It’s a question many of us want an answer to – but there seems to be so many answers out there! Every news outlet seems to cycle through articles discussing the latest ‘answer’, and the thousands of fitness influencers each seem to assure us they have unlocked the ‘answer’ (we just have to sign up to their online program to access it).
But maybe we need to take some comfort in there being so many ‘answers’. We all have different bodies, experience different circumstances, enjoy different things and strive for different outcomes. So, it seems reasonable that there’ll be different answers to the question of how often we should train or how long we should train for. The only thing that seems categorically wrong is to claim there’s a one-sized-fits-all answer.
And guess what? The evidence out there concurs. The time you should dedicate to your health and fitness depends on multiple factors – your body, your circumstances, your preferences and your goals.
For these reasons, generic measures can be easy to poke holes in, but they can also be a good baseline to begin our search for answers…
Broad Guidelines for general health and wellbeing
The Australian Guidelines for Physical Activity and Exercise recommends adults between 18-64 years old get in at least 2.5 hours of moderate intensity, or 1.25 hours of vigorous intensity physical activity each week. It is recommended this includes at least two sessions of resistance training. These guidelines are based on the minimum dose of physical activity required to reduce risk of lifestyle related illnesses like type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
Heart research Australia goes into a bit more detail, suggesting we accumulate 150 to 300 minutes (2 ½ to 5 hours) of moderate intensity physical activity or 75 to 150 minutes (1 ¼ to 2 ½ hours) of vigorous intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both moderate and vigorous activities, each week
So, if a base level of general health and wellbeing is your goal…
…simply making it to (Hawthorn’s) gym twice a week for a full-body workout or one of our 45-minute group training classes is a good start. Going for a walk, run, swim or bike ride or even playing a sport with friends would compliment this and attain the recommended amount of exercise under the Australian guidelines. If you are new to activity or if you are returning after a spell, this level of activity is likely to help you see results in the beginning and contribute to improving many lifestyle factors, such as better sleep, more energy throughout the day, improved mobility and reduced risk of common health problems like heart disease, diabetes and even mental health.
These can be huge improvements for many people and are nothing to be shunned, but the reality is that our bodies adapt and change, requiring us to evolve our exercise routines in order to continue seeing improvements.
If getting fit is your goal …
…and you want to continue to improve your cardiovascular fitness beyond ‘general’ health, then you may consider breaking down your training more methodically, as well as increasing (progressively and strategically) the volume of training each week.
One way to do this is to strive for your ideal balance between high Intensity, low volume and low intensity high volume training. High Intensity, low volume training has been shown to have the greatest and faster impact on your VO2 max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can utilize during intense exercise. On the other hand, opting for low intensity high volume training is still important, as it is crucial for building your body’s foundation of endurance, which indirectly supports VO2 max improvements will also result in increased aerobic capacity.
The balance of how to break down your weekly routine between these two approaches depends on what level of fitness you’re currently at and whether there is one aspect of these approaches more attune to your goal than the other. For example, if you’re training to improve your fitness during basketball games – three sessions focused on VO2 max and one on aerobic capacity might be your best balance. Alternatively, if you’re training for a half marathon, you might be better suited to a 50:50 breakdown early-on and build toward greater emphasis on endurance conditioning as you progress toward the event. Notably, many runners will taper their longer runs closer to the event and replace them with a mix of easy recovery runs and some (less intense) anaerobic activity. Again, we see the answers differ based on the exact situation.
With all this talk of aerobic fitness, don’t let training for ‘fitness’ steer you away from weights in the gym, either. An effective program in the gym will assist in strengthening relevant muscles groups and joints that assist you to run, swim, ride and move better, as well. Our trainers are happy to design personalised programs that are sport-specific or goal-specific.
Check out this great podcast on improving aerobic fitness by Dr Andy Galpin for more info here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XIoWlwUKU0
If gaining strength is your goal…
…the evidence tells us that you require much less volume to see results.
A 2017 meta analysis found that 81% of strength gains can be achieved with a single heavy set (in the 1-5 rep range) of your target exercise each week. This means that you could feasibly make solid strength gains for a muscle group with as little as one strength-focused training session per week. Amazing, right?!
Well, let’s not kid ourselves - the reality might look a little different. When you factor in the need to warm up effectively, strengthen supporting muscle groups and the fact most of us like to train our entire body (meaning we have multiple large muscle groups to cover), suddenly that ‘one’ workout is going to be a very big and long session – and therefore probably less effective, too.
But the info does help us shape our weeks a bit. We know we’ll need to give each muscle group ample rest between workouts to allow us to sufficiently recover and push to our maximum, so we may need to look at isolating muscle groups more strategically throughout the week. Heard people talk about ‘leg day’ days? This is where that idea starts to come into the picture.
Taking all this into account - timewise, if you’re looking to improve strength across a full range of body parts, you may be looking at around three heavy-loading sessions a week, planned out to include ample rest, diet and recovery.
Need some help? Contact us so we can book in a workout program to get you started on your strength-gain journey.
Access the 2017 meta-analysis on weekly set volume in relation to strength gain, here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28755103/
If you’re looking to optimize for muscle growth (hypertrophy)…
…then things get a little less clear. Ultimately, hypertrophy training can be as simple or complex as you make it.
As a general rule, there’s a nearly linear relationship between training volume and muscle growth. So, in theory, the more you train, the more you gain. Of course, that needs to be balanced with appropriate diet and recovery.
However, according to a meta-analysis of 15 different studies published in the Journal of Sports Science, simply doing one set to failure per week will see you reach over half your possible muscle growth gains. After this, increased volume still yielded muscle growth, but it was found to return exponentially less growth with each additional set. So whilst more training yields more muscle, over training can be futile.
As with cardiovascular fitness and strength gain, there have been entire books written about different approaches to gaining muscle mass and the hundreds of factors that can impact it. For the sake of not overcomplicating things, let’s read between the lines a little…
You should see results through a simple workout plan that includes: 3 full body gym sessions per week, with 3 sets for each muscle group you’re looking to grow in each session. This will see you achieve over 80% of your possible muscle growth in the early stages. Naturally, you’ll need to continue increasing the weight as your muscle mass increases. That should take around 3 hours in the gym per week, assuming your workouts take around 45-60 minutes.
But what about that last 20%? This is particularly the case for those people more progressed on their muscle-growth journey. Well, that’s where some creative workout programming can come into play to squeeze more volume in. This might include concepts like drop-sets and super-sets to fit in more volume in the same amount of time.
If you’d like to know more about how to make progress while spending as little time as possible in the gym, check out this video by Jeff Nippard, a great resource for fact-checked training advice:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xc4OtzAnVMI
Conclusion
All these approaches need to be taken within the context of your body, your experience and your circumstances. Most of all though, you need to enjoy the way you train.
We can sometimes get fixated on finding the ‘minimum’ requirements we need to see results, but that’s futile if you don’t first settle on what you find enjoyable. What are the odds you’ll stick to four gym sessions a week if you’re not enjoying it? If you hate the design of your high intensity cardio sessions, is it realistical that you’ll keep it up for months and years on end?
Fitness and movement can be done in a thousand ways and many of those can be achieved fully or partly in the gym – you just need to try them out until you find what’s right for you. If you’re on the ‘search’ for what you enjoy, trying group training, workout programming and personal training are all great options that will expose you to new ideas and new forms of movement.
In terms of time and volume, the best approach is to incorporate sessions of activity throughout your week. As a blanket rule, this usually entails at least 3-4 spells of movement and is best done with thoughtful consideration of you, your body and your goals.
The Visions Team