More isn’t always better: how often should you train?

More isn’t always better: how often should you train?

Many of us are guilty of this. We enjoy the gym, or we start seeing results, so we want to go more. It’s like feeling good after one drink and ending up having five.

It took me about a decade to realise this was holding me back. My mate Steve and I would sometimes train twice a day, back when becoming Arnold seemed like a realistic goal.

Training more isn’t inherently bad. It’s just complicated, because how ready you are for your next session depends on a lot of things:

1. Sleep
2. Diet and supplements
3. Stress from work, family and life in general
4. Training load
5. Your size and body composition
6. Recovery from your last session
7. Age
8. Training age (how long you’ve been training seriously, which isn’t the same as your age)

There are more, but these are the big ones.

An athlete’s job is to train. They have coaches and a schedule built around managing these factors. Most of us have busy lives, and plenty of these factors go unmanaged.

Here’s how it looks for me:

• Sleep: about 6 hours a night
• Diet: good, could be better
• Stress: low. I’m fairly relaxed and enjoy my work.
• Family life: busy
• Training load: heavy, especially during rugby season or before a powerlifting comp
• Size: 110 kg, 6'3", 10–15% body fat
• Age: 35, with a mature training age

With all that in mind, I get my best results from two hard gym sessions a week, plus two or three 5 km runs. If I added a third hard gym day right now, I couldn’t give it 100%. A light mobility or accessory day would be fine, but usually it’s better to let my body recover.

Recovery isn’t just about muscle. Tendons, ligaments and bone have a poorer blood supply, so they adapt and recover more slowly. Skimping on rest is how injuries creep in. And two sessions isn’t as little as it sounds: research suggests hitting each muscle about twice a week is a good target for growth.

This could turn into a book, but that’s not the point. The point is to get you thinking about your training frequency and whether it’s working for you or against you. Frequency is the foundation of your whole program, so it’s worth getting right.

If in doubt, start conservative. Add a day, and if it’s too much, pull back.

Reference: Schoenfeld, Ogborn & Krieger (2016), “Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy”, Sports Medicine.