The question of how many days you “should” train for best results isn’t one with a straightforward answer.
Mostly because it’s the wrong question. Because what you actually want to ask is:
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“How many days per week can I train before training takes more from me than it gives back?”
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For a lot of people, that’s three (two lifting sessions, and two cardio sessions with one tacked onto the end of a lifting workout).
It might be just two (in that case both lifting sessions would feature cardio afterwards).
And while this might not be “optimal” according to terminally online powerlifters who can’t bench their bodyweight, it certainly works better than slogging through workouts when you are mentally and physically exhausted (or skipping them altogether) because you are trying to cram in more than you can consistently manage.
But if you can reasonably train more often, you probably should.
Consider: Exercise (be it lifting weights, running, cycling, or whatever) is a skill. And you only improve a skill by actually doing it. So quite why the prevailing attitude is that one can do as little as possible yet still expect stellar progress confuses me greatly.
This goes double if you’re a bit on the porky side and would like that to not be the case. (The great natural bodybuilders of the “pre-steroid” era like Reg Park and Steve Reeves would drastically increase the number of sessions they trained per week in the leadup to competition, which, combined with eating less of broadly the same stuff they always ate, was all they did to lean out. They didn’t need to do anything more complicated than that because they weren’t blasting grams of goodness knows what into their veins in an attempt to look like a ghoul).
Once again for the hard of thinking: I am not saying you should push for more than you can manage, although you must absolutely guard against slacking.
Only you can know for certain what counts as “slacking”, and where you draw the line is contingent on all sorts of things: Your working hours, family duties, training experience, health status, aspirations, and plenty more besides.
Just know that pretty much every permutation of training frequency “works” to a greater or lesser degree – even stuff as out there as Vince Gironda’s infamous “Train 21 days, rest for 7” protocol. It just depends on what else you’ve got going on and, probably more importantly, whether or not you truly believe in what you’re doing.
Excuse me while I dislodge the fence post from my backside.
Ah, that’s better.
Anyway.
The “days per week” questions becomes even more of a non-issue once you possess a sufficiently large training toolbox, because you cease to be beholden to any one specific programme.
Instead, you use a first principles approach to craft robust yet flexible training systems you can easily modify to suit prevailing demands.
Hence, the chances of your training getting “too much” leading to you falling off the wagon and losing your hard won progress crater almost into nothingness while you enjoy slow yet incremental gains that compound over time in much the same way money in a pension fund does.
I explain a whole bunch of different ways to go about doing that in “Phil Tyreman’s Big Book of Fitness”.
It’s a fiver, and you can get it here:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/big/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman