Training Frequency

You basically have two options when choosing how frequently to exercise. You can do a lot of exercise a little bit of the time or a little bit of exercise a lot of the time. It certainly depends on your situation but for most people, even if you can get the same amount of exercise by training infrequently I think the latter is better.

By doing a little bit of exercise a lot of different times you have a few advantages over doing a lot of exercise infrequently. The first advantage is that you can still fit exercise in even on busy days. Certainly 20-30 minutes of available time is easier to find than a couple of hours. Also it is much easier to make up a 20-30 minutes session if you miss it than trying to make up a 2 hour session.

Secondly by practising more frequently your body learns the technique of the exercise much quicker. This allows you to push yourself to your limits much more safely. You will also recover much quicker which will also allow your next training session to be of high quality. The ability to recover should not be underestimated. Think of how sore you get every time you start a new exercise program. After a few sessions the soreness tends to decrease as your body adapts to the demands of the program. It’s ok to be sore at the start of a program but I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be that sore all the time. Unfortunately you probably will be if you exercise for long periods infrequently as your body struggles to adapt to that duration of exercise.

Adaptation is what we are trying to create with exercise. Once the body adapts it is time to create a new adaptation. It is therefore an advantage to try to force our bodies to adapt as quickly as possible. There is also much less chance of getting injured if our adaptations are small and frequent rather than large and infrequent.

If you have been doing a lot of exercise a little bit of the time, try frequent and intense sessions that force your body to create adaptations and progress quickly to your goals.