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Workout Frequency: How

Many Days?
By: Cody Volk 0

Seriously. How many days a week should we

be exercising? CrossFit is so much fun – even if
our faces don’t show it right before the WOD.
It’s easy to show up everyday of the week to
see your favorite coach and your friends.
However, there’s got to be a point of
diminishing return – right? Remember going to
the gym before CrossFit when training looked
something like this?

Monday

– Chest/Triceps
Tuesday – Rest
Wednesday – Back/Biceps
Thursday – Rest
Friday – Legs

Even if you are new to CrossFit, those days are

likely long gone. So how many days a week
should we be aiming for?

What Are Your Goals?

Like many other things in life, the answer is – it
depends. That’s not a satisfying one for anyone
who’s looking for an ironclad answer, but it
depends on what your goals are. Old school
gym templates have rest days built in to
programming, because the rest day is when
you actually build your muscle. Exercising
causes microscopic tears in your muscles, and
cells called fibroblasts repair it during rest. This
repair process is what heals and grows your
muscles. You can still workout on consecutive
days, but bodybuilding doctrine would have
you space out the muscle groups being
targeted so the “injured” muscles can heal. If
your goal is only to build muscle and gain
strength, you might benefit more from solid
rest days in-between heavy training and li!ing
days.

If your goal is to improve your cardio, however,

that’s a di"erent story. In a previous article, we
discussed cardio performance wears o"
quickly if your training program is stopped. The
body gets used to maximizing oxygen flow
when training and optimizing respiratory
ability. Any gains in performance in this area
will diminish quickly if ceased. However,
exercising 3 to 5 times per week will maintain
or even improve your cardiovascular fitness if
you are keeping an eye on your aerobic zones
and keeping blood lactate low. At a low to
moderate heart rate, it is perfectly healthy and
beneficial to exercise everyday. Even the CDC
recommends 150 minutes of moderate
physical activity each week – that translates to
about 20 minutes per day. At a higher heart
rate, however, overdoing cardio is more taxing
on the body and could result in injury and even
loss of muscle mass. High-intensity cardio
should be spaced out with rest to let your body
recover and avoid injury, but 30 minutes of low
to moderate aerobic activity per day is safe and
healthy.

A Note Professional Athletes

Top Athletes Reveal H…

If you want to look like your favorite CrossFit

athlete, you may want to train the way they do.
Many athletes train twice a day, and each
training session could be between two and
three hours. Of course, one must factor in
optimum nutrition and rest. Even Matt Frazer
says he trains once a day (in 2014), because he
had a full-time job and didn’t have the same
time for training as Rich Froning, who
remarked that CrossFit is his full-time job and
will train every few hours from 10 am to 7 – 8
pm. Most of us don’t have the same time,
resources, or goals as professional athletes.
Training twice a day for a normal human could
quickly become overkill.

Listen to Your Body

No matter what studies I cite or articles I
reference, you are the person who knows your
body best. Whatever your goals may be, injury
certainly isn’t one of them. If the body is feeling
worn-out, depleted, or even just cripplingly
sore, maybe it’s time to take a rest day or even
mix up the class you attend. Maybe that’s the
day to try out a cardio class instead of a max
push press day and the WOD is Fight Gone Bad.
If you don’t always trust your body, like yours
truly – it’s always demanding tequila and tacos
– you could get yourself a Whoop band, worn
by many of our coaches. The whoop band
analyzes heart rate variability and resting heart
rate to determine a recovery score. It also
measures key metrics to give you a strain score
that helps you know when it’s time to push or
time to rest.

Bottom Line
It depends – unsatisfying isn’t it? If you want to
build muscle only then take your rest days as
seriously as your li!ing days. If you want to
lose body fat only then you would benefit from
daily cardio sessions at a moderate hear rate,
but since we are talking about CrossFit Dark
Horse, we know that there are few classes if
any that will result in a moderate hear rate, so
rest accordingly. Coach Jameson reminds us
the CrossFit doctrine is 3,2,11: meaning 3 days
on, two days rest, one day on, one day rest. If
you want to work up an awesome sweat, see
your friends, favorite coach, and feel great for
the rest of the day, come as o!en as you can
and workout safely (or just mobilize while
cheering on your fitfam!).

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