Let me paint you a picture.
A long list of exercises, collected from all over the place. Four or five sets of everything, and it takes about an hour and a half to get through it. She does that five times in a normal week, six when she starts worrying that nothing is happening. She’s sore most days and reads it as proof the work is working.
By the middle of the week she’s tired, so the sessions get softer without her realizing it. She doesn’t push as hard, she doesn’t add weight, she just gets through them. Which feels like not doing enough, so the following week she adds another session.
And I know her well, because that was me for a good few years.
I get it, honestly. We live in this weird world where doing more has somehow become the answer to everything. You want to be more successful, so you work more. You want to improve your life, so you add more habits to your routine. You want to change your body, so naturally, you start spending more time at the gym.
The problem is that at some point “doing more” starts to affect the quality of your training. Every time you train, you’re asking your body to do something that costs it energy. For it to adapt and come back stronger, you have to give it time to recover.
It sounds very simple but most women do exactly the opposite.
In this article, I want to show you that adding more sessions to your program is (almost) never the answer, and how to get better results by doing less. The smart way.
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How much is actually enough
Contrary to what a lot of women think, you don’t need to be at the gym six times a week to get results. And when I say “results”, I mean what most women who are neither bodybuilders nor high performance athletes are looking for: a strong body, some visible muscle definition, and a body fat percentage that sits in a healthy range.
For the general population (and by general population I mean people like you and me), three to four lifting sessions a week, plus food that actually covers your macronutrients, meaning enough protein, carbs and fats, is enough to see a real change in your body composition. The problem is that a lot of women don’t train those sessions with enough intensity to produce the results they’re waiting for.
Intensity here has nothing to do with finishing your session soaked in sweat and out of breath. The variable that matters most for building muscle, and for the visual changes that come with it, is progressive overload.
In plain words, progressive overload means asking your muscles for a little more than you asked them for last time. Your body adapts to whatever you do repeatedly, so if you squat the same 30 kg for three sets of ten every week for six months, it has no reason to build anything new. The extra can come from a heavier weight, from an extra rep or two, from an added set, or from controlling the way down instead of just dropping into it. It doesn’t need to be a big jump, it just needs to keep happening.
I’m not going to go deeper here, because it deserves an article of its own and that’s exactly the one I’m writing next. If you’ve been here for a while you know I talk about it often, and I’m realizing more and more that this is where it breaks down for a lot of you.
But back to the number of sessions per week, and how to know which split works for you.
First you need to decide how many times a week you actually want to train, and can realistically train. For beginners, three full body sessions is the sweet spot. It’s easier to manage, and when you start out your body responds to almost any new stimulus, so there’s no need to load a beginner’s week with more. There’s also the question of sticking with it, which is the most important thing when someone is starting. A woman who has never trained in her life can be very intimidated by a plan with four, or five, gym days a week.
For women who have been training for at least six months, my split of choice is an upper/lower four times a week, meaning two sessions for the upper body and two for the lower body. Here you have room to bring in more varied exercises, target specific muscle groups in each session, and four days really lets you build an interesting program that will keep a motivated person engaged.
I’ve been lifting for six years now and I’ve tested a lot of different things, and I understood that training more than four times a week isn’t sustainable for me in the long run. Maybe I’ll do it from time to time, for a very specific goal, but most of the time I train four times a week and shift the emphasis to different muscle groups depending on the phase I’m in.
Ok, so now you know how many times a week to train. Next is how to structure strategic sessions, with the right exercises and the right number of sets.
What a strategic session looks like
I wrote a really comprehensive guide for beginners where I explain exactly how to program your workouts, with two training templates ready to use. So I’ll just put a summary of the main pillars here, but if you want the complete step by step, go take a look at it.
Instead of thinking about body parts in isolation, it helps to think in terms of movement patterns. This approach makes it easier to build a balanced program, because it naturally covers all your major muscle groups without you having to count every single one.
There are seven main patterns you need to know:
Squat works your quads, glutes, and core. This includes back squats, goblet squats, front squats, and leg press. Any movement where you bend your knees and hips to lower your body or a weight, then stand back up.
Hinge focuses on your posterior chain, meaning your glutes, hamstrings, and lower back. Romanian deadlifts, conventional deadlifts, back extensions, and cable pull-throughs all fall here. The movement is driven by pushing your hips back and then forward, with less knee bend than a squat.
Horizontal push targets your chest, front shoulders, and triceps. Think bench press (barbell or dumbbell), push-ups, and chest press machines.
Horizontal pull works your back, rear shoulders, and biceps. Cable rows, dumbbell rows, chest-supported rows, and seated machine rows are all solid options.
Vertical push hits your shoulders and triceps. Overhead press with a barbell or dumbbells, and the shoulder press machine.
Vertical pull targets your lats and biceps. Lat pulldowns and assisted pull-ups are the most beginner-friendly options here.
Carry trains your grip, core, and overall stability while you move under load. Farmer’s carries and suitcase carries are two great ways to train this pattern.
On top of these seven patterns, you’ll also want some isolation work depending on your goals. Lateral raises for the side of your shoulders, bicep curls, tricep pushdowns, leg curls for your hamstrings, leg extensions for your quads, hip abductions for your glutes, etc.
As for the number of exercises, five to six, no more. Start with the big compound lifts, meaning the ones that use several joints and a lot of muscle at once, like squats, hip hinges, presses, rows and pull downs. That’s where most of your results come from and where progress is easy to measure. The small isolation work comes after, and it’s fine if it doesn’t always fit.
Here is the skeleton of a session:
five to six exercises per workout,
two to three compound movements first,
then two to three isolation or accessory exercises,
three to four sets per exercise.
Write down your sessions in a notebook or an app (sets, weight used, reps). And last but not least, keep the same program for at least six to eight weeks and let the numbers climb. Changing your routine every three weeks is the most reliable way to never get good at anything.
Cardio, and why it’s important
Please, hear me clearly! Cardio is for your health, not to burn calories. I want that information printed in your brain.
There are three main raisons you should add cardio to your week:
your heart, which is the obvious one and the one that decides how your next forty years go,
your insulin sensitivity, meaning how well your body handles the sugar in your blood after you eat, which affects your energy, your body composition and your long term health,
and your lifting.
That last one surprises people but stay with me. When your conditioning is poor, your breath becomes the limiting factor on a heavy set of squats long before your legs do. You rack the bar gasping not really because you couldn’t have done two more reps, but because you couldn’t breathe. Better cardio fitness also means you recover faster between sets, so your third set still looks something like your first.
Two easy sessions a week is enough to start. Easy means a pace where you could still hold a conversation, thirty to forty five minutes. It can be whatever you like: running, cycling, rowing, the stair machine, dancing. If you’re currently at five or six lifting sessions a week and you’re not an athlete, not preparing for a competition, and only want to improve your body composition, my honest advice is to cut your lifting down to four sessions a week and add some cardio for all the reasons above.
It took me years to accept that training more doesn’t always lead to better results. Whenever progress stopped, I assumed I hadn’t earned it yet, and the fix was another session, another exercise, another thirty minutes. What actually changed my body was doing less in the gym, with a lot more intention. Aaand, let’s not forget, eating like a grown woman who trains.
So if you ask me how much you should be training to see results, my honest answer is that four times a week is usually more than enough, and often more than you can recover from the way you’re currently building them.
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Thanks for reading,
—Glicia
About the writer
I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and nutrition student based in paris. I’m the person behind never not hungry, a newsletter about getting stronger, eating actual food (yes, with carbs!), and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.
Wait I LOVE your pictures. Thank you for this informative article!!
Always learn so much from these articles, and BEYOND grateful to have you as my coach. I have learned soooo much over the past 5 months <3