Episode 9: If You Only Have Two Hours A Week, Lift Weights

Ever feel “active” but not actually getting fitter? We lay out a simple map that separates daily movement from real training, then show how to stack NEAT, cardio, mobility, and strength so your effort turns into results you can feel. The heart of the conversation is clarity: what each modality actually does, where it helps most, and how to prioritize when time is limited.

We start with NEAT—non-exercise activity like walking, chores, and taking the stairs—as the foundation that keeps energy high, joints happy, and recovery smooth. From there we break down cardio into aerobic work for heart health and stress relief, and true anaerobic intervals for power and glucose control without wasting hours on “kinda hard” slogs. Mobility earns its place through better range, tissue quality, and a calmer nervous system, while we bust a common myth: many mobility issues are really stability or strength gaps.

Then we make the case for strength training as the top lever for longevity and everyday freedom. Building and keeping muscle protects bone density, raises resting metabolism, improves posture and balance, and shields joints so you can move more with less pain. If you only have 1–3 hours each week, choose full-body strength sessions that hit the big patterns and slip in targeted mobility during warm-ups. With extra time, layer in aerobic work and a touch of intervals to round out your engine. The result is a clean, sustainable plan that makes hiking easier, groceries lighter, and life more enjoyable.

Want more support dialing this in? Follow the show, share it with a friend who lifts you up, and leave a quick review so others can find it. Your next strong week starts today—what will you train first?

Transcript

Welcome And Setup

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Well, hello, and welcome to the 1% better podcast with your host, Josh Williams. So happy to be here today for episode 9. Almost made it to a whole double digits. And it's been a little bit since I last did my last episode. So just been getting over some sickness with the family and wanted to make sure my my voice is sultry, sweet for you all, and wasn't coughing up along. So here we are today talking about an episode I'm I'm really excited to talk about this understanding of different types of training and how they work together, but also how there is a or one training modality that is the king of all training modalities, and uh it is based off of research. And yes, it just happens to be my favorite way of training, but I try to also be unbiased in that. And what I'm talking about is a lot of times people will say, I am I am being active or I live an active lifestyle, and that is is wonderful. And understand training comes out of this way of it is super easy to be sedentary, it is super easy to not have to go through life right now with physical challenges from a sense of having to do labor. Now we can, of course, have physical challenges due to uh injuries, aging, uh how our bodies are used in different ways, whether it's because we are active or we're inactive, they all add up wear and tear and mileage on the this wonderful thing that we have, a body. And so we need to understand that there is a difference between just being active and training and and the benefits that we get from that. So this is to say that being active is better than being inactive from not just a physical health standpoint, the chance, the giving yourself the best chance for longevity and quality of health. It is also when we go back to quality of life from a mental standpoint, from a social standpoint, being active is uh going to be huge in that. And so that's where the first category is what we call neat, which stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This is living life. This is daily activity. This is getting up and down, moving around, washing the dishes, walking, doing light chores that may subtle, subtly, that's not a word, subtly elevate your heart rate. So this is daily tasks in life. We want to do as much neat as possible. Neat is actually really valuable, beneficial. So it boosts again overall caloric burn burn. So if you're looking to for weight management, getting lots of neat in your life is going to be beneficial. Uh getting out for walks, movement, that's why I was like moving around is huge. It's really good for uh weight management. It is great for recovery from workouts, but also circulation. It gets the blood moving and flowing as well and keeps the joints loose and blood flowing. And then, you know, combat, you know, sedentary, sedentary risks. So as as well. And overall, it is it is pretty easy to do, low barrier of entry, though you have to carve out time to do it. That is excellent. When I'm meeting with somebody new, I love to hear that there is somebody doing lots of neat. Of course, they do not explain that like that. They typically say I go out for walks every day, I walk, you know, X miles a week, you know, I play pickleball or golf, this and that. This is all neat, uh, extra activity, uh, different hobbies people have. Uh, we always want that, and our training should actually support us to allow us to do more of those things to get outside. When it comes to training, we want neat. We want that as our base. That is what we call living life. I want to be able to do more of that easily. And then, so the second thing that we kind of talk a lot about or people might be doing, and it's valuable as well, is cardiovascular activity or training. This is like running, jogging, biking, swimming, hiking, all those things are underneath the cardiovascular umbrella. And I would say this is fairly common for people coming in and working with us to do, and it's extremely beneficial as well. And so, why would you want to do this? There's two categories of it there's aerobic and there's anaerobic. So aerobic's gonna be like your steady state, meaning with oxygen. And so this is gonna be things like walking, cycling, rowing, hiking, all those things. And the benefit is it strengthens the heart, it strengthens the lung, it enhances recovery and blood flow. You know, it does also help, you know, burn calories as well from weight management, and it also reduces stress, so it can calm the nervous system again, boost mood, release endorphins, and then also it is directly linked to lowering risk of like chronic diseases as well. And so this is aerobic capacity. We want to work on that, we want to build that, and then we have our anaerobic. So this is not a must, but it is a good one. It's high intensity intervals, short sprint, you know, short bursts. So, why would this be important for us in training? Well, what it does is it increases power and conditioning, so building the body's ability to handle high effort, you know, elevates you know, you know, the metabolism post-workout, they call it epoch, so that you burn more calories afterwards. Another big one improves glucose control, so that boosts insulin sensitivity and blood sugar regulation, which is really important. And so that's why working in a little bit of anaerobic is great. And the best part of it also is very time efficient. You don't need to do this for long periods of time. Like five, 10 minutes of high intensity is all you need to get some of these benefits. And so that is a great one. A lot of times, though, this one kind of gets uh bastardized, and we do like this high intensity, low intensity thing where we do what we think is high intensity, but we do it for such a long period of time, it becomes actually more like a high-level aerobic building. So, and then of course, the other thing, it builds mental grit and toughness, which building resilience can be really important in helping us get through other hard challenges in life. And that's one of the one thing I love about training, is it helps us, helps the mental side as well. And so, again, if we're looking to improve our cardiovascular health in those categories, we're gonna want to do more aerobic training if we want some of those benefits. And part of the point of all today is that one style of training, you can't get everything in, or can you? And then the other one that's pretty popular is gonna be stretching mobility. So a lot of people say they need more of this. Either they're doing it in some level, maybe this is all you're doing. And again, stretching mobility is important, so it improves you know, joint range of motion, reduces risk of injury, you know, uh improving tissue quality and um aids in recovery, so calming down the nervous system, especially with things like breathing techniques, helps deregulate that, and so it can be very beneficial as as well from a tissue quality, increasing range of motion, making certain things easier, getting to certain points. And again, if we're a little bit stiff, we might be needing that. But but the king of all kings is gonna be what we call strength training. This is what of course I am biased towards, but but strength training is a beautiful thing. And why would you want to strength train? Well, uh, for one, it builds and maintains muscle. You know, as we start aging, we start losing muscle mass at a surprisingly alarming rate. Uh some of the research will say after age 30, you know, most people lose between 3 to 8 percent of muscle mass per decade, which is pretty astounding. Again, after the age of 30. So that means if we're 50, on the high end, we could have lost 16% muscle mass by the time we're 50. You know, 20 uh almost a quarter of what we had by the time we're 60. That's a it's a it's astounding. And so by strength training, we can maintain, if not improve, our muscle mass. And this uh is critical for you know your metabolism, you know, your functionality and aging well. Another big one, it improves bone density. So you've been to the doctor and you have my goodness, um, osteoporosis or osteopenia, you know, strength training is gonna help that. Loading the bones appropriately is going to help that. Another great thing, it raises the resting metabolic rate. So again, muscle is active tissue, so the more you have of it, the more that you're gonna burn calorically. Again, it also supports uh posture, balance, and joint stability. So with better posture, balance, and stability, you will take it'll take less, it'll take strain off of the joints so they can last longer and you can use them more efficiently. And so we're not using patterns that aren't as efficient when it comes to things like that. And then, of course, it drives composition change. So it's one of the biggest drivers in that. The more lean muscle mass we have, the less body fat we have, the more tone our physique will look as well. And you know, the beautiful thing is we don't have all the time in the world. We may only have two to three hours a week to devote towards training. And so picking the type of training is going to be crucial to you know our longevity in our life. And so there's so many you're like, okay, I have my robic capacity I can work on. I want better lung capacity, I have my mobility I want to work on, I need to, I feel tight or stiff. You know, I want to be more active and I want to be stronger. And the beautiful thing is knowing which one to pick. And I go back to in the very beginning, I said there is one that is better than all the rest, and it is strength training. Strength training is by and far better than all the rest. And why is it? It's because it does a better job of supporting all the other modalities or or benefits. So build and preserve lean muscle. Like I was going back to by strength training, it's the only one that is gonna actually build muscle and improve strength consistently. Again, when you start doing anything, you're gonna feel a little bit stronger, your nervous system is gonna work a little bit better. But strength training itself is the only way to consistently, month after month, year after year, maintain and build strength. Also, it affects almost every other system in the body. So stronger muscles means better joint stability, it means better posture, it means better balance. And a lot of times the stiffness that we feel or lack of range of motion is can be due because we're not strong enough, because we're not in the right position to do it, and we don't have the stability to get into it. And so what must what might feel like a mobility issue is actually a stability issue, or is actually a strength issue. And so strength helps that. So though it is not aerobic, it is anaerobic training in nature, and so you'll get some of those benefits that you would get from anaerobic training as well. It has also the benefits of the epoch that you get in the high intensity. So after working out, though you don't burn a lot of calories within a straight training session, your metabolism is boost for the hours after that. Again, that that pales in comparison to actually just the lean muscle tissue that you build over time, and then your metabolism increases exponentially. It prevents injuries and keeps you moving. So this is huge. Going back to neat. If I feel beat up, achy, tired, I'm gonna move less. So the stronger I am, the more resilient I am, the more competitive I am in moving and doing things, the more neat. And that just drives the system. And then, you know, compounding benefits. So again, it makes everything easier. So if I want to go hiking, it's gonna make it easier. If I want to go running or carry groceries or playing with grandkids or whatnot, strength will make all of that easier and make it more enjoyable and something that you're gonna want to do. So that is why it is important to know what you are training for and the benefits of them. Again, there's so so many things that we can be training for. And if we feel overwhelmed and we only have so many hours in a week, I'm always gonna pick strength training. If I only have two hours a week to train, I'm picking strength training. If I have one hour a week, I'm picking strength training. If I have three hours a week, I'm probably still picking strength training. Now, if I have four or five hours a week, I'm gonna start diversifying. I'm gonna start probably working on my aerobic capacity a little bit more. I might start working on my mobility a little bit more. I might work on some power, but the goal is never to work out so I can work out more. The goal is so I can work out so I can enjoy this life to the fullest and have the confidence to do what I want to do. And all of that shows up in that need. The more I can do. And so, again, make sure you know what you're training for. The modality, I'm gonna encourage you if you only have three hours a week, strength train. If you have a couple more hours than that, awesome. Get out there, do some more biking, cycling, find something else. Again, the mobility side of things, you don't need a super long period of time of that, but you can work that into your workouts as well. So, again, strength training is king. Do it. Don't be intimidated by it. If you're new to strength training, sounds intimidating to you, but you're wanting the benefits of it, then that means you might want to think about working with a trained professional and coach. And that's what we do at the Spur Line Training System. Everybody is working with a trained coach who knows how to work with real human beings that want to feel better, move better, and also knows how to work around achy joints and injuries. So that's all I got today. Hope you found that insightful, interesting, helpful. And I look forward to talking to you all in the near future.