If you’ve spent even a moment learning about Native American culture it’s impossible not to have it impressed upon you how much of the animals they hunted were used, which is to say, literally every bit of it.

There seems to be almost a de-evolution over time in terms of how much of animals we let go to waste.

For example, our grandparents may not have worn buckskin clothing, but they certainly ate organ meat.

When is the last time you ate organ meat? Did you know that it’s potentially one of the single most beneficial things you could add back into your diet? Eating as much muscle meat (exclusively) as we modern humans, and especially westerners do is neither normal nor healthy. Including organ meats is one way to balance the amino acids and improve the nutrition profile of your diet. (By the way, I wrote up my chicken liver pate recipe, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t love it.)

And so on as you go back in history. Of course the more we waste, the worse things are for the planet and the worse things tend to be for us – who live best in concert with the planet not just extracting from it.

One of the things that always bothered me when I’ve hunted deer is that the hide goes to waste. I don’t know what the processor does with it, but I’d wager they don’t use it and I never asked to keep it since I didn’t know how to tan it.

So the next few days I’m going back to the woods to learn traditional brain tanning, which is using animal brains rather than harsh chemicals to break down the proteins in hide and make soft and usable leather.

I may not switch to wearing buckskin clothing, but knowing that I can use another part of the animal I’ve taken from the Earth is really important to me and is another skill in the quiver that could have who-knows-what benefits down the road.

Lately I haven’t had a lot of ambition to train. Between coming off a powerlifting meet in the spring, it being hotter than hell in the gym during the summer, and wanting to skydive as much as humanly possible all summer I just haven’t had a whole lot of extra time or ambition to train.

So I’ve been experimenting with the question of “how little is enough?” Usually when we talk about training there’s an almost obsession with maximizing outputs. How much muscle can you gain, how many PRs can you hit.

But there are lots of situations where that’s not really what you want. Sometimes the situation or your desires don’t call for maximizing output, they call for minimizing input and maximizing effectiveness or efficiency.

And yet, despite only training heavy twice a week, I’m not only maintaining body weight and composition, but my strength is staying relatively stable if not increasing incrementally. Of course I’m not pushing my absolute 1RM all time bests up, but my working weights are increasing gradually even with the low frequency.

One of the things I’ve learned from the mountain of data I’ve gathered having every member at my gym track their workouts is that the minimum weekly frequency to make good progress is about 2.1 workouts per week. In other words, two isn’t enough so three is just about right.

But, I think if you keep some guidelines in mind you can maintain or even progress very slowly in times when progress isn’t a priority:

• Train mainly with full body compound movements.
• Train the whole body each training session, no body part splits.
• Go heavy, for moderate reps. You’re not getting a lot of frequency, so the intensity of the stimulus needs to be higher.
• Don’t push things that don’t feel right or get hurt. This might sound obvious, but if you’re already only training at the lower bound of minimal effective amount you can’t afford to have to take time off because you tweaked something.

At some point, probably later in the fall after my travel schedule settles down I’ll go back to training more often and with more purpose towards moving forward. But for now I’m enjoying this little experiment and I’m learning a lot about what does and doesn’t work. I’ve always thought creating a program for the person who wants to train the absolute minimum would be fun, so I’m learning a bit towards that end.