Your workout week - when to train 

Figure out when you like exercising, as in what time of day works for you and fits with your schedule. There is no right or wrong. It is important to book it into your schedule, like you would a work meeting, or social meeting with a friend, so that it is non-negotiable. Waiting until you feel like it almost never works.  

Ideally, you should try to do a full body resistance workout at least twice per week. These sessions should not be on consecutive days if you are just doing the 2 sessions per week. If you do 3 days per week, full body, ideally you should have a day of rest between each.  

For those of you that are more active, it is possible to resistance train 4 or even 5 days per week, however the structure of your workouts is likely to be very different. Remember that quality is really important and coming into workouts fresh, matters. People who lift weights 5 days a week likely structure their programs so that they are relatively resting one whole body part while training another (e.g. they do upper body one day and lower body the next). This is outside the scope of FKB programs, which are a maximum of 3 days per week. 

Training full body 3 days a week is a great choice. There will be similar movement patterns trained during each session, e.g. a barbell back squat in one and a goblet squat in another, but the exact same exercises are unlikely to be repeated within a week unless you are training for something specific (e.g. powerlifters often barbell bench press 3-4x per week). You can do these sessions without a rest day in between, however your muscles recover when you arent exercising, and it probably is more effective to have at least a day in between each session if you can. 

Your workout week - for people who do lots of exercise

If you do other forms of exercise too, like pilates or yoga or cardio, the priority is maximising your performance in the exercise you care most about, or are prioritising results from. For example if you are trying to get a 5k PB, it would not make sense to lift weights before going for a run on the same day, or doing a heavy legs session the day before a fast run.  If you are doing two exercise sessions in one day, you should do the priority exercise first. 

Ideally, having time (hours) in between same-day sessions is important, depending how hard each session is. For example, if you are doing a heavy strength training session, you might be able to do something like pilates straight afterwards without too much dificulty. On the other hand, doing a pilates session directly before lifting weights might compromise your strength performance, so probably isnt advised. Splitting the sessions up with multiple hours in between (e.g. morning and evening sessions) is easier to manage. 

Figure out what causes fatigue that runs into the next day and structure your week accordingly, e.g. you may prefer to allow 48 hours in between a heavy squat session and a long run.  

It is important to have at least one complete rest day per week (light forms of exercise like walking and yoga are ok to do on rest days). If you are finding it hard to find time to have a rest day around the type of training you need to do, try to put two sessions on one day. Some suggest doing high intensity sessions on the same day, having a few ‘very hard’ days in a week, so you can have some very easy days in a week, instead of having lots of ‘moderately to pretty hard’ most days of the week. 

Rest days and recovery are important to reduce risk of injury & can require careful tinkering to get right!