Researchers from Australia and Japan found that doing a few repetitions of strength or resistance training daily builds better muscles than an all-out weekend warrior routine. Just a handful of bicep curls daily improves muscle strength more than performing continuous curls in a longer exercise practice once a week,

According to Study Finds, people don’t even have to work out at full intensity to achieve these results. The research team divided volunteers into two groups and over a period of four weeks measured their muscle strength and thickness while doing “maximal voluntary eccentric contractions.” An eccentric contraction is when the muscle lengthens or extends. An example is the lowering the dumbbell after a performing a bicep curl which lengthens the muscle.

One group did six contractions daily for five days. The second group performed all 30 bicep curls in one session. Researchers added a third control group who did six contractions once a week. The results showed that the people who did all 30 curls in one session didn’t see any increase in muscle strength over the four weeks. However, they did see their muscle thickness, which indicates growth, increase by 5.8%. The group that did six curls each day for five days saw their muscle strength increase by more than 10%, and their muscle thickness grew by 5.8 %, similar to the 30 curl, once-a-week exercisers. The group that did six curls weekly showed no improvement in strength or thickness of the muscle.

A previous study found that a mere single three-second bicep curl daily increased muscle strength.

Professor Ken Nosaka, one of the study authors from the Edith Cowan University in Australia, says that these studies show that a manageable strength training program can yield impressive results.

“People think they have to do a lengthy session of resistance training in the gym, but that’s not the case,” Nosaka said in a news release. “Just lowering a heavy dumbbell slowly once or six times a day is enough.”

Nosaka added that while the study required participants to exert maximum effort, early findings from current, ongoing research indicates that similar results can be achieved without the need to push as hard as possible.

“We only used the bicep curl exercise in this study, but we believe this would be the case for other muscles also, at least to some extent,” he said. Nosaka said that a decrease in muscle mass is a cause of many chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, dementia, plus musculoskeletal problems such as osteoporosis.

The professor added that while it is not known why the body responds better to resistance exercises in smaller doses, it may relate to how the brain is asked to make a muscle perform in that manner. And he said that resting is important. The group who exercised five days a week took two days off.

“Muscle adaptations occur when we are resting,” he explained. “If someone was able to somehow train 24 hours a day, there would actually be no improvement at all.” The new research was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.