Two sessions a week or three: what changes

When people start personal training, the question of how often comes up straight away. Two sessions a week and three are the most common choices. Here is how I think about the difference.

What two sessions a week gives you

Two sessions is enough to make real progress, particularly if you are new to training. You can work every major muscle group twice a week, practise the main movements often enough to improve at them and still have plenty of time to recover.

It also lines up with the national guidance. The Australian Government’s recommendations for adults include muscle-strengthening activities on two or more days per week, alongside 30 minutes or more of moderate to vigorous activity on most days. Two good strength sessions cover the first part. The second part is the walking, riding, swimming or sport you do on the other days.

That is the catch with two sessions. They work well when the rest of your week is reasonably active, and noticeably less well when they are the only time you move.

What the third session adds

A third session gives you three things.

More practice. Strength training is a skill. Three sessions means more supervised repetitions of each movement, and technique usually settles faster.

More room in the program. With an extra day, the trainer can spread the work out. Each session can have a clearer focus, such as legs one day, upper body the next and conditioning on the third.

Shorter gaps. With three sessions, the longest break between them is usually two days. That makes it easier to keep a rhythm, and a missed session costs less. If you train twice a week and miss one, you have had a one-session week. If you train three times and miss one, you still got two.

The third session does not add half as much progress again. In my view the returns taper: the step from no training to two sessions a week is far larger than the step from two to three.

Recovery sets the limit

Training is the stimulus. The improvement happens between sessions, when you eat, sleep and rest. Three sessions a week only beats two if you can recover from three.

If you sleep poorly, work long or physical hours or are under a lot of stress, a third hard session can leave you flat. Signs that you are doing more than you can recover from include soreness that never quite clears, sessions that feel harder each week at the same weights and a growing reluctance to turn up. In that situation, dropping back to two is the better program.

Cost

Three sessions cost half as much again as two, every week, for as long as you train. Before you choose, work out the monthly figure for each option and ask yourself which one you could pay for six months without resenting it. Training you stop after five weeks because of the cost is poor value at any price per session.

There is a middle path that suits many people: two sessions with a trainer and one session on your own, following a plan the trainer writes. You get much of the benefit of a third day without the extra fee. It depends on you doing it, so be realistic about that.

Who tends to suit which

Two sessions a week usually suits you if:

• you are new to training or coming back after a long break
• you already walk, ride, swim or play sport on other days
• your week is full and two fixed times is what you can protect
• you are happy to do some work on your own between sessions

Three sessions usually suits you if:

• you have a date to work towards, such as an event or a fitness test
• you know you will not train alone, so the booked sessions are the only ones that will happen
• you are past the beginner stage and progress has slowed on two
• your sleep, food and schedule can support it

Start with what you can keep

My usual advice is to start with the number you are sure you can sustain. For most people that is two. Do it for six to eight weeks without missing. If you are recovering well and want more, add the third session then. It is much easier to add a session to a habit that is working than to rescue one that started too big.

Whichever you choose, the count that matters at the end of the year is the number of sessions you turned up to. Two a week, kept up, is around a hundred sessions in a year. That is a lot of training, and it beats any plan that looked better on paper and lasted a month.