The perfect training schedule - frequency
How often an athlete trains, frequency, is one of key components to training. Along with intensity and duration they form the backbone of every training schedule.
There is a big difference to how often someone should train based the desired outcome an athlete wants to achieve as well as the level of performance the athlete is currently at.
Today, we will dive deeper into training frequency and how it can be used to boost performance.
Frequency
When it comes to training frequency there are quite a lot of things a self-coached athlete or a coach need to take into consideration. The goal always is to train as little as possible to achieve the desired result.
This might sound strange but athletes have to keep in mind that there is only so much stress their body can absorb and because of that they have to be realistic about the goals they are setting for themselves.
If they just start out running, it would be counterproductive to have them run every day while a seasoned runner can run twice a day and consider a single run day a recovery day.
Novice athletes
For most athletes a workout schedule that consists of 3 to 5 training days per week is ideal. If they are training some kind of multisport discipline (for example triathlons), they will have to increase their frequency to 5 to 6 training days per week so they don’t leave a big gap between training sessions for individual discipline.
This will help them rapidly improve initially by something like 10 to 15 percent after just a few weeks. This trend will continue up to a point when a different approach and change in training frequency will have to be made.
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommends that most amateur athletes train 30+ minutes for 5+ days per week. This assumes that all activities are done at moderate intensity (something we will cover in the next blog post). You can read more about the recommendations here.
Advanced athletes
Once an athlete gets into the advanced and elite levels of performance they also have to change up their tactics when it comes to training frequency.
They will start increasing their training frequency and but only up to a point. They have to carefully balance frequency and intensity and to get most out of their training.
Just as amateur athletes gain the most from their 3 to 5 sessions per week schedule, so do advanced athletes gain the most benefits from the same amount of training. Now it’s up to them to put in the extra effort to push their performance further. The bigger the competition the more they have to rely on those additional sessions to get an edge over their competition.
80-20 rule
For every athlete there is a simple rule that can be universally applied.
“80 percent of the desired results come from 20 percent of the work required to realize 100 percent gain.”
This goes back to the mention “minimum amount of work to get the desired result” statement.
Most of the gains an athlete experiences come from very little amount of work. The rest of the improvements come from a large amount of training that pushes the performance forward by just a few percent.
Know what you train for
It’s quite different to train for endurance or for strength. An athlete can train up to 6 times per week to build endurance but in order to gain strength, an athlete shouldn’t hit the same muscle group more than 2 to 3 times per week and they should leave at least 2 days between working the same muscle group.
A single sport athlete can train for up to 5 times while multisport athletes can have 10 or more training sessions in a give week depending on their level of fitness and prior experience.
It’s always key to understand what an athlete wants to achieve and then take the appropriate steps to get them there.
Adjust throughout the season
Training frequency will also vary based on where an athlete is in their training cycle. As the season progresses the training frequency should gradually increase to add stress. Coupled with correct recovery this will increase an athletes performance over the year.
Once an athletes gets into race season, they will want to decrease the training frequency to allow for more time to recover and arrive fresh to the start line.
Don’t train in a vacuum
Training frequency is just one of the three elements of a perfect training schedule and it’s important to take all factors into account when creating one. Monitor your athletes performance and don’t blindly follow a designed plan but adjust and change as needed to maximize improvements.
Tomorrow we will talk about the second part of this triumvirate - intensity. See you then!
