How Often Should I Workout?
Great question, reader!
I hear this one all of the time, “Andrew, how many times a week should we be working out? How many workouts will get us to my goals? Is it bad to workout too much?” etc., etc. I’m sure you have wondered about one of these or something similar recently. They’re good questions to consider. How often should we be training? What is the magic number? How can we efficiently get to our goals? The answer? It depends..
For those of you who know me personally or have worked with me before, you know that I use that answer A LOT, because it does. Everything depends on nuance. Whenever a trainer gives a hardline answer to anything, they’re off-base. Good training is math and science. We make educated guesses based off of the data we have in front of us and the references we have from past personal and client training experiences, and then we implement our educated guesses, evaluate more data, and adjust the program as needed. That is it. That is ALL of it.
“OK, cool, thanks for the info fitness nerd, but can we get back to the main topic of this article?”
Woah, take it easy friend, we’re getting there! Like I said, it depends. For most people, doing three strategic training sessions each week is sufficient for general health benefits, muscular adaptation, positive bone density manipulation, and general cardiovascular gains. You can honestly program a lot of progress into three training sessions each week, more than I just listed here. I would like to rephrase the question, though. Instead of asking how often we need to workout to see progress, why not try and formulate our view to how often can I positively stimulate my body to react the way that I want in order to see progress off of my recovery practices? Here, let me explain..
We don’t need to pick a generic number of workouts each week and call it a day. We need to adapt fitness into our lifestyle and stimulate our bodies as much as we can to see consistent training, replenishment, recovery, repeat.
I recommend 3 sessions each week for most people starting out, sometimes less, because the game is all about stimulation and recovery. To simplify things, we want to fatigue the muscles we want to see positive adaptation from and then allow them to recover. When we are regularly training our bodies have a greater ability to recover off of training stimulus versus when we go from sedentary to working out multiple times each week. This is why it is not recommended for people getting back into the swing of things to crush the ever living crap out of their body and soul with all things fitness.. It’s honestly not advantageous. Recently, I have been talking a lot about “checking the box off,” and that applies here too. We want to create fatiguing stim, eat, sleep, drink water, and do it again. This is SCIENCE my friends!
TL;DR Plz Summarize Thx
Okay, to simplify, we want to workout as often as our body will allow us to. If you want to grow glutes, train them as often as you can. For example, I have put people into 3-4x each week glute programs, and they grow incredibly fast, but they can handle the workload and recover off of it. Make sure you are going from good, to sore, to good as fast as possible, and that is determined by conditioning level, workload, recovery processes, and nutrition.
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Coach Happel
