Minimalism means different things to different people.
- “I am a busy guy and want to spend as little time in the gym as possible.”
- “You never need to do more than one set of hyperbolic Bosu Ball squat thrusts, or anything else (but must approach failure).”
- “I am a lazy guy and want to use as little effort as possible.”
- “Just focus on the three main lifts.”
- “Jazz is all about the notes you don’t play.”
Asking “is minimalism better for maintenance” implies it is not best for beginners, because you need to have achieved something to maintain it. And this is correct.
Beginners are going to gain weight and strength despite their mistakes. But without volume they might not develop the work ethic needed to fuel effort and push intensity (perhaps more if they did not play organized sports as a kid, as mentioned). I think minimalism poor for beginners unless this means one hard set of 6-12 exercises. But people’s goals vary. An athlete concentrates on their sport, and does enough training to gain selective strength without compromising their sport skills. That’s a different salamander.
Most people start gradually losing muscle in their 40s and find when they are in their 70s carrying something up the stairs is now too difficult for them. Minimalism maintains muscle, maybe. But whether it maintains strength and power depends on the specifics.
Lifters, occasionally already on the obsessive or dysmorphia spectra, always talk about optima. The minimal amount of protein. The very best way to Bosu Ball squat thrust squat. The One Routine To Rule Them All (And in The Darkness Bind Them). Life is much less prescriptive and people differ quite a lot more than most think .
I think minimalism a poor choice for beginners. I think it reasonable for busy people , who lifted more when younger, using the Pareto Principle (80% of gains from 20% of effort) and this reasonable for maintaining muscle and maybe strength. If you only lift once a week, you are way better off than those who never strength train from a health perspective, and it isn’t even close; regardless of how close you are to your full potential if you spent much more time.
If minimalism means doing one set on thirty different nautilus machines, this will make you crazy strong. If it means “don’t try hard” you are wasting your time in the gym (but have possibly acquired some righteous selfies). If it means “the notes you don’t play” you are probably pretentious but it remains true you can only do so many exercises for so much time.
But this leads to the Iron Law Of Iron: Things only work for so long with respect to gaining strength, and then you are better off trying something different. It is easy to change from high volume to less. It is harder to change from doing the minimal to doing more, since you must improve the constitution as well as change the routine.
Lifters learn what works for them, for a while, then try different experiments. Occasionally, I go to the gym and do one warmup lift which feels unexpectedly hard but should be easy. That’s enough to forget my planned workout and do another part or cardio since I know I need more recovery. Minimalism works for a while if you have been training high volume. As a strategy, if you need to focus on 3 lifts do that as long as it works and you maintain joint balance. But everyone plateaus. The older you get, the more you must do to get stronger. But for maintenance, you can do much less work, but not with much less thought.
With all that, Thibs, a lifting genius, found a way to make one set work extremely well. Of course few do this. But it worked for me.
[Summary, remember “5-5-10-15”:
5 reps with 5 second negative, 5 regular reps, 1 rep 10 second negative, 1 hold for 15-30+ seconds.]