How Much Should You Actually Train Each Week?

I train six days a week. Most of those days I train twice.

That sounds impressive until you realize my first workout usually starts at 4:00 a.m., and at that point we’re no longer discussing fitness. We’re discussing a series of questionable life choices performed while the rest of my neighborhood is sensibly unconscious.

Right now I average somewhere around 10 to 15 hours of training per week. Running. Strength training. Conditioning. Durability work. Long sessions. Shorter sessions. Sometimes a workout in the morning followed by another one around lunch. And over the next few years, assuming my body continues tolerating what I’m asking from it, that volume will probably increase.

I need to make something very clear before somebody reads that and decides the missing ingredient in their life is waking up at 3:30 in the morning to do Bulgarian split squats.

Please don’t.

I’m not even doing Bulgarian split squats at 4:00 a.m. I’m not that crazy.

There are very few people I would actually coach to train the way I currently train, because more training is not automatically better training. Copying somebody else’s schedule might actually be one of the dumbest ways to build your own. This is one of those areas where social media drives me insane. We see the visible part of somebody’s training, the miles, the lifts, the two-a-days, the giant Saturday session, and assume that volume itself is the secret.

Usually it isn’t.

The better question isn’t, How many days per week should I train?

It’s: What am I trying to become, and how much training does that actually require?

Scientifically, the answer gets complicated pretty quickly. Practically, you still have to decide what you’re doing Monday morning.

And I think we’ve made that decision far more complicated than it needs to be.

Training Volume Means Nothing Without a Goal

If your goal is general health, getting stronger, looking better, maintaining cardiovascular fitness, moving well, and reaching middle age without making a sound like somebody stepped on a goose every time you stand up from the couch, you probably don’t need 12 hours of structured training every week.

You can accomplish a ridiculous amount with substantially less.

The World Health Organization recommends adults accumulate roughly 150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week, or 75–150 minutes of vigorous activity, along with muscle-strengthening activity involving the major muscle groups on at least two days per week. Those are public-health recommendations rather than an optimized athletic program, and they’re intentionally broad, but they’re useful because they show how far removed “healthy and physically capable” is from the training schedules we often see glorified online. [1]

A few intelligently designed training sessions can do a hell of a lot.

Resistance training improves strength, hypertrophy, power, muscular endurance, and physical function, and the recent American College of Sports Medicine evidence review pulled together data from 137 systematic reviews involving more than 30,000 participants. One of the more useful findings, in my opinion, is how many programming variables matter less than fitness culture likes to pretend they do. You absolutely can optimize details, particularly as goals become more specific, but you don’t need an elaborate six-day Bulgarian periodization ritual blessed by a man with a tripod and 4% body fat just to become stronger. [2]

For a lot of people, three to five purposeful training sessions each week combined with ordinary physical activity is plenty. Lift a couple times. Get cardiovascular work in. Walk. Hike. Ride a bike. Play with your kids. Carry things. Occasionally move faster than would be required to escape the Costco parking lot.

That can be an excellent fitness program.

Meanwhile, I’m outside before sunrise voluntarily running laps around my subdivision like an escaped Roomba.

But there’s a reason.

I’m not training for general fitness.

I’m training toward a very specific endurance and performance objective that is still years away. At the time I’m writing this, I’ve got roughly 1,080 days to build myself into someone capable of attempting it. I need a large aerobic engine. I need strength. I need the durability to continue producing useful movement after hours and hours of accumulated work. More importantly, I need my body to tolerate a frankly stupid amount of training without eventually submitting a formal complaint to management.

Those adaptations require time.

And some of them require volume.

That doesn’t mean volume becomes the goal. The goal is the adaptation; volume is one tool used to create it.

An ultrarunner may eventually need ten, fifteen, or twenty-plus hours of weekly training because the event demands enormous endurance capacity and resistance to fatigue. A competitive powerlifter may accumulate significant weekly training volume for completely different reasons, organizing that work around strength development, technical practice, and fatigue management. Someone training for HYROX, CrossFit, a triathlon, mountaineering, tactical competition, or another mixed-demand sport will build yet another training structure.

Different task. Different body required. Different training.

My own training volume didn’t magically appear because I watched a motivational video and decided sleep was for cowards. I built toward it. Slowly. Years of endurance work, strength work, racing, mistakes, injuries, rebuilding, more mistakes because apparently the first set wasn’t educational enough, and gradual increases in what I could tolerate.

That word, tolerate, matters just as much as perform.

Training works because the body responds to stress. Give it an appropriate stimulus, provide the resources and time required to recover, and it remodels itself in ways that can leave you better prepared for the next exposure. That’s an oversimplification of an enormous collection of physiological processes involving skeletal muscle, connective tissue, nervous-system adaptations, metabolic pathways, cardiovascular changes and about seventeen thousand things I’m mercifully not going to turn into a textbook chapter here.

But the basic principle holds.

The workout isn’t the adaptation.

The workout is the stimulus.

I sometimes think about it like construction. Training is showing up at your house with a sledgehammer and knocking down part of a wall. Recovery is when the contractors arrive and rebuild the thing.

Then training knocks on the door again.

If you keep returning every twelve hours screaming, “GOOD NEWS, I BROUGHT ANOTHER HAMMER,” eventually the contractors are going to stop answering your calls.

That’s roughly where the motivational version of training falls apart. We celebrate the hammer.

Nobody posts a cinematic montage of eight hours of sleep.

Nobody puts ominous music over a carbohydrate.

Recovery doesn’t look heroic, but without it the entire system stops making sense. Consensus work on overtraining makes essentially this same point in much more respectable language: successful training requires overload, but excessive overload combined with inadequate recovery can push an athlete from productive training stress toward nonfunctional overreaching and, in more severe cases, overtraining syndrome. [3]

You need stress.

You also need enough capacity to absorb it.

Those aren’t opposing ideas. They’re the whole game.

Your Body Doesn’t Care About Your Training Spreadsheet

Here’s where people get themselves into trouble.

They see somebody training ten hours per week and think, I need to train ten hours per week.

No.

You need enough training to create the adaptations your goal requires while remaining able to recover from the total stress being imposed on you.

And total stress is where things get messy, because your body doesn’t exist inside TrainingPeaks.

You’ve got a job. Maybe kids. Relationships. Housework. Financial stress. Travel. Bad sleep. Illness. Deadlines. An argument with someone you love. A parent who needs help. A toddler who has apparently declared sleep an instrument of capitalist oppression. Then there’s the meeting that should’ve been an email but somehow became a 90-minute discussion about scheduling another meeting.

Usually Friday around 3:00 p.m.

I’m not venting. I swear.

Sport-science literature on recovery recognizes this explicitly. Training and competition load are only part of the stress-recovery equation; other life demands matter too, and recovery responses vary considerably between people and even within the same person over time. [4]

Your spreadsheet may say:

MONDAY: 60-minute threshold workout.

Your body may be working from a slightly different document:

MONDAY: 60-minute threshold workout + four hours of sleep + sick child + deadline + skipped lunch + existential crisis in parking lot.

Physiologically, those aren’t identical Mondays.

This is one reason I don’t like rigid prescriptions based solely on what somebody should theoretically tolerate. Human beings aren’t equations where you plug in five sets of squats, 40 miles of running, 2,800 calories, and precisely 7.63 hours of sleep and receive +4 fitness units on Sunday.

I wish there were a cleaner answer. There isn’t.

Sleep is an obvious piece of this. Expert consensus around athletes describes inadequate sleep as a common problem and recognizes that training schedules, stress, anxiety, travel and competition can all affect sleep quantity and quality. The relationship between sleep and performance is complicated and individual, but pretending sleep is optional because you’re “disciplined” is a wonderful way to misunderstand both physiology and discipline. [5]

Sometimes discipline means doing the workout.

Sometimes it means going to bed.

That’s less exciting, unfortunately.

This is also why my personal schedule shouldn’t automatically become yours. I train early because early is where training fits in my life. My first session often happens around 4:00 a.m. because I can get substantial work done before my family wakes up and before the rest of the day begins competing for that time.

There is no secret 4:00 a.m. anabolic portal.

Your mitochondria don’t become unusually ambitious before sunrise.

Mine would also prefer to be asleep.

When my schedule allows it, I’ll perform another session around lunchtime. Because endurance development is currently a major priority for me, I often put conditioning or endurance work in the morning and strength or durability work later. That arrangement gives me a way to distribute the work, protect the sessions I care most about and accumulate the volume my goal demands without trying to jam everything into one enormous daily workout.

There’s also an actual scientific discussion underneath concurrent endurance and strength training, although fitness culture has managed to turn that one into another overly simple rule.

Yes, an “interference effect” can occur when endurance and strength training are combined. But the magnitude depends on factors including training status, sex, endurance modality, frequency, volume, exercise selection and the adaptation being measured. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis involving 59 studies found a small blunting of lower-body strength adaptations in men performing concurrent training, while several other outcomes weren’t meaningfully different. Other reviews have similarly shown that concurrent training can work extremely well and that the details of how it’s programmed matter. [6,7]

That’s the scientist talking.

The coach has a somewhat shorter response:

If you need strength and endurance, you’re probably going to have to train strength and endurance.

Welcome to hybrid sports.

Then we manage the interference rather than becoming terrified of it.

That might mean separating demanding sessions when practical, changing their order depending on priority, controlling endurance volume around important strength work, monitoring fatigue, and accepting that maximizing two competing qualities simultaneously is different from specializing in one.

My endurance work generally comes first because endurance is the higher priority for my current goal. Someone whose main objective is maximizing their squat would probably organize things differently.

There isn’t a morally correct answer.

There’s a task.

Program for it.

That idea has changed the way I think about “optimal” programming in general. I’ve spent decades training in one form or another, and one thing I’ve learned is that a program can be wonderfully optimized on paper and completely useless if it doesn’t survive contact with someone’s actual life.

The best training program isn’t the one containing the most training.

It isn’t even necessarily the program that would produce the maximum theoretical adaptation under laboratory-perfect circumstances.

It’s the program that produces enough of the adaptations you need and that you can execute consistently inside the life you actually have.

That last part gets treated like compromise.

I don’t think it is.

It’s programming.

Start With Enough. Then Earn More.

Eventually there’s a point where additional training produces less additional benefit.

Then, if you’re sufficiently committed to ignoring the warning signs, you can reach the much more entertaining point where adding training actively makes things worse.

Performance starts falling. You’re constantly tired. Little injuries begin appearing and never quite disappear. Your easy runs aren’t easy anymore. Your strength stalls or drops. Motivation gets weird. You start needing increasingly heroic amounts of caffeine just to become a person. Every workout feels harder than it should.

And now you’re training 15 hours every week to perform like somebody training eight.

That’s not dedication.

That’s bad math.

The difficult part is that there isn’t a universal threshold where useful training suddenly turns into useless training. People adapt differently. Training history matters. Age matters. Nutrition matters. Sleep matters. Genetics matter. Sport matters. The type and intensity of the training matter. Your outside life matters. Sometimes your body just does weird shit.

So rather than chasing a predetermined weekly number, I prefer a simpler rule:

Start with the minimum amount of training that reliably moves you toward your goal. Then earn more.

Not the absolute minimum amount of exercise required to remain technically alive. I mean the lowest practical dose that is producing meaningful progress toward the thing you’re actually trying to accomplish.

Then watch what happens.

Are you getting stronger?

Is your pace improving at the same effort?

Can you tolerate longer work?

Is your technique holding together deeper into fatigue?

Are you recovering between sessions?

Do recurring aches settle rather than escalate?

Are you showing up to key sessions capable of actually performing them?

Is the training still compatible with the rest of your life?

Then maybe we add something.

Five more miles.

Another set.

A longer long run.

An additional easy session.

Ten or fifteen minutes added to an existing session.

Whatever makes sense for the goal.

Then you watch again.

This is where coaching becomes less about writing workouts and more about interpreting feedback.

Assess. Train. Recover. Audit what happened. Adjust.

Repeat.

You’re trying to find the dose that creates enough stress to force useful adaptation without creating so much fatigue that the adaptation gets buried underneath the workload.

The more advanced the goal becomes, the narrower that margin can become. Beginners often have the wonderful privilege of improving at almost everything simultaneously. Train consistently, lift some reasonably heavy things, run a little, eat decent food, stop doing obviously stupid stuff and suddenly half your performance metrics improve.

Enjoy that phase.

It doesn’t last forever.

As performance rises, specialization usually rises with it. More advanced strength goals can require greater training specificity and workload. High-level endurance performance can require large amounts of aerobic volume. Competitive athletes frequently end up spending enormous amounts of time developing relatively small improvements because once you’re already very good, easy gains have mostly left the building.

That still doesn’t mean more is automatically better.

The 2009 ACSM position stand on resistance-training progression made this point years ago: programming recommendations have to be understood in the context of the individual’s goals, training status, and physical capacity. That sounds almost painfully obvious, but fitness culture repeatedly forgets it. [8]

Somebody inevitably asks, “Okay, but how many days should I train?”

I understand why.

We want a number.

Numbers feel safe.

So, broadly speaking, someone interested in health and general physical capability can build an outstanding program around roughly three to five purposeful sessions each week, depending on how those sessions are structured and what other physical activity they’re doing. Someone pursuing more ambitious strength, endurance or hybrid-performance goals may train four, five, six, or sometimes seven days, although “training day” becomes a pretty useless metric once easy aerobic work, technical practice, mobility, recovery work and double sessions start entering the picture.

Two people can both train six days per week and have hilariously different workloads.

One performs three 45-minute strength sessions and three easy 30-minute walks.

The other is preparing for an Ironman.

“Six days” tells us almost nothing.

This is why I’m much more interested in total workload, intensity distribution, specificity and recovery than whether somebody has Wednesday circled as a rest day.

And if you’re progressing with less?

Fantastic.

Don’t add work because Instagram made you insecure.

I think this is where our relationship with training occasionally gets backwards. We begin treating workload as evidence of seriousness. Ten hours must mean you’re more committed than somebody training five. Running 70 miles must indicate greater discipline than running 35. Two-a-days become some kind of character test.

Maybe.

Or maybe the person doing five hours has designed exactly the program required for their goal, executes it consistently, sleeps well, stays healthy, has a functioning relationship with their family and keeps progressing.

Sounds pretty disciplined to me.

I train six days each week because my goal currently demands a lot from me. Most weeks contain multiple double sessions. I’m accumulating somewhere around 10–15 hours, and over the next few years that workload may become considerably larger.

That isn’t advice.

It’s context.

I’m trying to build an unusually high level of endurance, strength and durability for something that will require it. The volume makes sense because of what I’m asking my body to become.

Most people don’t need that.

Frankly, most people probably shouldn’t want it.

Fitness isn’t measured by how much suffering you can cram into your calendar. It isn’t measured by how early your alarm goes off, how destroyed you look after training, or whether strangers on the internet would describe your program as hardcore.

It’s measured against the task.

Is your training changing you in the direction your goal requires?

That’s the question.

If three sessions are doing it, three may be enough.

If five stop producing the adaptation required, perhaps you need six.

If fifteen hours are making you worse, fifteen hours aren’t evidence of superior grit. They’re fifteen hours you should probably reconsider.

Train enough to adapt.

Recover enough to do it again.

Then, if the goal demands more and your performance tells you you’re ready for it, earn the right to add more.

The goal was never to become good at training.

The goal is to become capable of doing whatever all that training was supposed to prepare you for.

Scientific References

1. World Health Organization. WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2020. Recommendations include 150–300 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75–150 minutes of vigorous activity weekly for adults, plus muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days per week.

2. American College of Sports Medicine. “Resistance Training Prescription for Muscle Function, Hypertrophy, and Physical Performance in Healthy Adults: An Overview of Reviews.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 2026. Evidence synthesis incorporated 137 systematic reviews and more than 30,000 participants.

3. Meeusen R, Duclos M, Foster C, et al. “Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment of the Overtraining Syndrome: Joint Consensus Statement of the European College of Sport Science and the American College of Sports Medicine.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 2013;45(1):186–205. doi:10.1249/MSS.0b013e318279a10a.

4. Kellmann M, Bertollo M, Bosquet L, et al. “Recovery and Performance in Sport: Consensus Statement.” International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. 2018. The consensus emphasizes balancing training and competition stress, other life demands, and recovery.

5. Walsh NP, Halson SL, Sargent C, et al. “Sleep and the Athlete: Narrative Review and 2021 Expert Consensus Recommendations.” British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2021. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2020-102025.

6. Schumann M, Feuerbacher JF, Sünkeler M, et al. “Concurrent Strength and Endurance Training: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Impact of Sex and Training Status.” Sports Medicine. 2023. The review included 59 studies and 1,346 participants and found that interference effects varied by outcome and population.

7. Wilson JM, Marin PJ, Rhea MR, Wilson SMC, Loenneke JP, Anderson JC. “Concurrent Training: A Meta-Analysis Examining Interference of Aerobic and Resistance Exercises.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2012;26(8):2293–2307. PMID: 22002517.

8. American College of Sports Medicine. “Progression Models in Resistance Training for Healthy Adults.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 2009;41(3):687–708. doi:10.1249/MSS.0b013e3181915670.