This is a question I get on a regular basis, whether it is for our Group Classes or Personal Training.
Most people seem to base the answer on something they heard online from a stranger who doesn’t give much context for how they got there.
“Three days is great.”
“Two days is enough.”
“So-and-so works out every day.”
The problem is that all of those answers can be correct.
How often you should work out depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, how well you’re recovering, how hard you’re actually training, and what the rest of your life looks like.
There isn’t one magic number of workouts per week that works for everyone.
There are, however, some general rules that can help.
Training Frequency Is About Productive Work
When you’re new to exercise, or coming back after a long break, almost anything you do is probably going to make you better.
That’s a good thing.
Early on, the priority should be learning how to move well, building consistency, and getting your body accustomed to training.
Eventually, simply showing up isn’t enough. You need to be able to produce a meaningful training stimulus.
That’s where intensity and recovery become more important.
You can’t continually increase the amount of productive work you’re doing without giving your body the ability to recover from it.
This is where people often get frequency backward.
They think:
“If three workouts are good, five must be better.”
Not necessarily.
Five productive workouts may be better than three.
Five beatdowns probably aren’t.
Recovery Determines How Much You Can Train
How well you recover plays a huge role in how often you can train hard.
Sleep, nutrition, stress, work, family, and everything else going on in your life all affect your ability to perform.
If you aren’t recovering well, you aren’t going to perform as well in your training.
And this creates an important distinction:
A workout can feel hard without being a good training session.
If you slept poorly and squat 20% less than you normally do, that lighter weight may feel absolutely miserable. You may leave the gym thinking you worked incredibly hard.
But your output was lower.
Feeling tired isn’t the same thing as producing a high level of training output.
This is one reason I don’t like the idea that every workout needs to crush a person.
You Don’t Need Every Day to Be a Hard Day
For most people, I think three truly hard training days is the upper limit of what you can consistently produce well in a week.
And by “hard,” I don’t mean three days where the workout felt terrible.
I mean three days where you were able to produce a high level of output toward the thing you’re trying to improve.
You can exercise four, five, or even six days a week.
That doesn’t mean every one of those days needs to be a high-output training day.
In fact, everyone would benefit from having a couple days that are deliberately easier.
You might have a week that looks something like:
2 hard days
1–2 moderate days
1–2 easy days
The exact schedule isn’t important.
The point is that training has different purposes.
Some days you push.
Some days you practice.
Some days you build capacity.
Some days you simply move.
All of them can be productive.
Your Goal Should Influence How You Train
The other major consideration is what you’re trying to improve.
If your primary goal is strength, your hard training days should be organized around producing a high level of strength-specific output.
If you’re generally trying to become more fit, you have more flexibility.
Your hard days might involve strength, conditioning, mixed-modality work, or some combination of the three.
This is one of the advantages of having a coach.
You don’t have to figure out every variable yourself.
A good coach can look at what you’re trying to accomplish, what you did recently, how you’re recovering, and what you’re capable of doing today.
Then they can make an adjustment. Harder work on the days you are “feeling the fury” and adjust the intensity on days when you are off.
How Often Should You Do Personal Training?
If you’re new to training or coming back after a long time away, I often think two Personal Training sessions per week is a good place to start.
That gives you enough exposure to build consistency while giving your body time to adjust.
It also gives your coach enough opportunities to teach you how to move correctly, establish some standards, and help you understand what productive training actually feels like.
As your fitness improves and recovery gets better, three Personal Training sessions per week can make a lot of sense.
You can also do easy movement on your own between sessions.
Go for a 30-minute walk.
Walk for a minute and run for a minute, repeating this for an extended time.
Go for an easy steady run.
Do something that gets you moving without taking away from your ability to perform during your harder training sessions.
That’s an important distinction.
Your activity outside the gym shouldn’t always be another workout.
Sometimes the best thing you can do for your training is something easy.
What About Group Fitness Classes?
Group classes are a little different because the training isn’t built around one specific goal.
There is more variety.
That’s why I generally encourage group class members to show up four to five days per week if their schedule allows it.
But the same rule still applies:
Four or five days of training does not mean four or five hard days.
One day may have a heavier strength focus.
Another may be more technical.
Another may be a conditioning workout.
Another might be intentionally easier.
And your coach will be able to guide the person standing in front of them them on adjustments to make.
Didn’t sleep well?
We can pull back the intensity.
Feeling great?
Maybe we push it.
Working on technique?
Intensity may not be the priority.
That’s still training.
The Best Workout Schedule Is One You Can Actually Recover From
There is no prize for training the most days.
There is no prize for being exhausted all the time.
The goal is to train frequently enough to improve while recovering well enough to keep producing good work.
For some people, that’s two days.
For others, it’s three.
For someone in group classes with good recovery, it may be four or five.
The number matters less than what you’re actually able to do with those days.
Train as often as you can productively train, not as often as you can force yourself to show up.
If you’re not sure what that looks like for you, that’s exactly the kind of thing we can help with.
If you’re in the Dallas / Oak Cliff area and want to talk through your goals, training history, and what a realistic schedule would look like, reach out to Bishop Arts Fitness for a No Sweat Intro. There’s no workout and no pressure. We can simply sit down, talk about your goals, and figure out whether Personal Training or the Group Classes make sense for you.
