How Many Times A Week Should I Train?

You got questions? Hopefully I have the answer. In today’s Q and A I’m gonna go over ‘How many days a week should you workout?’ Let’s get right into it. So the question was asked to me specifically, “Sam, how much should I workout? Should I work out three days a week? Or should I workout five days a week?” That was the question that was asked so I’m gonna kind of divulge between those two, three and five days a week, if you’re considering going that high and we’ll break it down by goals. Okay. First things first though, this answer is going to be another, it depends. It really depends on what your goals are. I’ll give you the breakdown of how much we could be working out for muscle building and then how much to really maximize our cardiovascular benefits. Okay. 

First for muscle building in general, this is general okay. I’m not gonna get into a nuanced conversation or you would be watching this video for 30 minutes. General, 3 days a week is perfect. Especially if you’re doing full body training. If you’re doing head to toe training, working all those muscle groups three days a week, you do not need to do more than three days a week. Okay? The reason being is science will show sets per body part. So how much you are working a body part for the week is best done between 9 and 20 sets. Anything over that, not gonna give you more benefit. It’ll actually hurt you. Anything under that is not to give you the results that you desire in terms of building muscles. So three days a week, full body, best practice for strength training.

Now let’s talk about aerobic conditioning. That is a little bit different, cause it’s not as taxing on the nervous system. It’s gonna depend on what style of aerobic conditioning you are doing and what other kind of training you’re doing. Let’s say you are just doing aerobic conditioning. You’re not doing any strength training that you can actually scale up the frequency over time to more like five days a week. Now, starting out though, don’t start out five days a week. And the aerobic conditioning is not going to look the same every single day. We do not want to hammer ourselves into the ground. We’re not pushing max intensity, seeing how fast we can spur a mile every single day, because that would over time really damage us. So what I would suggest is if you’re really looking to boost up your cardio, how many days a week for that, you can go one kind of longer to moderate day followed by a shorter rest day and then kind of alternate in there.  

I would not do more than three to four, really intense aerobic conditioning days for the general public. So that kind of breaks it down. How much you need to be working out. Good rule of thumb. If you just want a good rule of thumb, just stick to three days a week, that is gonna get you the best results. These other days of the week… That does not mean when I’m talking about exercise, that is something we just sit on the couch for the other days of the week, get up, move, do some stretching, do some mobility work, do some light…

You can even do some really, really light kind of movements that are gonna put blood in the muscle facility, recover and get you better results.

So that’s my recommendation. Three days a week of more intense training. And then you can go up to the other four days a week, very light recuperative type work, and that’s gonna get you great results, no need to really hammer ourselves seven days a week. All right, that’s all I have for you for today’s video. If you liked this video give me a thumbs up, if you’d love to give me a heart and as always, stay strong.

-EarthFIT Coach Sam