How many times a week should you be training? How long should a training session last? As you endeavor to begin a training program or perhaps have been training for a while and are trying to figure out how to get optimal results, these are important questions to answer. Finding the right frequency and duration of training sessions will depend on a few variables. Though the answer to this question of how frequently to train does have a fair amount of variation depending on the age and level of advancement of each individual, the answer I will provide here will be suitable for the vast majority of people reading this. If we consider that there are three classifications of strength trainees — novices, intermediates and advanced — the advice here is intended to guide primarily novices and early intermediate trainees. So, let’s break this topic down and help you figure out what’s right for you.
How Frequently Should I Train?
Some try to take the approach that working out more is necessarily better than less and longer training sessions equal becoming fitter and healthier. Like most things in life, it’s just not that simple, and the right answer may be counter-intuitive. For people new to working out, it may be advisable to start off with no more than two training sessions per week. A Monday and Thursday or a Tuesday and Friday split works well. You’ll no doubt be sore at least a little bit. I try to keep this to a minimum, since soreness doesn’t mean anything productive necessarily happened, and too much soreness just makes you unnecessarily miserable – and who needs that? After a brief period of getting acclimated to strength training (one or two weeks), most people can quickly adapt to training three days per week. I find this true for most age groups — even people in their seventies. Properly designed weightlifting programs are designed to provide a sufficient dose of stress in a single workout, such that the trainee does well to take a rest day between sessions with a full two days off after the third training session within a week’s time. This makes for a convenient Monday, Wednesday, Friday training split with the weekend off. Remember you are not getting stronger while you are working out. The workout is a stress event that must be recovered from in order for you be able to adapt to it, thereby becoming stronger. If you follow that train of logic, I think you can begin to see that simply willing yourself to train every day is not productive. Too much stress and not enough recovery will lead to burnout and exhaustion at best and injury at worst. As an aside, If you can work out every day in perpetuity with seldom a day off and no ill effects, it is likely that you are training ineffectively, as in not hard enough to cause you to get fitter or stronger. You may be doing little more than burning calories and staying active while doing virtually nothing to improve your strength. For many people, they will find three days a week optimal for their progress and about as much as they can sustainably recover from on an ongoing basis.
How Long Should I Train?
The next question I often hear is, “How long should a training session last?” The average length of a training session should be one hour. For newer trainees, the workouts may be much shorter, since they just can’t tolerate a very high volume of heavy work yet. Therefore, a workout for someone brand new may only take 30-40 minutes. After 4-6 weeks of training, the workout usually takes a full hour to complete and may last as long as 75 minutes. Again, for more advanced trainees, they may need 90 to 120 minutes to complete their workouts, but for the vast majority of us, we will do our best work in 60 minutes or slightly less. Another reason to keep workouts confined to an hour is that most of us have limited time. We work jobs, have families and other obligations. If you want to make training sustainable, then you will do well to make it fit into your lifestyle. Most people I know don’t have more than an hour at a time to be in the gym three times a week, let alone the energy to do it consistently.
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In conclusion, you are more than likely going to benefit from training three times a week for about one hour per session. More training than that is difficult to recover from over the long term, and training only twice a week is difficult to make steady progress unless your training sessions get to be closer to 90-120 minutes, which for many people is not feasible. Of course, there is more than one way to skin a cat, but starting here will help get the ball rolling. If you are inclined to add more training days into your week, always remember that you must take into account time for your body to recover. If you can keep your training stress and recovery in balance, you will make great progress.