How Often Should You Train?
First off, let me clear this up. I’m not talking about athletes here! Most of my clients are rehabilitation clients (mainly neurological), and general population clients who have jobs, maybe second jobs, maybe kids, dogs, a house etc. Yeah, athletes may have these commitments too, however, their job is to train, recover and be at their best to compete.
So, how often should you train? Well…it depends. Yeah I know that sounds like a cop out, however, hear me out. Let us start with what happens when we train, and what can impact progress.
When we train we want to stimulate the muscle/nervous system to create an adaption, and then recover from it. This is the point that a lot of people seem to miss, the fact that we need to recover! It isn’t only the stress from training that needs to be thought about, but a whole host of other things too – diet, work stress, hormonal status, sleep, stress at home, age etc etc. These, along with many more factors, can impact how well you recover from your training, and therefore the progress you make.
In a nutshell, if you aren’t recovering your progress will suffer!
Now that we’ve spoken about stress and recovery, let’s move onto training.
Overall, this will depend on your goal. Whether that be fat loss, strength, muscle size and so on and so forth. However, I am going to say that one training session per week probably will not get you anywhere. Also, going for 6/7 days a week may be counter productive too…recovery and all that.
Ideally, 3 to 4 training sessions per week will probably work for most people (once again, I’m not talking about athletes/people who are competing), as long as they can recover from the training sessions adequately. Two would also be sufficient in some cases, when life throws you a curveball. Don’t take this as permission to sit down all day though! I actively encourage low level aerobic activity outside of your training sessions, and that is what it should be – low level movement, daily and often. Just don’t turn it into another training session!
In order for you to figure out how often you should train, you need to first decide on your goal – the ones I am going to focus on here are fat loss, muscle gain and strength. We will leave rehabilitation out of this as it is more complicated than the goals outlined above, and has even more variables involved.
Fat Loss
Three full body sessions per week with a mixture of strength training and conditioning would be sufficient here, along with lots of walking. Don’t let the walking impact your recovery. In fact, if you are struggling for time, I would prefer you to focus on shopping and cooking to get your diet on point as this is where the largest gains towards your goals will be made.
Muscle Gain
Choose between three full body workouts or an upper/lower split. If you want to train four days a week then go for an upper/lower split. Outside of the gym focus on recovery and eating enough calories in order to see the most progress from your training sessions. Please don’t think that more is better when it comes to training, as it isn’t. Once you have maximally stimulated the hypertrophy response of a muscle or muscle group doing more doesn’t mean you are going to get more.
Strength
This is one that you can chop up in many different ways. You could do an upper/lower split, split up the days by movement (press day, squat day etc.) or a full body training session. Once again, three to four days is optimal here. If you are going for three days then do a split or full body, if you are doing four days then split it up.
These are very brief overviews on what I feel would work for most individuals. However, as stated previously, the way you chop it up ultimately depends on your lifestyle, recovery capabilities and the time you have to hand. Once you start planning your training, ensuring recovery and keeping to your goal you’ll be surprised with the progress you make.