Hi there, I am training with my wife and due to our schedule, energy levels, and flexibility required, we find it difficult to strength train for more than 15 minutes per day. However, we have availability every day of the week. As such, we are splitting up a 3-day/week template into 5-6 short workouts per week.
Is there any lower limit to how much you can split up a week’s worth of workouts, such that there is a minimum amount of stimulus needed per session to see meaningful improvements over time?
For my partner in particular, due to her newness to strength training (and patience), her total weekly volume is still quite low. That means that when she is splitting her weekly training plan up into 6 sessions/week, this results in doing maybe 1 top working set per exercise per session. How much, if anything, is she giving up by spreading those workouts out rather than doing more per session?
Good question. Allow me to come at this from a slightly different direction.
Broadly speaking, the more exercise someone can do, the better. The upper limit of benefit depends on a person’s physiological tolerance. In other words, what they can recover from. In the real world, the amount of exercise someone can do is limited by not only physiology, but also logistics (e.g. time).
So, in the case of you and your wife, it is likely that both of you are missing out on some fitness and health benefits from exercise by not exercising more…you more than her. Don’t feel too badly about that though, pretty much everyone on the planet is also missing out on squeezing every single drop of benefit from exercise…save for those who get paid to exercise.
More specifically to your quesiton, there is no minimum dose of resistance training per session. Instead, people seem to do more or less the same when the training is spread out over more days or compressed into fewer days…provided the total amount of training gets done. In other words, exercise frequency should be viewed as a tool to distribute the training in a way that suits the individual’s preferences.
If you guys are completing the template’s programming over the course of ~ week, I’m on board with that.
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Awesome, thanks for that explainer, it answered my questions and more.
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