Is it Worth Working Out Only Once a Week?

As a personal trainer for 18 years I have trained people in all types of scenarios and around all kinds of schedules. I have had clients that trained 6 days per week and others that came in once per month. Neither of those are ideal situations but everyone has different needs and different limitations. Some of my clients would come in once per week because they had very busy work lives as surgeons on top of having multiple children. In these cases we would do a full session once per week that worked around a cumulative training program that would consist of sporadic bouts of movement using limited or no equipment both at their office and at their home. This works very well for most people but this is not everyones case.

Whatever you can manage is worth it. There is no scenario where having a good fitnesscoach is a waste of money.

The minimum effective dose of exercise is ridiculously small. Studies suggest that if you exercise vigorously for as little as 15 minutes per week you can reduce all cause mortality by about 18%. There isn’t another thing you can add to your life that has such an effect with so low a commitment of time.

That said my recommendations line up similarly with those that come from most institutions – 150 minutes of moderate to intense exercise per week will get you to a place where you significantly improve your overall health and fitness. When thinking about the long game it is ideal (but not mandatory) to include exercise that improves or maintains strength, stability, mobility and cardiovascular health. Power is also often mentioned in the list of things I and other personal trainers want to add but it’s an after thought for me in most cases. Most trainers will hate me saying this but its just not as important for the vast majority of people I train and their overall wellbeing. I don’t train athletes much anymore so I focus more on the other parameters.

I gladly take on a client that wants to / can only train once per week because of these simple facts –

• very little exercise can lengthen your life.
• the optimal amount of exercise for you is the amount you can sustain.
• very few moderately hard sets (of strength training) can maintain muscle mass.
• habits beget habits – one day per week ill often lead to more.
• consistency of exercise can be a lifeline to other healthy choices.
• even one short bout of exercise has cognitive benefits including memory formation, processing speed and mood improvements.

Maintenance will often be a perfectly reasonable goal for people. I often tell my clients that maintenance is progress because if they were to stop training even at a very minimal level, then we would inevitably see decline. Progress through fighting entropy, even at a small scale is something.

There are approximately zero bodybuilders or triathletes in blue zones. At least none that were born there and continue to add to the lineage of old age. The activity side of the equation often looks like maintenance of functional ability. No big muscles no competitive levels of cardiovascular ability and no obsession with protein! They move everyday but it is more often than not simple activities that require low performance ability. They may partake in sport but it is not high intensity competitive sport.

To be clear there are a multitude of factors that define the probability of a population that tends to live a long time. I am not saying that working out once per week is the thing that will get you there. I am just suggesting that the minimum effective dose, be it one day per week of moderate intensity, daily low level activity or a mix of both can do a lot of good for the vast majority of people.

The social media horrorscape of wellness often uses maximum tolerance as optimal dose. Many of the studies we look at are very short and so when we are searching for a training effect in a short period of time we often have to increase the intensity or increase the dose under time to see an example of what works. Also “what works” is very limited in scope – usually muscle building or cardiovascular ability (V02max) etc. These are very useful parameters for fitness as they correlate well with general health. I think this is all very important research and I often cite it in my posts or use it in my training program development. But when you begin thinking on a longer time scale – as I do with the majority of my clients – I care less and less about maximal or “optimal” effects.

If I have a client who can only train once per week than I already know that we are trying to get more bang for their buck and I may try and push hard in those sessions to get the benefits we see in high intensity training research. But there are often other limitations than the schedule. So if we need to build a foundation of stability first, or coordination then the high intensity interval training or stremgth training takes a back seat. All of it is useful but none of this is what sells on TikTok or Instagram.

I said earlier that there is no scenario where having a good coach is a waste of money. The “good” part is important. Even a program that is performed once per week has to have some goals. Individual goals, like stabilizing a wonky joint is priority number one but keeping in mind a time scale of a year is going to set the tone of the program. Variety is less and less important the fewer the sessions. A good trainer will have a method of maximizing goals or maintaining function that takes into consideration the other kinds of activity the client partake sin throughout the week, if any.

Variety is overrated in general. I try and keep things interesting while focusing in on the same kinds of patterns each week, particularly with my clients that come more often. But you can do this with less sessions too. I just don’t think it’s important unless your client needs it.

Retention is key. Not just for business but for their health. A boring or bad impression with a trainer can be like cutting the lifeline to good health for people who have a really hard time self motivating. And there is no shame in that. It is not inherently easy to propel yourself into doing something challenging. There is a lot of background noise that directs this ability, no matter what the ding dong influencers try and spew at you about discipline. Discipline is a learned skill like every other trait, just because some twat with backwards baseball cap on a podcast says you just need to show up every morning and do it and not make excuses doesn’t make it right. I also wear a backwards baseball cap by the way but no podcasts just yet and no psych 101, life coach, BS idioms. Life is complex and everyone has their own journey towards healthy living. One session or one walk outside at a time is fine.