If you’re anything like me you’ve compared yourself to top functional fitness athletes and wondered what separates them from mere mortals like us. Well, there is quite a lot that differentiates elite functional fitness athletes from plain old very good athletes. In this article, we are going to cover all the relevant stats including: how long they workout out, how many hours per week, how strong they are, and much more.
If you’ve read any of my previous articles on elite functional fitness athletes, you’ll know that athletes like Rich Froning, and athletes that finish at the top of the Open every year are very fit. If you read those two articles, you’ll get a good idea of the strength and WOD numbers you’ll have to hit to perform at the highest level, and win functional fitness competitions. However, that doesn’t tell you just how those athletes became that fit.
This article is going to show you how much work these top level athletes are putting in to reach these extreme fitness levels. As you’ll see, they spend a lot of time in the gym, and they structure their lives so that fitness is clearly their top priority.
This article is based on a survey from Scandinavian Health and Performance. They emailed hundreds of top level functional fitness athletes an extensive survey, and compiled the data on their training trends. Without further ado, let’s get into the statistics.
How Many Hours Per Week Do Elite Athletes Train?
As a coach and programmer this statistic was very surprising to me. Most functional fitness athletes, that go to a traditional box, attend 3-5 classes per week. Those classes are generally an hour long. For my competitive athletes, I would estimate that they are spending about 7-9 hours a week training. This would include a few days a week of two a days. Let me tell you that is nothing compared to the amount of volume the top level men and women are working!
You can see from this graph that the average athlete is 15 hours per week, with a significant portion of these athletes working around 18-20 hours per week. They have a part time job, and that job is fitness! It’s important to point out that this will include all the things that go into a full training session. This isn’t just time spent doing WODs.
Now that we know that elite functional fitness athletes put some serious time in the gym. This leads us to our next question, how many actual training sessions are they doing each week to put in this kind of volume?
How Many Workouts Do Elite Athletes Do Each Week?
This particular graph is interesting. We have a large group of athletes that stick to 6-8 training sessions. We also have the majority of athletes completing between 9-12 sessions per week.
Much of this comes down to individual training preferences. Some athletes prefer longer sessions, and others prefer shorter sessions, with a narrower focus per session. If the average athlete is training 15 hours per week, and they’re putting in an average of 9 sessions per week, that means each session is an average of 1 hour and 40 minutes long! That is a long session.
As a coach and programmer, my next question is how much recovery are these athletes getting? Remember, it’s not the work you do in the gym that actually improves your fitness. It’s the work, plus the recovery, that allows your body to strengthen itself.
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How Much Recovery Do Elite Athletes Get?
Having trained thousands of athletes over the years, I generally recommend at least two full rest days per week. For my competitive athletes, I’ll allow them to go with one full rest day a week, and one active recovery day. These elite athletes are getting even less recovery than that!
The bulk of these elite athletes are only taking around one rest day per week, with a fair amount taking up to two days off per week. Perhaps these athletes can survive on this amount of rest, however, given their training volume, I wonder if they might actually do better if they took a bit more rest.
They do report sleeping quite well however, with 55% of them sleeping more than 8 hours per night. The rest of the athletes report getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night. This begs the question. Does higher training volumes actually produce better results? Wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what we are going to talk about next.
Is More Functional Fitness Training Better?
These charts compare two things. They look at the amount of sessions per week, and the impact on strength levels. They also looks at the amount of years a person has already trained and overall strength performance.
Remember this is self reported survey data, not a scientific experiment. From the top chart we can see that there is a negligible difference on strength between athletes that train 9 sessions per week and those that train with 12 or more sessions. Overall training age also has little impact on strength numbers. From these facts we can draw some conclusions.
These athletes already have a lot of experience in the gym. Most of these athletes have 3-5 years experience with functional fitness specific training. However, they have 8+ years of experience in the gym as a whole. Many of them report coming from collegiate athletic backgrounds, with the most common being: gymnastics, rugby, track and field, and other team sports.
Now let’s take a look at who does their programming, and who is helping them in the gym.
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Do Elite Athletes Do Their Own Programming?
I was expecting that more of these athletes would do their own programming. I also would not have expected that any large portion of them would follow generic programming.
As you can see, the largest portion of athletes have one coach, with some athletes having a main coach and a specialist in things like endurance training, or weight lifting. Obviously, this can get expensive, as these coaches aren’t volunteering their time. That is probably why almost half of the athletes follow generic programming or DIY their own programming.
The bulk of these athletes report that they follow an annual plan, with 79% saying their program is planned at least one year in advance. This is one area that I think many semi competitive athletes lack. They follow a program for only a few months at a time, and then jump ship to another program. That can work for a while, but a longer plan is needed for elite performance.
Next, let’s talk about these athletes and their diets.
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Do Elite Athletes Track Macros or Use Dietitians?
This is another area where I would have expected the opposite of what they are reporting. Next to sleep and training, diet is the largest piece that will control an athlete’s overall performance. This might be a trend that starts to change in the future.
Most professional sports teams regularly employ dietitians, and I’m surprised that only 42% of these athletes have used their help. Based on that lowish number, I would expect more athletes to at least track their macros and caloric intake. Looks like I’m wrong again! Only 29% of elite athletes report tracking their food intake.
Similarly, these athletes report that they regularly take supplements. The most common of which are creatine, whey, fish oil, bcaa’s, magnesium, and multi vitamins. These are basic supplements that are well supported by science. If you want to learn more, read this article about creatine, and other supplements.
We’ve already covered the big ticket items, but as I’ve alluded to earlier, these athletes have set their lives up so that training and fitness is their top priority.
Elite Athlete Lifestyle Statistics
Most of these athletes are single, at 69%. Only 33% of them have jobs outside of the gym, and 84% coach at a gym. These stats are honestly more important than most folks think.
It used to be quite common for people with regular day jobs to show up at the Games, but you tend to see that less and less. Remember, that most of these athletes are spending 15 hours plus in the gym. They are also probably spending a fair amount of time on soft tissue work, and other recovery therapies outside of the gym.
Anyone that has a family, and kids, can tell you that spending 20-30 hours a week on something that isn’t your job is probably not going to fit into the families’ lifestyle!
Final Thoughts
I recommend checking out the full results of the survey, as they cover some other things such as the incidence of injuries, and other more subjective measures of fitness. The data we’ve covered today does paint a pretty clear picture. These athletes work very hard.
Based upon my decades working out, and coaching in the gym, I would conservatively estimate that these athletes are roughly doubling the amount of total volume a locally competitive athlete is doing. This also explains the crazy amount of food they’re eating.
I’ve seen some elite athletes consuming 400+ grams of carbohydrate on a daily basis. This is a crazy amount of food for anyone not putting in 15 hours of hard work in the gym per week. This brings up my final point.
You shouldn’t base your individual goals, and fitness programming, on what top level athletes are doing. They are not you, and they have set their life up to maximize performance in the gym. While they are very hard workers, that level of commitment isn’t something that can be maintained in the long run. It also isn’t particularly healthy, and will wear down your body over the long haul.
You can achieve an incredible levels of fitness, strength, and muscularity without living in the gym. Just check out a few articles on this website, and we’ll get you pointed in the right direction. Now get out there and start training!
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