 2.4% of their body weight, and the combined group lost 10.8% of their body weight over the course of a year (which is a weight loss equal to that of the dietary group and exercise group combined). What this shows is that weight loss is best when combining the two components, but diet literally makes up 80% of the results achieved.

Let’s look at the effects of different exercise protocols for aerobic training on weight loss. A study published in the journal Metabolism in 1994 HERE showed that in a comparison between a 20 week steady state program that burned 28,661 calories and a 15 week program that burned 13,614 calories (47.5% as many as the steady state) resulted in 9 times greater subcutaneous fat loss in the interval group than the steady state group. If we correct this for time, that means that the interval training group put in about 20% of the time that the steady state group put in (depending on whether the energy systems being used were accurately estimated.

Let’s take a look at a typical run training program. A marathon runner who makes the bulk of their training through distance running won’t turn into a body builder by hitting the weights once or twice a week, however that time spent in the gym can help to increase their pace, reduce injuries, and decrease fatigue or over-training risk. An article in the International Journal of Sports Medicine HERE showed that replacing 20% of the runners volume with explosive strength training in trained young runners resulted in an increase in force-time characteristics (ie. speed) and 30m run speed by 3.0% compared to a control group that just did the run volume as normal. Again, 20% of the training produced greater gains.

Another feature you could look at is the effect of higher intensity loading on development of strength. It’s common knowledge that training for 1 rep max strength will increase your strength a lot faster than performing 10 rep sets or even circuit training, meaning that dramatically lower volume of training will result in steep increases in strength compared to hypertrophy programs, which is why a lot of powerlifters lift a lot more pounds than a bodybuilder, but conversely a bodybuilder will tend to outlast a powerlifter in any exercise due to their increased muscular endurance. A typical powerlifting workout will only involve about 20-30 working reps, whereas a bodybuilding workout may involve 20-30 workouts of only a single exercise in their workout, sometimes even a single set.

Most athletic training programs will vary their intensity throughout the week and throughout the year, only using max intensities during peaking phases, which would conceivably account for roughly 20 percent of the year (what works out to 10 weeks a year, or once every 4 weeks if not factoring in transitions or off weeks).

So this was in essence my long-winded way of trying to say that the majority of results accomplished from any training program will be from applying the right training intensities and directed work, not from spending countless hours in the gym and riding the elliptical for 6 hour each night. So let’s look at some specific examples of program design components for different goals and how they would work best using the 80/20 principle.

Weight Loss

Imagine how boss it would be if you could work each and every day using an interval training program, working at 200% VO2 max workloads, for weeks and weeks on end? Sure, you’d probably turn into a complete diesel, but you would probably also reach into over-training, repetitive strain injuries, and hate life in general. In exchange for constant high intensity training, there should be a balance with soft tissue work, active mobility work, and general strength training combined with training different energy systems in relative balance, using primarily anaerobic systems for caloric burn, and also occasional aerobic systems to promote a more rapid recovery.

If we were to break down the training between core components, it would look like this:

Foam rolling work: 10% of each weeks timeframe

Active Mobilization:10-20% of timeframe, depending on mobility of the individual

Anaerobic conditioning: 20%, assuming interval-based cardio, plus circuit strength training

Aerobic conditioning: 30% of each weeks timeframe

Strength Training: 30-40% of each weeks timeframe to keep from wasting muscle

Assuming the individual devotes 6 days per week for 1 hour each day, that works out to 360 minutes total time. A 10 percent window mens 36 minutes per week, or 6 minutes per workout, definitely reasonable when considering foam rolling. The cardio conditioning would be to allow for a build-up of caloric expenditure while limiting the overall degeneration on supportive tissue from the higher intensity workouts, and the anaerobic conditioning would help to maximize the caloric burn and fat loss potential of the individual.

Strength Training

We could assume similar relationships to gaining maximal strength, with the emphasis being on grooving the patterns used, accessory lifts and mobility drills, and only minimal amounts of time each workout or each training cycle working on maximal lifts, which will produce the biggest benefits.

Each phase would vary depending on the stage of training and where the desired peak may be, but even in the most advanced program, lifters only really try for max lifts one or two months each year.

Injury Rehabilitation

Here’s a tricky one that a lot of people tend to either over work or under work. For most of my clientele, we spend only about 20% of our training time working on the direct site of injury. This means that during a hypothetical rotator cuff injury, we would spend 20% of our time working on the rotator cuff through band resisted rotations and glenohumeral stretching, and the remainder of the time working on scapular stability, pulling movements, postural strengthening, vertical & horizontal core vector loading, and cervical strengthening and stabilization.

To break this down further, let’s assume a hypothetical uncomplicated rotator cuff in an early stage recovery following discharge from physiotherapy. Their training program would look something like this:

band resisted rotations    2 x 6 each internal & external

low trap scap dips: 3 x 8

horizontal rows: 3 x 6-8

vertical pulls: 2 x 6-8

Chin tucks: 2 x 10

narrow supinated floor press: 3 x 6

Total Reps = 108, 24 directly on the rotator cuff (22.2%)

We could sub in any exercises and variations we want to for the horizontal and vertical pulls, but if the volume or frequency increases, the relative ratio tends to stay the same. The big issue comes from trying to do 50 different variations on the rotator cuff, not addressing underlying mechanical issues, or any other fun stuff that may be causing some of the issues in the first place, and then wondering why the shoulder is either not getting better, or progressively getting worse.

So to give a brief recap, the most important results can be attained through some of the smallest components of the training program, as long as they are correctly balanced with the other necessary components of the program. A program doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” program, where the best option dominates the entire workout, to be effective. A well-balanced workout program will have a focus on the major training component that makes the biggest difference, as well as those that provide secondary or otherwise indirect benefits to the training program in proper proportions with each other.

What are your thoughts on this concept? It’s been around for a while, and I only skimmed the surface of possibilities with this article, but do you think there are other times where the 80/20 rule applies with exercise, or even just life in general? Leave a comment below to get a discussion going.

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