Why You Should Not Be Training 5-6 Days A Week
There has been a significant increase in the amount of information about training, there are many coaches who can inform you of
How to train.
What lifts target which muscles.
The ideal way to build muscle and lose fat.
What type of training you should be performing.
With all this information, it can lead you to think that you need to be in the iron paradise and working hard to achieve the physique you want 24/7 otherwise you will be wasting potential gains.
Working in the training world both as an online coach and in-person, one of the most common things I hear when discussing training frequency is “I know I need to be training 5-6 days a week”. To this, I always ask the simple question of why?
Why are 5-6 days of training the magic number for your goal? In reality, most people do not need to be training more than 3 days a week, you could push 4 days a week if you have some extra time on your hands. I am sure some of you are ready to disagree with me and I know if you shared this with your peers some would think I am talking absolute rubbish, but let's go into why I have come to this conclusion.
You As A Person
Everyone starts their fitness journey at different points in their life. Some may start in their late teens, others in their twenties, and some further down the line.
Let us look at those who start off as a teen. I want you to think back to the teenage you, you may have had a part-time job, attended school/college, and maybe taken part in a sport as well, but ultimately your responsibilities were relatively low and you had an endless amount of energy even when you were tired. Fitting in the gym is not a major task at this stage due to the much more carefree nature and the body's rapid restorative abilities at those ages. You could easily train multiple times a week, maybe even a day, meet your friends, and do other tasks/activities outside of that.
Now, let's look at those in their twenties and further into adult life. We can all agree that the further away you get from your teens, your energy levels also seem to deplete quicker. There are different reasons why this happens, changes in hormones and physiology occur as we age which can reduce our activity levels. But a major impact is due to the responsibilities and stress you undergo as you age.
You begin to:
Build your working career.
Engage in relationships.
Have the responsibilities of bills.
Along with all the other curve balls life throws as you get older. The accumulation of all this adds to the amount of stress on the body. What I want you to be aware of is that stress is stress! What that means is no matter what the stressor is, the body takes it as the same thing, and the brain is what associates stress with its stressor.
With all these stressors being placed on your body, a high training frequency will be the cherry on top. 2-3 training sessions that work for you at the ideal volume and intensity. What I have found is that there are two types of people 5-6 times a week, those who push every session to the limit who I like to call the hardcore and those who train 5-6 days a week and the sessions are always suboptimal, who I refer to as the daydreamers
Both these two types will have a different experiences with their training. The daydreamers will build a training routine and will always find time for a session and see results early on. But those results soon plateau and the training becomes very unbeneficial. Whilst the hardcore will also build that routine and build some good results but will shortly be halted due to overtraining (Click here to read the article on overtraining).
Rest and Recovery
Another reason why 2-3 training sessions would be ideal is due to the amount of rest it offers you. The best way to combat stress is to rest. The body uses resting as its time to recover and restore not only the muscles but hormones, blood flow, fluid regulation, brain function, etc.
In relation to training, when you train you place a load on the body and the body enters a state of deconditioning. During the time we rest the body recovers and adapts to the load by making the muscles stronger to be able to handle that load again and overcome it. However, as we want to continually aim to get stronger we have to increase the load during our training sessions thereby increasing our strength. This process is coined progressive overload.
If you are training 5-6 days a week and you are in that hardcore category, along with all the other things going on in your life that are stressors, it is hard to see where your body is going to find the time to rest, recover, and adapt.
When I come across clients who have had the hardcore approach before working with me, I like to understand what their training currently consists of and then tie it back into their goals and see where modifications can be made. If you feel you fall into the hardcore category I want you to ask yourself some things
Do you feel completely drained by the end of the week?
Do you find yourself dragging through a majority of your sessions?
Do you find you get aches and niggles much more frequently?
If you answer yes to most of these then I would advise you to think about how frequently you are training on a weekly basis and see where you can make reductions. If you want to discuss this with me then click here
Click here for tools to get better rest and recovery
Training Goal
Now I am not demonising training 5-6 days a week, there are many who train in this manner and continually see great results due to the structure of their training plan. the main decider if you do this or not is what your training goal is. From my experience working with clients online and in-person, there are too many other things going on in your life for you to commit to so many training days. As well as that, the goals you have more than likely do not require you to commit to 5-6 training sessions.
Having a goal similar to;
Wanting to improve your general health.
Building strength.
Losing some weight and gaining some muscle.
Do not require intense training commitments. My old basketball coach use to say ‘basketball is easy, we are the ones that make it difficult’ and I can say the same is true when it comes to our approach to training. It does not have to be rigorous and be very intense that it feels like a chore. You overcomplicate the process and become frustrated, but you are battling yourself.
Keeping things simple and staying consistent with the process will be the best option for you to achieve your health and well-being goals. You do not build training consistency in a week. There will be periods where you are very consistent and times where that is interrupted. As long as you get back into the swing of things as soon as you can then you are doing the right thing!
I hope this helped
Til next time
Myles
