How Much Should You Be Training?

“The dose makes the poison”

The classic question posed to coaches by wide-eyed athletes, weekend warriors and those new to exercise: “How much should I be training?” – Some hope for little, some hope for lots, but all want to know definitively what the answer is.  I’m not going to fob you off with “it depends” even though it’s true; I am going to give you some principles to guide your thinking and narrow in on what is right for you or your athlete. 

TLDR: more training gets you more results and faster results, but carries more risk.  Too little training gets no results.  The sweet spot is where you get fitter and within that you need to make a call on the level of risk vs. the patience you have.  Regularly evaluate your training progress to determine where you are relative to the sweet spot and decide if you need to course correct.

Enough.

When does too little become enough become too much?  Good question.  When deciding this, we need to understand two concepts: 

1)    Minimum Effective Dose (MED)

2)    Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV)

MED is the amount of training required to actually move forward.  Eliud Kipchoge probably isn’t going to improve his sub 2 hour marathon time by running 1km per day at 5.00/km.  Equally Dave down the gym isn’t going to get bigger biceps by doing the same weekly 3 sets of 10 curls at 8kgs that he’s done for the last 4 years. 

The human body requires stress to stimulate adaptation.  This is the ‘pain’ in ‘no pain no gain’, and it’s the discomfort that corresponds to ‘getting out of your comfort zone’.  Without enough of this, there’s no business case for your body to necessitate adaptation and improvement. 

MRV is the opposite end of the spectrum.  This is the most training your body can handle and actually repair itself from in time to train again.  This is the inflection point of diminishing returns.  When you train more than this, you’re actually slowing down your progress.  This is Jonny Wilkinson practising goal kicking so much he tore his adductor and couldn’t kick for weeks after.  This is jumping in on that workout after a long time off, and getting rhabdo so you’re out of action and lose further fitness while recovering. 

There is a physiological limit to how much and how quickly we can repair our bodies.  Many factors affect this, training history, training type, injury history, movement quality and lifestyle (nutrition, sleep, other stresses).  If we exceed this limit, at best we take longer to recover to a place we can train effectively again, at worst we get a serious injury, either acutely or chronically over time.  This means a reduction in fitness over the long term. 

Duh, that’s obvious – why should I care? 

Alright alright, I’m getting there.  Between your MED and MRV is the Sweet Spot, which is where your training should be pitched.  Enough to stimulate, but not so much that you’re overdoing it.  The sweet spot is a range and it isn’t constant.  There’s a zone where you’re above MED and below MRV, and it changes with your fitness.  The fitter you are, the more you need to do to exceed MED and the more you can do before breaching MRV.    

The key nuance here is that the more training you do, the faster you get results.  However, the more training you do, the closer you are to MRV, overdoing it, slowing progress and getting hurt.  The higher the training stress, the faster fitness goes up (provided you stay below MRV). 

This is where you’ve got some decision making to do. 

If you’re a competitive athlete, flirting with MRV and the Danger Zone is where you need to be.  It isn’t enough to be getting better, you want to be getting better faster than your competition, so need to be as close to your MRV limit as possible if you want to work towards your potential.  The risk is higher, but so are the rewards – you’ll improve close to the fastest possible rate.  Where you are in your season will also impact exactly where you want to pitch your training stress - off-season vs peaking for competition.

If you’re not competitive, but you are impatient for results, you have to decide your risk appetite.  Ask yourself: ‘How soon do I want results and how much am I willing to sacrifice for them?’ – the key considerations are: time, cost, effort and injury risk. 

If you’re chilled and in no rush, all you need to do is ensure you’re over MED and making progress, however slow.  Easy peasy.  Just be sure to kick the tyres and give them a pump every now and again.

What does this mean on a practical level?

‘How do I calculate my MRV and MED?’ I hear you cry.  I thought you’d never ask. 

It’s more pragmatic to think of each as overall training stress/load, as intensity must be factored in as well as pure volume.  Running 100km per month at 7.00/km and doing 1000 air squats is very different to running 100km per month at 3.30/km and 1000 back squats @100kg. 

Training stress can be calculated as volume x intensity. 

E.g. reps x weight or distance x speed. 

Experienced endurance athletes will be familiar with Training Stress Scores (TSS) as a calculation of duration x intensity measured as either a % of their max power or heart rate.  See here for more detail. 

All good training tracking software will automatically calculate this with sufficient inputs, but for a light touch approach, hours x effort is your starting point.  If you want access to my free training stress estimator, sign up to my newsletter here.

How should I adjust my training in light of this?

Assess your progress.  Are you getting fitter in the way you want to?  If not, why not? Why aren’t you in the sweet spot?  Are you closer to MRV or MED?  Obviously it is important to recognise you can be injured from having a biomechanical or movement dysfunction, or an unfortunate incident/accident as well as training too much or too hard, or too little.

If you’re on track, keep doing what you’re doing.  If not, course correct.  This could be training more, training less, training smarter, or working on your recovery game, but considering your training stress should be your first port of call. 

Final thoughts

The human body can adapt to almost anything, if the rate of change is right.  There are a ton of clichés and sayings about Rome not being built in a day, good things coming to those who wait, slow and steady winning the race, more haste less speed, but I’m not going to quote them as I’m sure you’re sick of hearing them.  The crux of the issue here is that training stress matters.  More is always more, but sometimes it can be too much.  If you have no idea where your training stress is at, you probably stand to benefit by thinking about it and tweaking it depending on your results.