Goals:
Staying all natural, get max hypertrophy in 1 hour / week. Eat mostly clean with plenty of protein.

Schedule:
20 mins x 3 / week. Weekly gym time: 60mins. I will do random cardio 1x a week as well.

When it's a normal week, I try to space out the rest as evenly as possible, 2.33 days. In this case I go: Sun evening, Wed morning, Fri early afternoon

Reps:
11-15 is best, with ~14 seeming ideal for many lifts. Why am I so certain? For a 20min workout, it just isn’t practical to do less reps given the time it takes to set up. While 16+ reps will also work, it can get very exhausting and the time under tension / near failure ratio is much lower.


The minimalist workout is basically an alternate push / pull . There is less exercise variation in the push, so start with that, in order to give those muscles more rest. For every set, go to failure (excluding legs).This is extremely important in a minimalist workout, and far more important than anything else. (Keep in mind many exercises will only be 3 x 14 PER WEEK.) There is no rest between excersises except for several seconds after squats/deadlifts/lunges.

For push (non legs) exercises, I use dumbbells exclusively (except for one of my sets of OHP for variation). This saves time, is safer alone and better for hypertrophy (tell me if I’m wrong though). But mostly, for it allows me to push towards max failure, safely by myself.

The exact order depends on your gym setup. I also switch the order of the non core lifts every time for balance. I have knee issues, so for squats/deadlifts I don’t go super hard and only try to maintain. (Currently I have a bias towards OHP as I've been lacking there.)


Example A and B days:

Day A Squat/deadlift example (1 set of 14 reps, unless says otherwise)
Overhead Press dumbbells
Incline bench reverse fly
Abs cable rope 3 sets / cable crossovers 2 sets (low then high) -> abs cc abs cc abs
Squats 10reps then barbell shrugs (same station)
Upright row
Overhead Press Bar
Deadlift 8reps then shrugs then pull-ups (same station as squats)
Flat Bench Press dumbbells
Side lateral raises
Incline bench press dumbbells
Abs/core (remaining ~30 secs)

Day B Lunge example (1 set of 14 reps, unless says otherwise)
Overhead Press bar
Incline bench reverse fly
Abs cable rope 3 sets / cable crossovers 2 sets (low then high) -> abs cc abs cc abs
Lunges w/ dumbbells out and back w/ pull-ups in between sets
Overhead Press dumbbells
Side lateral raises
Abs/core (2mins)
Cable Rows
Decline bench or flat bench w/ dumbbells
Upright row
Incline bench

Way fewer exercises. Maybe upper day incline db press+pullups. Lower body day SLDL and Lunge. Alternate upper lower and add either reps or weight each session to each exercise. Between those four you're not really missing basically anything.



i've been training for bodybuilding for years now and training in total for 16 years and I've basically always ended up with better results by reducing the number of different exercises I do. I think this would be even more true for somebody with your very odd goals of 20 minutes 3x/wk.

Thanks. SLDL is a good idea.

Fewer exercises does make some sense, yes. I am just trying to take advantage of every time (vs resting more). Will think about my options here.

What if I told you I had 25 minutes 3x/wk?

I do 25-30 minutes a day (including warm up) 5x a week and 1 day that's about 45 min. I do 1 exercise/day and alternate upper body/lower body. I've been working out in my backyard since my gym closed at the beginning of covid and never reopened so I'm pretty limited as to what I can do. In a gym environment you could be much more creative. Lower body: any type of squat or DL variant. Upper body: OHP, bench variants, rows. Mix up the exercises for variey. The last set of the day could be an AMR set. I'm an old dude so I can't do much volume anyway but even at a younger age I became convinced that less can be more. Good luck.