HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU TRAIN: The Origin of The 5-6 Day Split
The age old debate, “How often should you train?”
When it comes to getting the physical changes you want, people often make a big mistake.
While it is often believed that more work = more results, this is not the case. Their incorrect equation looks like this:
WORK + WORK = BURNOUT/INJURY
Instead, a more fruitful equation looks something like this:
QUALITY WORK + QUALITY REST = MORE RESULTS
And yet, most people fail to adhere to this strategy. Why?
The Problem: a systemic fitness industry problem
There is a systemic problem in the fitness industry of people demanding their trainer or coach to increase training frequency (how often you train) to an unsustainable amount.
If you ask most specialists if you should do something regarding their service, they will usually suggest you buy it.
If you ask an auto mechanic if your car needs anything, they will find something.
If you ask a surgeon if you need surgery, they will offer surgery.
And the same goes for many trainers.
But how did this trend of overtraining come to be? Let’s take a look back at the history of physical culture.
The Origin of The Problem
Physical Culture was a counter-culture in its origin. Guys in their garage smashing weights and writing about it.
They all had full time jobs, usually manual labor, and had to fit in training around their hard work schedules. It was gospel that these guys would train 2 or 3 days a week. Getting incredible results on limited time was a necessity with their workload.
Then came the dawn of commercial fitness and guys like Bob Hoffman and Joe/Ben Weider.
Their whole business was predicated on training more and buying more: magazines, equipment, and supplements.
If they had a product that could only be used to workout, of course they were going to find ways to get you to use their product more frequently. This presented the first endorsement-based approach in marketing.
This led to training programs thats purpose were to sell more products. Body part splits and muscle group per-day workouts became the standard and changed the fitness industry forever.
Meanwhile the guys in their garage were screaming that this was illogical and unsustainable, but their voices were washed out by the bombardment of publications stating otherwise.
The fitness industry had become commercially driven.
This trend continues today as you, the customer, now have a harder time filtering through these messages. Messages powered by sexy endorsements, polarizing copy, and preying on people's insecurities.
So, what should you do? The Solution:
When choosing training frequency, there's a couple of routes.
You can focus on muscles.
You can focus on movements.
You can focus on kinetics (velocity, force, capacity).
What determines which approach is “best”?
Your goals and the limitations of your schedule and workload are the main factors.
If you have limited time and can only train twice a week, it's not a good idea to focus on muscles since you will not get enough stimulus. Conversely if you are a professional athlete and have unlimited time, you can afford to structure your program to maximize kinetics and have 4-8 specialized training sessions a week.
Remember our initial equation: quality work + quality rest = quality results.
From our perspective it’s NOT a quantity of work problem, it IS a quality of work and a quality of rest problem.
Quality of work matters. It drastically reduces the absolute quantity of work you need to do. Training too much leads to diluting your training quality and wasting your time.
So what approach should you choose?
For most people, lifting through a full range of motion, with greater body control, utilizing compound (ground-based) multi-joint movements and progressive overload will allow you to get more from less.
This is a shift back to movements not muscles. Meaning you don’t need to train every day.
The rest component is the area where people feel like they are getting behind. The opposite is true.
People that are doing poor quality workouts require more workouts to get the desired stimulus.
Those who train less frequently with more quality and rest between sessions are able to achieve a higher stimulus with the time they have.
Those that overtrain will mistake their lack of QUALITY work for a lack of QUANTITY work. This leads to a dangerous feedback loop that only leads to burnout and injury.
Remember the proper equation:
Quality Work + Quality Rest = Quality Results, keep hammering that in your head till it sticks.
If someone has something to gain by having you train six times a week, ask how effective that is relative to how much they make.
The Allegiate Prescription and solution
At Allegiate we intentionally created a system where we offer unlimited sessions in the form of membership so that you can manipulate the program to fit your needs.
For most people, this settles into 3x (Strength or Team) per week, for 52 weeks a year.
This is the gold standard for training frequency.
If we find that it’s too little we add conditioning, kinstretch or hypertrophy/arm farm.
If it’s too much we drop to 2x per week (Strength or Team).