The Minimal Effective Dose for Maintaining Fitness and Strength

Holidays can be a tricky time for training; if you are worried about your training programme over this period it might be as well to consider maintaining rather than trying to make fitness gains. That way you can enjoy your holidays knowing that you can come back in a couple of weeks time without having lost fitness.

The concept of the Minimal Effective Dose (MED) will help you do just that. It is about finding the smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome. When it comes to maintaining endurance fitness and strength, applying the MED principle can help you plan a sensible amount of training without creating too much stress and clashes with family and other commitments. It can also be a good concept to help maintain fitness at other times when you can't commit your usual amount of time to training.

In this blog post, we'll explore the MED for cycling, running, and strength training.

The table below provides a summary guide of the minimum requirements generally considered to be needed to maintain fitness.

As you can see the volume is surprisingly low although a small amount of intensity is required.

Endurance Fitness: Cycling

To maintain cycling endurance, focus on consistency, intensity, and duration.

A sample MED cycling workout plan might look something like this:

Monday

10 minute warm including 4 x 20s accelerations.

Main Set

8 x 1 minute hard 1 minute easy

Cool down

10 minutes easy spin

Wednesday

45-minute steady-state ride at moderate intensity (zone 2-3)

Friday

60-minute endurance ride at a comfortable pace, chatty pace (zone 2).

Endurance Fitness: Running

Maintaining running endurance also relies on consistency, intensity, and duration

A sample MED running workout plan could look something like this:

Tuesday

10 minute warm including 4 x 20s accelerations

8-10 repeats of 30s hard 30s recovery.

10 minute jog cool down.

Thursday

30-minute steady-state run at moderate intensity (zone 2, endurance).

Saturday

45-90 minutes endurance run at a comfortable pace

Strength Training

Strength training is crucial for overall fitness and injury prevention.

Sample MED strength training workout plan:

Monday

Upper body (push-ups, rows, shoulder press)

Wednesday

Lower body (squats, lunges, deadlifts)

Friday

Full body (combination of upper and lower body exercises)

Balancing Endurance and Strength Training

To incorporate both endurance and strength training into your routine, alternate between cycling/running and strength training days. For example:

Depending on whether your main focus is running or cycling you could do more cycling workouts than running workouts or exclusively one or the other.

Remember to listen to your body and allow for adequate recovery between workouts.

Conclusion

So if you want to (or need to) focus on family over the Christmas period (or are time constrained at other times in the year, you can still maintain fitness with relatively little volume).

By applying the Minimal Effective Dose principle to your endurance and strength training, you can maintain your fitness with a time-efficient approach. Start with the suggested MED workouts and adjust as needed based on your individual response and progress.

Finding your personal MED sweet spot will help you achieve your fitness goals while minimizing the risk of overtraining or injury.