How Often Should I Be Working Out?
How often you work out will depend on several factors that are unique to each of us.
General guidelines will suggest 30 mins a day of movement but we’re going to delve into some key considerations for your training goals and flexibility…
Quality over Quantity
This is something important to consider when exercising as how you perform each exercise in your session will have a big impact, therefore the quality of the session can be more important than how often. For example, if you are going into the gym everyday to lift weights, but not doing it with any real structure, then it is probably better to cut down the number of sessions and focus on building a better routine.
However, doing just one session a week, even if it is a really good one, might not be enough to get the results you want, so it would be important to consider where else you could add exercise into your week.
Are you burning out?
We see this a lot in the gym, people going hard in their sessions 7 days a week but their bodies not being able to keep up, which can lead to physical burnout if you are not careful.
Whilst it is good to get some movement in each day, we recommend that this is not all resistance based training, it might be good to look at some light cardio, active recovery and stretching etc so that you are getting a variety of movement and not overdoing it in one area.
What are your goals?
Your health and fitness goal will play a large impact in how many times a week you exercise. If your goal is to lose weight, then it’s a good idea to be trying to get at least 30 mins of exercise in each day, which would be a mixture of cardio and weights.
If you are looking to tone and maintain muscle, then you don’t need to be in the gym everyday whereas if you are trying to bulk build muscle – you will likely be training more than this. We highly recommend speaking with a trainer and discussing your goals to get a realistic schedule in place.
How much time do you have?
Our day to day schedules will play a large part in how often we are training, it’s not always feasible to get to the gym everyday so this is where elements such as home workouts, walking where you can and trying to fit in other forms of exercise will be beneficial.
Trying to plan the week ahead is a useful thing to do as it means your workouts are scheduled in and you will be more likely to achieve more than 1 session.
To summarise, there is no right or wrong to this question as it will depend largely on your specific goals, time and ability to train multiple times a week. Following the general guidelines of 30 mins per day of exercise (any type) and aiming for 1-2 of these to be resistance based sessions is usually a good place to start.
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