Athletes: How many days a week should You work oUt?

When it comes to building muscle, strength, speed, and power, many athletes think the more they work out, the better. They’ll start hitting the gym every day and make sure they leave feeling sore and tired. Sore and tired means you worked super hard and will see better results, right? 

Not necessarily…

Yes, someone training 6 times a week can see great results, but that’s IF their stress and recovery is balanced. Frequency is very important in a training program, but intensity is also half the puzzle!

And no, intensity is NOT supposed to be high every single day. This will just run you to the ground feeling beat and slow down your gains.

So how do you make sure that your week’s stress and recovery is balanced?

Here at Pursuit, we follow the High Low System. We make sure that our athletes’ weeks alternate between high intensity and low intensity days. This will ensure sufficient stress to stimulate change but also enough recovery to actually create adaptations. The key is to compile your higher intensity stressors together and compile your lower intensity stressors. 

Let me give you some examples of high and low stressors and then show you how a week can be organized. 

Higher Stress:

• Strength Training

• Intense Practices

• Games/Competitions/Meets

Lower Stress:

• Conditioning

• Technique/Skill work

• Lower intensity Practices

• Low minutes played in games

• Full rest day

Now, here are examples of how a week can be organized:

Off-Season

Sunday: Rest

Monday: Strength Training

Tuesday: Conditioning/Skill Work

Wednesday: Strength Training

Thursday: Conditioning/Skill Work

Friday: Strength Training

Saturday: Rest or Conditioning or Skill Work

In-Season

Sunday: Rest

Monday: Practice

Tuesday: Game

Wednesday: Practice and then Strength Training

Thursday: Practice

Friday: Game

Saturday: Practice and then Strength Training

If there are multiple high stressors in the week, make sure they’re closer together while separated by lower stressors like the in-season schedule above.

There are many individual factors that are at play such as an athlete’s practice/game schedule, what season they’re in, daily life stress, their rate of recovery, etc.

So how many days should they workout per week? As you can see, it all depends. I know, not the answer you want. But what I don’t want you thinking is that more is always better. This is why we make sure to understand each of our athletes' individualities and program them accordingly.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out and we’d be happy to go into more detail!