Is Training Five Days a Week Too Much? I Have No Idea.

Every once in a while I'll see someone ask a question like, "Is it bad to train five days a week?"

My honest answer is that I have no idea.

I don't mean that I don't know anything about training. I mean that the question doesn't contain enough information for me to give you a meaningful answer.

• I don't know how long those five sessions are.

• I don't know what you're doing during them, how hard you're training, how much of the work is technical practice, how much is live sparring, whether you're lifting, whether you're conditioning, or how those different types of training are distributed throughout the week.

• I don't know how long you've been training or what your training history looks like.

• I don't know how well you're sleeping, what kind of stress you're dealing with outside the gym, or whether your body has adapted to the workload you're currently doing.

There are simply too many variables missing from the question.

Five days a week is a number. It's a useful piece of information, but it's only a piece of information. It tells me something about frequency, but it doesn't tell me nearly enough about the training itself to determine whether that training is appropriate.

That's something I think we get wrong fairly often in sports training. We find something that is easy to measure and start treating it as though it is a complete description of what is happening. Training frequency is easy to count. You were in the gym Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Five days. Simple. But the number of days you trained doesn't tell me what happened during those five days.

Five Days Can Mean Almost Anything

Imagine two athletes who both tell me they train five days a week.

The first trains for about an hour each session. Most of the work is technical. They drill, work through some positional situations and do a few moderate rounds at the end of class. They've been training for ten years and have gradually built themselves up to that schedule. They know how to train without turning every round into a competition, and their workload is spread out so that they aren't constantly going from one hard session into another.

Now imagine another athlete who also trains five days a week. This person trains for two hours every session. They lift several days a week, wrestle hard, spar hard, add conditioning and approach every live round as though somebody is keeping score. They've been training for six months and they're also working a physically demanding job.

Both people train five days a week.

Those numbers look identical, but the training isn't remotely identical. The amount of work, the intensity of the work, the athlete's experience and the recovery demands could all be dramatically different. If someone asked me whether five days was too much for those athletes, I couldn't possibly answer based on frequency alone.

This is why I think we need to be careful about the questions we ask. "How many days do you train?" isn't a bad question. It's just an incomplete one.

Training Frequency Doesn't Exist by Itself

Frequency is one part of training. It matters. I'm not suggesting that we ignore it.

But frequency exists alongside duration, volume, intensity, exercise selection, technical demands and recovery. Five days of relatively easy technical work isn't the same stress as five days of hard sparring. Five days of BJJ isn't the same as five days of MMA. Five days of lifting isn't the same as five days of wrestling. Even five identical classes can produce very different training stress depending on what the athlete actually does during those classes.

This is particularly obvious in combat sports because we use the word "training" to describe a huge range of activities. A fighter might spend an hour drilling a new technique, an hour working positional sparring, an hour doing hard wrestling and an hour doing conditioning, and all of those sessions would count as "training." But they don't place the same demands on the athlete.

Even within a single class, two athletes can experience very different workloads. One person may spend most of the session relaxed, technically focused and working at an appropriate intensity. Another may turn every drill into a battle and every positional round into a fight for survival. They were technically in the same class for the same amount of time, but their training stress wasn't the same.

So when somebody tells me, "I train five days a week," I know their frequency. I don't necessarily know their workload.

Your Training History Changes the Answer

The other major variable is the athlete themselves. Training capacity isn't fixed, and it certainly isn't identical from person to person.

Someone who has trained consistently for ten years may be able to handle a workload that would overwhelm somebody who started six months ago. That doesn't mean the experienced athlete can train endlessly without consequences. It means that years of gradually applied training have produced adaptations that allow that person to tolerate more work.

This is one reason I don't like universal rules about how many days somebody should train. You will hear recommendations that people should train three days a week, four days a week, five days a week or even six or seven days a week. Those numbers may be useful starting points, but they aren't laws of nature.

The same schedule can represent a very different stimulus depending on the athlete who is doing it. If someone goes from almost no physical activity to five hard combat-sports sessions every week, that's a huge change in workload. If an experienced athlete has been training five days a week for years, that same frequency may simply be normal for them.

The number is the same. The athlete isn't.

The Number of Days Doesn't Tell You Whether You're Improving

This is where I think the distinction between a data point and a performance metric becomes important.

Training frequency is a data point. It tells us something about what the athlete is doing. It can be useful when we're looking at someone's overall training program, but it doesn't tell us whether the program is actually working.

If I'm evaluating an athlete, I'm much more interested in what the training is producing. Are they getting better? Are their technical skills improving? Are they becoming more capable under resistance? Are they getting stronger or better conditioned when those qualities are part of the goal? Are they able to consistently complete their training? Are they recovering between sessions? Are injuries accumulating? Are they constantly carrying fatigue from one session into the next?

Those things give me information about the relationship between the training and the athlete. Training five days a week doesn't.

An athlete can train five days a week and get better. They can train five days a week and stagnate. They can train five days a week and become chronically fatigued. They can train five days a week and barely train hard enough to produce the adaptation they're looking for.

The number of days doesn't tell us which of those things is happening.

More Isn't Automatically Better

I also don't want this to become an argument that training more is bad. It isn't.

I like training. I think combat sports should be physically demanding. I think athletes need to be exposed to difficult situations and learn how to perform when they're tired, uncomfortable and under pressure. Training is supposed to create stress. That's the mechanism by which we create adaptation.

The question isn't whether training creates stress. The question is whether the athlete can recover from the stress we're applying and adapt to it.

And that changes depending on the person and the circumstances.

A training schedule that works when you're twenty-five, sleeping eight hours a night and have very few responsibilities may not work the same way when you're forty-five, working fifty hours a week, raising a family and sleeping six hours a night. The number of training days could be exactly the same, but the athlete's ability to recover from those days may be very different.

That's why I don't think the answer to "How many days should I train?" can be separated from the rest of someone's life. Training doesn't happen in a vacuum.

We Like Numbers Because They're Easy

I understand why people want a simple number. Numbers make training feel objective. Five days sounds like something we can evaluate. Three sets, ten rounds, two hours, six sessions. We can count all of those things.

But something being easy to measure doesn't necessarily make it the most useful thing to measure.

I've had athletes tell me they trained seven days that week, and my response wasn't automatically, "That's great." My next question was, "What did you actually do?"

I've also had people tell me they only trained three times that week, and after hearing what those three sessions contained, I thought, "That's probably plenty."

The number of sessions is part of the picture, but it isn't the picture.

I think this matters because combat sports can create a strange culture around training volume. There can be an assumption that the person who trains the most must be the most committed, and that the person who takes more rest must somehow be less serious. But training isn't a test of how many hours you can spend inside the gym. The goal is to become a better athlete and a better fighter.

Sometimes that means doing more. Sometimes it means doing less. Sometimes it means keeping the same frequency but changing the intensity or distribution of the work. And sometimes it means taking a day off.

So, Is Training Five Days a Week Too Much?

I still don't know.

If someone tells me they train five days a week and asks whether that's too much, I don't have an answer yet. I have questions.

• How long are the sessions?

• What are you doing?

• How hard are you training?

• How long have you been training?

• What does the rest of your week look like?

• How are you recovering?

And, most importantly, what is happening to your performance?

Five days a week might be too much for one person. It might be exactly right for another. For somebody else, it might not be enough to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish.

The point isn't that training frequency doesn't matter. It does.

The point is that frequency is a variable, not a verdict.

We should use numbers to help us understand training, not to replace understanding. If somebody tells me they train five days a week, that's useful information. But it is only the beginning of the conversation.

So the next time someone asks me, "Is it bad to train five days a week?" I'm probably going to give them the same answer.

I have no idea.

Tell me what you actually do during those five days. Then we can start talking about training.