Elite athletes – like Jakob Ingebrigtsenwho won men’s 1500m gold at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics – train almost ten to 14 times a week, accumulating many hours on the track and in the gym. But for the rest of us, getting in shape doesn’t have to mean dieting that hard.
How often you should train depends on many different factors, such as your training goals, your exercise intensity, and your injury history. The type of workout you do can also determine how often you need to exercise.
Exercise puts stress on different systems in our body. This stress causes fatigue, but also leads to “adaptations” (improvements) specific to the stress we have experienced. For example, while resistance training (like weightlifting) helps us build muscle strength, it’s less likely to improve our cardiovascular fitness because it puts more strain on our skeletal muscles than our heart.
But improvements only happen with a combination of recovery and repetition. If we don’t repeat the training stress, the improvements will be lost. We also need to give our bodies enough time – but not too much time – between workouts to recover and “adapt”. In short, the key to improving fitness is exercising regularly, which means finding a balance between exercise and sufficient recovery.
To complicate matters, some bodily systems take longer to recover than others. For example, exercise that strains the body’s nervous system – such as sprinting, high-intensity interval training, or very intense resistance training – will take more time to recover than a lower-intensity workout – like a gentle jog that primarily involves the heart and lungs. This means that depending on the type of training you do, you may need to exercise more or less than you think.
Endurance exercise
When training for endurance events, it helps to do regular low-intensity workouts. Training regularly at this intensity helps the body use oxygen more efficientlyand over time it becomes easier to train at the same intensity. In fact, successful endurance runners tend to perform the most (around 80% of their training) at low intensities, with carefully planned higher intensity sessions – often two to three times a week, with a minimum of 48 hours between them. It also helps athletes recover better and avoid injury between workouts.
Skill sports
Many sports, including swimming, tennis and martial arts, require combinations of physical and technical skills. Whereas more research is needed in this area, it is generally believed that regular and targeted practice improves performance for these types of sports.
For example, swim coaches appreciate high-volume, low-intensity workouts (focus on technique) to allow their swimmers to move more efficiently and easily through the water. But when we repeat the same type of training, overuse injuries can happen, so it may be best to vary the stress of training to help the body recover – so balance intense days with easier training days and recovery days.
High-intensity activities (such as sprinting or playing a tennis serve) can alter the central and peripheral nervous systems – both considered important for improving skill. But these activities can only be sustained for a short time at the required intensity – so to avoid injury it’s important to only do a little bit in each training session, but practice regularly over time.
In short, training “smarter” not harder is essential in endurance sports and skill-based sports.
Resistance training
When it comes to building muscle, doing more workouts per week leads to greater gains in muscle strength. This is likely because higher training volume results in a greater increase in both muscle size and strength. But rest and recovery (including good nutrition) are still crucial to help muscles increase in size.
Generally, it is recommended to perform muscle strengthening exercises on two or more days a week to improve muscle and bone health. If your goal is to increase muscle size, working different muscle groups on different days can help ensure that you are always challenging your muscles enough to build strength, while giving you plenty of time to recover between workouts. .
But while performing more days of resistance training is beneficial, even just one day per week is effective for improve strength. Full-body movements, such as squats and lunges, performed with correct technique, can be great for building strength. It should also be noted that exercising at your absolute maximum until you can lift no more reps on any given exercise – known as lifting to failure – provides no additional benefit for improve strength. Indeed, it may be more advantageous to build strength leave a little in reserve.
Health and fitness
For the average person trying to get in shape, the most important thing isn’t necessarily the amount of exercise you do, but the quality of that exercise.
For example, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) shows promise for improve fitness and health. This involves performing maximal effort exercises for a short period of time, followed by a period of rest. A recent study showed that four to seven one-minute bouts of intense exercise with 75 seconds of rest three times a week improved physical fitness and mental well-being. So, for people who don’t exercise regularly, less than 30 minutes a week might be beneficial.
Whether you should exercise more or less often depends on many factors, including how often you are able to, your training goals, and the intensity of the exercise you are doing. We recommend that you try to vary the type of training you do over the course of a week and allow for sufficient recovery between intense or resistance training days, including at least one recovery day per week. But overall, the most effective training program is one that you maintain consistently over a long period of time.
