How Many Days a Week Should You Workout?

0:00 Most people have no idea how many days a week they actually need to train. And the answer is almost always less complicated than they think. For some, one day is enough. For others, 5 days makes more sense. Today, I'll show you the smartest way to choose the perfect training frequency based on actual science, your goals, and your real life circumstances. Before I discuss this next bit, which will come as a surprise to many people, I want to make one thing clear. Physical activity in general is amazing for health and you should do basically as much as your schedule allows you to do because around 75% of people in the general population aren't meeting guidelines for physical activity for health. It can be as simple as going for a walk, going for a jog, cycling, gardening, the list goes on. When it comes to lifting, however, the relationship between more lifting and health is actually somewhat of a black sheep. Let's set one thing straight. Lifting is good for your health. It has many health benefits from preventing osteoporosis in elderly people to making you healthier overall.

0:54 preventing sarcopenia as you age. There are a lot of benefits here. However, when it comes to the dose of lifting, things aren't as positive as you might expect. That trend is best summarized in a meta analysis by Mama and colleagues. In their meta analysis, Mama and colleagues analyze data from hundreds of thousands of participants. They tried to see did participants who lifted weights for more hours a week have a lower risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes.

1:19 Importantly, this type of study, a method analysis of cohort studies, is observational in nature, meaning it doesn't strongly make the claim of causality. However, by adjusting for confounders and with a very large sample size, it can help us answer somewhat how much time should you be spending in the gym per week if your goal is health. And their results were shocking. 1 to 2 hours of lifting per week did improve health. But past this, not only was there no additional benefit, there was even some evidence of the benefits diminishing, meaning people who spent more time lifting in the gym had worse health outcomes than people who simply spent one or two hours in the gym a week. And these findings are corroborated by other meta analyses.

1:56 Importantly, many participants in these studies are relatively older. So, there are many things to consider when interpreting these findings. But one thing does seem pretty clear based on the evidence, and that's that you don't need to spend much time in the gym to maximize your health. Realistically, only one or two hours of lifting a week is sufficient to get most, if not all of the health benefits from lifting. So, if you're mostly interested in health, for many people, that will mean that just one to 3 days in the gym per week is enough. And this makes sense because as much as in the fitness industry, we tend to adopt a very maximalist lens on lifting weights, how much time you should be spending in the gym, how much effort you should be putting into it, the reality is that for many health outcomes, it's not as deep as it may seem. Specifically, one thing you want to avoid with lifting is getting dependent or losing your independence as you age, avoiding circenia, avoiding osteoporosis. All those things are major risk factors for dying early. You don't need to lift much to offset those things massively. You don't need to be lifting three, four times your body weight in order to not have sopedia at age 60 or 70. You simply need to lift enough that you can maintain your bone density better. the dose response relationship between lifting and amount of lifting and health simply isn't as steep as you might think as someone who's lifting for hypertrophy. So again, if health is your goal, just 1 to 3 days in the gym per week is likely sufficient. And you don't need to set elite expectations for yourself as far as strength goals go.

3:18 But let's discuss hypertrophy now. And let's start with some practical considerations. The first one and most important one being how many days can you realistically hit 80% of the time? So, in at least four out of five weeks, how many days do you make it to the gym? Four days, 5 days? Because if you plan a program run on five days a week, but then often only hit four days a week based on your routine, some muscles will almost always get neglected, unless you're perfectly splitting things up with a full body approach. Let's say you're doing upper, lower, upper, lower, upper, for example. Your upper body, if you tend to miss that fifth day, you're not getting as much upper body training in as you actually planned for. And if really bringing up your upper body is a goal of yours, then you made a mistake in how many days you're hitting the gym per week. Instead, you should have used a 4-day routine. This gets even worse if you're following something like a bro split and you happen to always miss leg day every week. In my experience, your lifestyle matters hugely. And additionally, when it comes to determining how many days a week you should be in the gym, your lifestyle matters a lot. In my experience, for busier people, more frequent but shorter workouts can help with habit formation and also reducing dread in the gym if you get pre-workout apprehension. Let me expand on both. First, when it comes to habit formation, more frequent workouts tend to make it easier. In my experience as a coach and as someone who lifts in building the skill of getting to the gym, because especially if you're relatively new to lifting or you have a pretty busy schedule, making lifting a part of your routine should be one of your top priorities and more frequent workouts simply give you more opportunities to practice the skill of making time in your schedule, getting to the gym, having a mental blueprint for how to make the health habit happen.

4:52 When it comes to pre-workout dread or apprehension, oftentimes if you have fewer workouts, but super long workouts, you might feel a lot of dread or like your stomach is sinking or whatever it might be, especially before things like a heavy leg day. For some lifters who are struggling with consistency, and I've had this in the past, it can help to split up bigger workouts into shorter but more frequent workouts because each workout gets a bit easier and you don't get as much of a sense of dread beforehand. At the same time as reducing that pre-workout dread, you also build greater self-efficacy or self-confidence because you've been working out more consistently and you get more sort of small boosts to your self-efficacy. More frequent sessions or spending more days per week training can also be great for people with a low fixed cost of going to the gym. Fixed cost is simply a term from economics which refers to the cost of doing business. What you have to pay just to get business going. In this case, the fixed cost is making it to the gym. For example, a 20-minute drive both ways. If you have to drive an hour to the gym and an hour back from the gym, chances are you'll be better off doing fewer workouts per week because you can fit into your schedule more easily. On the flip side, people with a lower fixed cost of going to the gym. For example, for me, I have a gym at home. I can literally walk to the gym in 30 seconds and get a session started. For me, with a low fixed cost, I can be better off doing more frequent sessions.

6:06 Likewise, more frequent workouts or training for more days per week can be great for people with limited time on a daily basis. For example, if you have a newborn child, you might only have time to train before they wake up at 6:00 a.m. So, you're intentionally waking up at 5:00 a.m. with the idea of getting a workout in. You have maybe a half an hour window every single day to work out. To maximize your progress, you're likely better off doing multiple 30 minute sessions throughout the week. In fact, nearly as many as you can fit in rather than trying to find a 2-hour slot because that might simply not be realistic for you. So considering how many pockets of time you have across the week and how large each pocket of time is should dictate how many days a week you train. A quick shout out to today's sponsor, creatine gummies by Tasty Games. If you've followed me for a while, you already know creatine is one of the few supplements that's actually proven to build muscle and improve performance. But let's be honest, remembering to take it everyday, mixing powders or carrying tubs around gets old fast. That's where these come in. Tasty Gains creatine gummies make it ridiculously easy to stay consistent.

7:05 Each gummy has a full gram of creatine monohydrate. They taste amazing and you can just throw a pack in your gym bag or your desk drawer. I've been using them for months and the convenience alone has made me way more consistent. No shaker, no excuses. So, if you want to make one of the best supplements even easier to take, check out Tasty Games Creating Gummies using the link below and thanks to them for sponsoring this video. On the flip side, less frequent but bigger workouts, an hour, two hours, can work great for people who don't have easy access to a gym, have a busy hobbies or social life because you have fewer pockets in that week, but they tend to be larger. For example, if you do pottery on a Monday, archery on a Tuesday, you play a musical instrument on a Wednesday, then you have friends on a Thursday, you're better off doing, say, two to three full body workouts that take several hours each time. So far, we've mostly discussed practical considerations, and these are all things I consider with clients. But now let's talk about frequency for hypertrophy because that plays a big role in determining what routine is best for you. There are a few takeaways from the research. First, training a muscle once a week probably isn't ideal for hypertrophy. There can be exceptions to this. If you're intentionally training with really low volumes to just maintain size or make very slow progress, but generally if you want a decent rate of progress, you probably want to train each muscle at least twice a week.

8:16 Second, frequency is mostly a distributor of volume rather than something that directly increases muscle growth. To give you an analogy, if you only ever sell your manufactured goods, let's say you make coffee cups via one physical store, you will probably limit your sales, but only if you're selling enough goods for it to matter, aka you're doing a relatively high volume. If you're only selling on two mugs, yeah, sure, you can do one store. But if you're selling, say, 20 mugs, you might want to start expanding and shipping to different stores, aka doing more sessions across the week. And that brings us to training volume, which is ultimately what matters more for hypertrophy. There are a few considerations when it comes to volume.

8:52 First of all, greater training volumes on a weekly basis tend to lead to more hypertrophy. The biggest study on training volume by peladin colleagues shows that going all the way up to 30 to 40 fractional weekly sets per muscle group increases hypertrophy. By the same token, however, a metanalysis by Reyn and colleagues found that doing more sets for a muscle in a given training session increases hypertrophy. But past around 11 fractional sets for that muscle in that session, there's not necessarily a clear benefit anymore. So, if we're aiming to get as high up in volume, close to 30 to 40 fractional weekly sets, we likely want to split up that volume across multiple sessions and do up to 11 sets per muscle group per session as a rule of thumb. So, if you're doing around 20 fractional sets for a muscle, around two sessions a week, if you're doing 30 sets, around three at least is a good idea. But when it comes to volume per session, there's another consideration, which is that most people tend to gas out or be pretty tired and not be able to consistently perform a workout if they do more than maybe around 20 to 30 hard sets per workout in my experience as a lifter and as a coach. And that's because people tend to get somewhat bored after 20 to 30 sets, which is roughly 1 to two hours in the gym. they start to get tired and being in the gym for much more than one to one and 1/2 hours gets tough for most lifters. So since we get diminishing returns on more sets per workout and there is kind of a cap to how much work you can get done in a session for most people productively. There is a good huristic and that is to base how many days a week you need on your desired volume per muscle. I'll give recommendations for people who are simply aiming to maintain their physique, people who are trying to see some gains and people who are trying to maximize their muscle growth. If you're simply trying to maintain your physique and you're roughly eating at maintenance, so you're not in an aggressive cut or anything, only a couple of sets per muscle per week are required. And in that case, you only need to be in the gym one day a week. You can use a full body split, get a couple of sets in for most muscles, and you'll likely be able to maintain your size and strength pretty well. If you just want a slow but consistent progress, not spending a ton of time in the gym, but still growing long-term and slowly getting towards your dream physique, around 5 to 10 sets per week per muscle works great on a fractional basis. The math analysis by Pel and colleagues clearly shows that this level of volume will very likely produce growth in the long term. If you're doing this level of volume, there's a variety of ways you can set up your training routine, but you probably want one to two days per muscle per week. That could literally be one to two longer full body days per week or 3 to four shorter days.

11:20 Let's say an upper lower split. If you're setting it up as a full body routine, that might be around 1 to 1 and 1/2 hours per workout. If you're setting it up as an upper lower routine, that might be half an hour to an hour per workout. But that range of 1 to 4 days per week if you just want some solid consistent gains is great. However, there's one thing that's clear. You won't maximize hypertrophy with this approach. If you want maximum growth, you will need to do far higher volumes.

11:45 And you may not want this because you do get diminishing returns, meaning to spend disproportionately more time in the gym if you want more growth. Since you'll likely want to take most muscle groups to the 20 to 40 weekly fractional sets area, you will need more days in the gym to spread that out over since we don't necessarily see much more hypertrophy going past around 11 sets per muscle per session. So, you'll need at least 2 to four days in the gym per week. And that's if you use a full body routine where you train every muscle every single day if you want to train in that 20 to 40 set range. However, most people don't really want to do a full body split four days a week. So I would say as a range 4 to 7 days in the gym per week is where you will see your best growth. Now you might say there's no way I can do 20 to 40 fractional weekly sets per muscle every single week. And I want to push back on that assumption a little bit. For one, there are studies in the literature where subjects perform around 150 to 200 sets per week and still recover and see a benefit of training with that high of a volume. For another, there's plenty of case studies and anecdotes of people doing this and benefiting from it. Many bodybuilders across time have trained with high volumes close to failure, grown their best physiques, and been competitive on a bodybuilding stage. Likewise, there's even examples in the natural bodybuilding sphere of people doing this. people like Eric Helms who've built their best physiques off of very high volumes and are recovering just fine even into their 40s. And likewise in the literature on overtraining you see that even extreme protocols like doing 27 sets of quads in a single session in the NS study or training with daily maxing protocols are recoverable.

13:15 Instances of true overtraining are remarkably rare. So pay attention to your performance as in how well you perform on one week versus the next as a gauge of your recovery. If you could bench 225 for 10 last week and you can still bench 225 for 10 this week, recovery is likely not an issue for you. Using performance in the gym as your northstar of whether or not you are recovering push volume up and you'll likely realize you can do more training than you think. In a discussion of how many days a week to train, one thing we do need to discuss is training on consecutive days. Many people don't have much time throughout the week. For example, Monday through Friday, they're on their grind. They have to get the kids to school. They have to go to work.

13:51 They have other hobbies. They have a social life. and they simply don't get the time to spend in the gym. However, on the weekend, maybe they can train on Friday, Saturday, Sunday back toback and they're worried that this isn't ideal for progress as opposed to training on say Monday, Wednesday, Friday with a break between each day. On the flip side, people training four, five, six, seven days a week are worried about recovery between one day and the next with no rest days in between. However, several studies have actually compared training on consecutive days back to back without rest to training with rest days in between and have found the same hypertrophy. So, as long as you're managing your volume and proximity to failure effectively on one day to the next and your recovery seems fine, you really shouldn't worry about training on backto-back days. The recovery timeline depends entirely on how much you do and how close to failure you go and what exercises you pick. So, just tweak these as necessary if your recovery is an issue. Now that I've given you my recommendations for hypertrophy and health, I'd like you to notice the following. The minimum dose and health recommendations align really well. for both health and for making some progress on your physique, just 1 to 4 days a week in the gym is sufficient. So, if you're not bothered about maximizing your physique in the short term, just spending that amount of time, 1 to 4 days in the gym per week, can be a great approach. And likewise, notice how the top end recommendations of how many days to be in the gym per week align really well with actual bodybuilders practices basically forever. Nearly all the routines used by actual bodybuilders for decades and decades now have had people in the gym four to sort of seven days a week. Are there exceptions like Mike Mener? Yes, sure. But when trying to find a generalizable principle that will apply to basically everyone, you shouldn't really look for the exception, but rather look for the rule. And if you want to follow something actually science-based, check out my adapt, the app I co-ounded to help you apply the science from this channel. It builds evidence-based routines around progressive overload and smart excess selection. It lets you emphasize the muscles you care about and tracks progress automatically. You can train anywhere at home or in a gym in as little as 15 minutes. And you can switch between locations seamlessly. Head to myapp.com and use code wolf for a free twoe trial. If you'd like to work with me directly, you can also book a free coaching call in the description.

15:55 I'll work with you directly to optimize your training, nutrition, and recovery. Big thank you as always to Rascal Apparel for supporting the channel. You can use code wolf for 10% off their training gear at rascal apparel.com.