Deep Fitness: Bringing Mindfulness into Strength Training

Rodger Douglas
Dec 30, 2018
6 min read

Updated: Aug 8

A review of Deep Fitness: The Mindful, Science-Based Strength-Training Method to Transform Your Well-Being in Just 30 Minutes a Week by Philip Shepherd and Andrei Yakovenko

Most books about weight training focus on what can be measured from the outside: repetitions, sets, resistance, muscle size and performance. Deep Fitness is interested in all of these things, but it also asks a less familiar question: what does strength training feel like from within?

That question is what makes this book different.

Published by North Atlantic Books in 2021, Deep Fitness brings together two writers with very different backgrounds. Philip Shepherd is known for his work in embodiment—the practice of becoming more fully aware of the body as a living, sensing whole. Andrei Yakovenko came to high-intensity strength training through Body by Science and later founded New Element Training in Toronto. One contributes the language of presence and inner awareness; the other contributes the practical structure of brief, demanding resistance exercise. The book grows from the meeting of those two perspectives.

The basic idea

The authors call their method Mindful Strength Training to Failure, or MSTF. The exercises are performed slowly and with close attention, usually in one or two sessions of about 30 minutes each week. The book includes more than 30 illustrated exercises using gym machines, resistance bands or body weight, so its principles are not limited to one type of equipment.

Like The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution, Power of 10 and Body by Science, it argues that strength training does not have to consume several hours of every week. A small number of carefully performed exercises can provide a meaningful stimulus, after which the body needs time to recover and adapt.

This is an appealing idea, particularly for people who are put off by conventional gym culture or who simply do not have the time or energy for lengthy workouts. The promise of the book is not that exercise will become effortless. The sessions are intended to be challenging. The promise is that they can be focused, efficient and purposeful.

What makes the book different

The most valuable part of Deep Fitness, in my view, is not its workout schedule. It is the quality of attention the authors bring to exercise.

Many of us have learned to treat the body almost as a machine. We give it instructions, count its repetitions and judge it by what it produces. Even an activity intended to improve health can become another opportunity to ignore what the body is saying.

Deep Fitness suggests another possibility. During an exercise, we can notice the breath, the changing pattern of muscular effort, unnecessary tension and the way the body organizes itself around a movement. Slow repetitions make this easier because momentum cannot carry us through the difficult portion of the exercise. We have time to feel what is happening.

In this sense, strength training becomes a form of moving meditation. Attention is not something added to the workout as decoration; it becomes part of the technique. It may help us move more deliberately, recognize the difference between effort and pain, and remain present when an exercise becomes uncomfortable.

This is where Philip Shepherd’s influence is most apparent. Strength is presented not as hardness, aggression or domination over the body, but as a deeper capacity to inhabit it. That makes Deep Fitness the most contemplative of the slow-strength books I recommend.

The question of training to failure

The word failure can sound alarming. In this context, it means reaching the point at which another repetition cannot be completed with proper form despite a sincere effort. It does not mean pushing through sharp pain, allowing technique to collapse or treating exhaustion as a test of character.

For a healthy person with good supervision and reliable recovery, training to momentary muscular failure can be one useful way to make a short workout sufficiently demanding. However, I am less convinced that it should be treated as essential.

The wider research does not show that everyone must reach failure to become stronger or build muscle. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis found no overall advantage for failure training in strength or muscle growth, while a 2026 meta-analysis concluded that non-failure training was similarly effective for most outcomes and may offer a small advantage for dynamic strength.

This distinction matters, especially for people living with chronic illness, persistent fatigue or delayed symptom flares. The muscular system may be capable of continuing while the body as a whole is already approaching its limit. In such cases, the cost of reaching failure may be greater than the benefit.

My preference is therefore to take the principle rather than the prescription: use slow, controlled movement; choose enough resistance to make the exercise meaningful; pay close attention; and finish while the body can still recover well. Leaving one or two repetitions in reserve is not a failure of will. It can be intelligent self-regulation.

The best workout is not necessarily the hardest workout we can survive. It is one the body can absorb, recover from and gradually build upon.

How strong is the science?

The book is at its strongest when explaining the importance of maintaining muscle and strength as we grow older. Resistance training can support mobility, physical function, metabolic health and independence. It also deserves far more attention than it has traditionally received in many general approaches to wellness.

I am more cautious when the book’s broader health claims or its branded method are presented too confidently. Evidence supporting resistance training in general does not automatically prove that MSTF is uniquely effective, that very slow repetitions are superior for everyone, or that a single protocol can reverse a long list of chronic diseases.

Research comparing repetition speeds suggests that a fairly broad range of controlled tempos can build muscle, rather than establishing one ideal speed for everyone.

A systematic review of repetition duration found similar muscle-growth results across repetition lengths of roughly half a second to eight seconds. Slow movement remains useful, particularly for reducing momentum and encouraging awareness, but it should be understood as a valuable method rather than the only scientifically correct one.

I would also resist interpreting “30 minutes a week” as a complete definition of fitness. Strength training is one important part of health, not a replacement for walking, aerobic activity, balance, mobility, sleep or ordinary movement throughout the day.

Current public-health guidance recommends both muscle-strengthening exercise and aerobic activity.

None of this makes the book’s approach unhelpful. It simply places it in perspective. The exact dose and intensity that work best will vary with age, experience, health, goals and capacity for recovery.

Who may find it useful?

I would particularly recommend Deep Fitness to someone who knows strength training is important but feels alienated by the noise, speed and competitiveness that often surround it. It may also appeal to people interested in meditation, somatic practices or body awareness who have never considered lifting weights to be compatible with those interests.

The illustrated selection of machine, resistance-band and body-weight exercises makes the book practical as well as philosophical. Beginners may still benefit from instruction when learning unfamiliar movements, and anyone with significant medical limitations should adapt the program to their own condition rather than assuming that training to failure is automatically appropriate.

Readers looking only for a simple list of exercises may find some of the discussion of embodiment more expansive than expected. For me, however, that material is the reason to choose this book over a more conventional training manual.

My conclusion

I do not regard Deep Fitness as a set of rules that must be followed exactly. I regard it as an intelligent and unusual invitation to reconsider the relationship between strength and awareness.

Its most important contribution is not the acronym MSTF, nor even the promise of a short weekly workout. It is the idea that we do not need to leave the body in order to train it. We can become stronger while listening, breathing and noticing. We can challenge the muscles without turning exercise into a battle against ourselves.

For people with abundant energy, that awareness may improve the quality of a demanding workout. For people whose health or recovery is unpredictable, it may help them recognize when enough really is enough. In both cases, the deeper lesson is the same: exercise should support life, not dominate it.

That is why Deep Fitness earns its place among my recommended books. I may not accept every claim or apply every part of its method, but I value the bridge it builds between physical strength and embodied presence. It reminds us that fitness is not merely something the body displays. It is something we can learn to experience from within.

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