How Often Should You Strength Train?

I'm a big strength training guy. It's the underlying quality that many other areas of fitness rely on. You need strength to build muscle (which will then help you lose and keep off weight). You need strength to increase your work capacity, and increase volume in your sessions. You need strength to use towards gaining power if you want to be more powerful and dominant in your sport. You need strength to be robust enough to tolerate the high volumes of work you'll be subjected to if you're aiming to be an endurance athlete. Strength is key. We should all be training it in some capacity. But how often should you be training for strength for it to be most effective? Let me explain... The Law Of Diminishing Returns Let's start with the basic law of diminishing returns.

The law of diminishing returns demonstrates that when you invest (time/money/energy) in an area, your returns start in a largely linear fashion (more input = more output)... until a point. This is known as the productive phase. Then, you can continue to invest further in that area with more time/money/energy, and get further gains, but at a slower rate than you initially did. This is diminishing returns. Continue to invest further, and you'll finally hit the point of negative returns, where for every additional input you put in you get negative returns. This is true for many things, and it's very true for strength training. Some strength training is better than none. More training is better than some, but is even more training even better still? That's the big question... Training Dose Your strength training dose can be loosely described as your sets x reps x weight over a session, week or month. It's the amount of work that you do.

From this graphic you can see 4 key kinds of training dose. Minimum Retention Dose (MRD) The minimum retention dose is the smallest amount of training you need to do to retain your current strength/fitness level. Recent research suggests adolescents can retain strength for up to 32 weeks with as little as 1 session per week, and 1 set per exercise as long as intensity is maintained, and older populations can maintain strength and muscle on 2 sessions per week, with 2-3 sets per exercise. That's not a lot of training. Minimum Effective Dose (MED) Add a little more training and you'll find yourself at the minimum effective dose, or the smallest amount of training you need to do to actually see strength and muscle gains. This meta-analysis suggests that 1 set of 6-12 reps at 70-85% 1RM 2-3 times per week can produce significant if not optimal gains in the squat and bench press in resistance trained men. That's not a huge amount of additional training... Diminishing Effect Dose (DED) and Maximum Tolerated Dose (MTD) Continue to add training on top of the minimum effective dose and you'll likely see linear gains until you hit the diminishing effective dose. Alongside the initial law of diminishing returns we discussed earlier, progress will slow beyond a given point. Continue further, and you'll shortly hit the maximum tolerated dose beyond which you cannot tolerate any further training, your recovery tanks and you experience detraining. But why? The Supercompensation Curve Strength training is a cyclical process. You train, and you acutely get worse. You couldn't repeat the same session to the same intensity straight after due to fatigue. But your body begins to adapt to the stimulus through recovery. Give it a good stimulus and enough recovery time and your body will supercompensate, or regenerate better than before to better handle that stimulus in future. It looks like this.

The aim of the game is to train, allow enough time to recover and come back stronger than before, then train again in the period of supercompensation. Do this repeatedly and you're seeing regular and significant strength improvements. But train again too soon, and you won't have fully recovered, so the stimulus you apply will be either compromised (diminishing effective dose), or negative (beyond maximum tolerated dose). What that training actually looks like will vary person to person based off age, training age, sex, recovery ability and more. There are however some sensible starting points. So How Often Should You Strength Train? There are two patterns I use most frequently with clients. 3x per week full body (Mon/Wed/Fri) 4x per week upper/lower split (Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri) This is because they train each movement pattern 2-3 times per week for multiple sets (above the minimum effective dose), but provide a minimum of 48 hours rest between training a movement pattern to allow for recovery. For the 3x per week full body, we train every pattern every session, so take a full day off in-between. For the 4x per week, we split upper and lower body into alternating days to maintain recovery times of 72 hours between training exposures (i.e. upper body Mon/Thurs, lower body Tues/Fri). This will leave most people in the productive/development phase, with enough training to provide frequent stimuli for adaptation, but enough rest and recovery for that adaptation to actually occur. If your life is busier, more stressful, or you pursue other activities, 3x per week full body is usually wise. If your physical activity solely comes from the gym and you have time, 4x per week upper/lower can work great. Go beyond this and I would expect most people to see their strength progress slow, stall, or even begin to regress. Remember, the recovery is just as important as the training. Ian.