Athlete For Life
How Much Strength Training Do You Actually Need After 40?
by Jeremy Hudson, Athlete For Life
“Two hours a day, six days a week.”
That’s the number most people are braced for when we get to the conversation I have with every client at the start: how much strength training do you actually need? They’re expecting punishment. A number that confirms what they already suspect — that getting it back is a part-time job they can’t afford.
The real answer is smaller than they fear, but it comes with a catch. It isn’t a single number. It’s a law, and once you know it, you’ll read your own training week differently.
More Wasn’t Working
Jeff came to me as the busy kind of gym guy. Genuinely active — lots of movement, lots of sessions, lots of exercises. A team-sports guy his whole life who wanted to get back to playing pickup basketball, except the fallout after playing had gotten so bad it stopped being worth it. Play Tuesday, pay until Friday.
His words, after four weeks of working together, tell you everything about what was actually wrong: “My previous work in the gym was quantity over quality. I was very active and busy, but not necessarily intentional.”
And the lesson he took away? “More is not always better. Less of a good thing is way better than more of just doing things for the sake of doing them.”
Here’s why his case is worth studying. The fix had nothing to do with adding gym time. We aimed the time he already had. He thought his goal was basketball, but the assessment said his real goal was strength — back and legs — because that’s what stood between him and basketball. So that’s where the work went, and even with two hip replacements in his history, the first thing he noticed wasn’t a lift number. It was the recovery: “The next day, I have been able to be back in the gym if I wanted to and work hard again. There has not been downtime afterward.”
Being busy didn’t do that. Being intentional did.
The Law: Heavy or Often — Pick One
So how much do you actually need? It runs on one law.
Intensity and frequency are locked together, and they move in opposite directions. The lighter the work, the more often you need it. The heavier the work, the more rest it demands.
That one law sets the dose at every level.
Movement skill needs daily doses. If you’re rebuilding a movement — a squat pattern, a range of motion, mobility that left years ago — that’s neurological work, and the nervous system learns by repetition, not exhaustion. The stimulus is light, so the frequency has to be high: daily, sometimes multiple times a day. It’s why rehab exercises get prescribed every day. Try to fix a movement twice a week and progress crawls, then stalls.
New to strength means light and frequent. Early strength gains are mostly neurological too, because you’re acquiring the skill of the lift under loads that are still relatively light. The same rule applies: three to five days a week serves a newer lifter better than two crushing sessions.
Advanced means heavy and sparse. As the weights get truly heavy, the law flips on you. A seasoned lifter might need a big lift only once every four or five days, sometimes just once a week, because recovery becomes the limiting factor. And at that level you stop living at one speed: you alternate a slower, heavier lift with a faster, lighter one — which, if you read last issue, you’ll recognize as exactly how power gets built.
In my program design system, intensity is organized into zones, and the zones carry the same law. The heaviest zone might appear once a week, while lighter zones can show up three times or more.
If You Want One Number: Three
Everything above is true, and I know it reads like “it depends.” So here’s where I plant the flag.
Three days a week of strength training. That’s the minimum I recommend. Then let your progress adjust it from there.
And if you’re already giving the gym five or six days? Good. Don’t add hours — split them. My preferred structure is three to four days of strength and two to three days of speed and conditioning work. Same weekly time you’re spending now, completely different return: you come out stronger, faster, and better conditioned. Or as Jeff put it after four weeks: “being active, but active with a purpose.”
Three Hours, Built Right
Here’s the shape of a week I’d build on the three-day minimum, about an hour a session:
Monday — Heavy Day
Start with a jump or a throw to wake the body up
Then two big lifts: one heavy lower-body exercise and one heavy upper-body exercise, working up to your heaviest sets of the week
A couple of extra exercises the big lifts don’t cover: one-leg work and rowing
Carry something heavy on the way out the door
Wednesday — Volume Day
The moves Monday didn’t touch: upper-body pulling, pressing, and rotation work for the core
Medium weights, always leaving a rep or two in the tank
A short round of tempo intervals to finish — your conditioning, built in
The easier day sitting between the two hard ones
Friday — Fast Day
Start with the most explosive lift of the week, a movement where the whole body drives the weight up
Then one big lower-body lift and one big upper-body lift: lighter weight, moving every rep as fast as you can
Friday is where the athlete comes back
That’s the week for someone with training miles on them. Newer to strength? Same three days, but full body every session: a leg exercise, a push, and a pull each day, rotating the versions — knee-dominant legs one day, hip-dominant the next, pressing and pulling alternating between vertical and horizontal. Core every session, and each day can close with a short round of sled work or conditioning. The law explains why that works: the loads are lighter, so the same patterns can show up more often.
And the levels can mix, because not everyone’s movements are all at the same level. I have a client right now whose upper body is advanced but whose lower body still needs movement work. His lower body gets movement training every session, all three days, while his upper body runs the split: heavy Monday, volume Wednesday, fast Friday. Same law, applied pattern by pattern. Your movement levels are unique to you, which is exactly why a template is a starting point, not the program.
Notice what’s not in that week: four chest exercises on the same day. A bench press, an incline press, a fly, and a dip is a bodybuilding day — which is de-athleticizing. For movement and performance, one, maybe two exercises per movement per session is often all it takes.
Conditioning Is Already Covered
Even at three days. The newer-to-strength week builds it in daily with that closing round of sled work, and the split covers it with Wednesday’s tempo intervals. For an athlete whose priority is strength and power, that’s genuinely enough engine work.
Got more time? Add a conditioning day — Saturday’s the spot. That’s where the higher-intent work lives: multi-directional agility, sled work, faster tempo runs.
Almost everyone reading this will benefit from one realization: conditioning is training, and it needs to be structured just like your lifting days. Most people’s conditioning is the same jog at the same pace it was a year ago — no plan, no progression. It burns calories and not much else. A structured session builds speed, agility, capacity, and most importantly, athleticism.
The Hours Were Never the Problem
Look at Jeff one more time. He didn’t add a single hour to his week. If anything, he spends less time in the gym than he used to. What changed is that every hour now has a job.
That’s the real answer to the question, and it’s why the number matters less than the law behind it. The lighter the work, the more often you need it. The heavier the work, the more rest it demands. Set your week by that, and the hours you’re already spending stop making you busy and start making you an athlete again.
Stay athletic,
Jeremy
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Jeremy Hudson is a strength and conditioning coach (NSCA-CSCS) with 27 years in the field. He runs Athlete for Life in London, training adults in their 30s through 60s to move like athletes again. Curious how you’re actually holding up? Find your Athletic Age in three minutes: athleteforlife.ca
