“With two or three days a week changes are already noticeable”

The arrival of the sixth decade of life is usually accompanied by an alarmist message about inevitable physical decline, with all the health problems that entails. To be able to deal with this, the important thing is to start exercising as soon as possible, and when you reach this age it is not necessary to go to the gym every day or subject your body to exhausting sessions.

The science. Scientific evidence and clinical experience converge on a much more accessible point, which is the possibility of strength training two or three days per week, since it is the optimal threshold to generate structural, functional and perceptible changes in a short period of time.

The experts. The physiotherapist and therapeutic exercise specialist Agus Oliver recently explained it in an interview for Infobae, making clear that with two or three days a week you can already notice important changes if the work is well planned. According to his clinical experience, the success of the intervention does not lie in leaving destroyed after hours of continuous effort, but in executing programs of between thirty and forty-five minutes consistently.

This moderate frequency also allows the introduction of complementary disciplines such as Pilates, which adds body control and mobility to the gain of strength, without overloading the patient’s joint structures.

The tests. This perspective is deeply rooted in the strictest international guidelines. Here the WHO itself, in a physical activity guide published in 2020points out that for older adults it is essential to accumulate between one hundred and fifty to three hundred minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week.

But to this recommendation they add that strength training of large muscle groups during two or more days a week provides substantial additional benefits in fall prevention and functionality. Two points that are fundamental when you reach a certain age to maintain good autonomy.

Rest is essential. Given the idea that more minutes of exercise means physical improvement on a linear scale, the American College of Sports Medicine point to the need to respect about 48 hours of rest between sessions that involve the same muscle group.

In our country, the Spanish Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology joins this consensus and explicitly endorses that strengthening the muscles two or three days per week is the most effective strategy to optimize walking, facilitate the use of stairs and drastically reduce the risk of accidents, recommending not working the same area on consecutive days.

a study published by the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 2025 pointed out directly that traditional strength protocols, carried out precisely at those frequencies of two or three days a week, are capable of improving knee extension strength by up to 46%.

Additionally, multicomponent programs increased the distance covered in the six-minute walk test by more than 13%, while interval training improved maximum oxygen consumption by almost six percent. We are talking about measurable clinical changes in a matter of weeks, which restore autonomy to patients without the need to impose unacceptable routines.

Images | Center for Aging Better

In Xataka | Muscle as medicine: this is how strength training protects your heart, your brain and your life expectancy