Question 1

How many days a week should I train for my sport?

Accepted Answer

Most community athletes train best on two to four gym sessions a week in-season, on top of team nights and a game. Three is the common sweet spot. Below two, strength is maintained at best; above four, the sessions start competing with team training and game recovery rather than adding to them.

Question 2

How heavy should I lift?

Accepted Answer

Heavy enough that the final rep of a set is genuinely difficult but still done properly, and no heavier. For most working sets that lands somewhere around 70–85% of the most you could lift once, but the percentage is a description of the effort rather than something to calculate from.

Question 3

Is bodyweight training enough, or do I need a gym?

Accepted Answer

Bodyweight training builds genuine strength, and for the upper body it can keep doing so for a long time — press-ups, dips, chin-ups and their harder variations scale by leverage rather than by load. For the lower body it runs out sooner: a squat and a hinge can be loaded far beyond what one body weighs, and single-leg variations only close part of that gap.

Question 4

Should I train legs the day before a game?

Accepted Answer

Not heavily, and not for volume. Heavy lower-body work the day before a game leaves you slower and sorer for the one session that counts, and it is too late to make you fitter — that adaptation takes days to weeks, not hours.

Question 5

What is the difference between strength and power, and which matters more?

Accepted Answer

Strength is the amount of force you can produce; power is how quickly you can produce it. A sprint start, a jump and a tackle are all decided by power. But power is force expressed fast, so raising the amount of force available raises the ceiling on it — which is why a program builds strength first and converts it later.

Question 6

Should I lift weights during the season?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Strength built over a pre-season starts to decline within a few weeks of stopping, so an athlete who lifts hard until round one and then stops spends the second half of the season weaker than they started it. What changes in-season is the volume, not whether you lift at all.

Question 7

How long before a season should I start training?

Accepted Answer

Eight to twelve weeks before round one is the usual window, and twelve is better than eight if you have it. That is long enough for two or three four-week training blocks, which is what it takes to build an aerobic base and a strength base and then sharpen both.

Question 8

What should I do in the off-season?

Accepted Answer

Take a genuine break first — two to four weeks of little or no structured training, which is short enough that you lose very little and long enough that the accumulated fatigue of a season actually clears. Then rebuild: general strength, the movements the season crowded out, and whatever niggle you managed around for months.

Question 9

How long does it take to get fitter?

Accepted Answer

The first changes arrive faster than most people expect and are mostly neural: within two to three weeks a lift feels more controlled and the weight moves more easily, largely because you have got better at the movement rather than because the muscle has grown. Measurable strength gains follow over four to eight weeks, and aerobic improvements over six to twelve.

Question 10

Why has my progress stopped?

Accepted Answer

Most plateaus are one of four things: the program stopped getting harder, recovery stopped keeping up with the training, the training was never as consistent as it felt, or you are measuring something that was always going to move slowly. Reaching a genuine physiological ceiling is rare and takes years.

Question 11

How much weight should I add to the bar each week?

Accepted Answer

Add weight when you complete every prescribed rep with good technique, and add a small amount — roughly 2.5% on big lower-body lifts, and less than that on upper-body lifts, where the same percentage is a much larger share of the total. In practice that is often the smallest pair of plates available.

Question 12

Is it normal to feel weaker in a deload week?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is common. A deload week drops training volume so that accumulated fatigue can clear, and fatigue does not leave evenly — feeling flat, heavy or oddly weak part-way through a deload usually means the three weeks before it were hard enough to need one.

Question 13

Is running enough to get fit for a field sport?

Accepted Answer

Steady running builds the aerobic base that everything else sits on, so it is worth doing — but on its own it does not prepare you for a field sport. A game is a sprint, a walk, a jog and another sprint, and the quality that decides it is how quickly you recover between hard efforts rather than how long you can hold one pace.

Question 14

Can I run and lift in the same week without one ruining the other?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Running and lifting in the same week is what every field-sport athlete does, and the interference between them is real but modest — it mostly affects maximum strength and maximum aerobic development at the very top end, which is not where a community athlete is training.

Question 15

How much sleep do athletes actually need?

Accepted Answer

Athlete sleep guidance sits higher than general adult guidance — the recommendations Train Smart follows put an athlete in training above the familiar seven-hour figure, which is why 7–8 hours sits in the middle of our scale rather than at the top of it.

Question 16

What does HRV actually tell me?

Accepted Answer

Heart-rate variability is worth watching against your own rolling baseline and close to meaningless compared with anyone else — the spread between healthy people is so wide that one person’s normal is another’s alarming. A single reading tells you very little; a run of readings well below your own average is a signal worth acting on.

Question 17

Should I train when I am sore?

Accepted Answer

Ordinary muscle soreness two days after a hard session is not a reason to skip training — moving usually improves it, and training the same muscles again at reduced load is generally fine. What is not fine is training through pain located in a joint, a tendon or one specific spot, or soreness sharp enough to change how you move.

Question 18

How much protein do I actually need?

Accepted Answer

For an athlete in training, roughly 1.8 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day, and toward the higher end of that range while eating in a calorie deficit. For an 80 kg athlete that is about 145 to 175 grams a day.

Question 19

Can I build muscle and lose fat at the same time?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes. It happens most readily in three situations: you are new to resistance training, you are returning after a long break, or you are carrying a fair amount of body fat. Outside those, progress in both directions at once is slow and often not worth pursuing over doing one properly.

Question 20

Do Nordic curls actually prevent hamstring injuries?

Accepted Answer

The evidence that eccentric hamstring training reduces hamstring strain injuries is among the strongest in sports injury prevention, and the Nordic hamstring curl is the exercise it was built on. It is the reason Nordics appear in nearly every prehab block Train Smart writes for a running sport.

Question 21

What is prehab, and does it work?

Accepted Answer

Prehab is targeted work done to reduce injury risk before anything is wrong — eccentric hamstring work, adductor strength for groin problems, and structured warm-ups are the best-evidenced examples. The research behind those specific protocols is good, and Train Smart cites it against each claim.

Question 22

How young is too young to start lifting weights?

Accepted Answer

Age is the wrong thing to ask about. Appropriately supervised resistance training with sensible loading is widely regarded as safe for young athletes, and the risk in youth sport sits overwhelmingly with the sport itself rather than with the gym. What decides it is supervision, technique and progression — not a birthday.

Question 23

What do selectors actually test at trials?

Accepted Answer

Across Australian pathway programs the recurring battery is a running test of some kind, a short sprint, a jump, and at senior levels a strength measure. Exactly which varies by sport and state — the AFL Draft Combine, a rugby league trial and a netball state squad all measure different things — but the shape is consistent.

23 training questions, answered straight

Training