Am I Training Too Much — Or Just Too Much of Everything?
A reader of our 3 Rep Max newsletter responded to our recent survey with a question:
“How many hours a week should be enough to maintain strength, speed and stamina in a 57-year-old menopausal woman? I swim 3–4 times a week, 1.5 hours each time, cycle 3–4 hours, walk/run 3–4 hours and add some strength training throughout the week. Am I at risk of overtraining? A 70.3 and the Rottnest Channel Swim are goals within the next year.”
There are two different questions buried in there that probably apply to many of us as Masters athletes, regardless of our goals or sport.
The first is: how much training do I need to maintain strength, speed and endurance as I get older? The second is: am I currently doing too much?
They sound like the same question, but they aren't. Add those training hours together and we already have somewhere between 10.5 and 14 hours of swimming, cycling, walking and running each week, before the strength work is included. That's a significant training load. But significant doesn't automatically mean excessive.
There isn't a weekly number beyond which a 57-year-old suddenly becomes “overtrained”. Ten hours might be comfortably tolerated by one athlete and far too much for another. Fifteen hours might be perfectly appropriate during one part of a preparation and completely unnecessary during another.
Overtraining is not simply the result of accumulating a lot of training hours. More commonly, athletes can become progressively under-recovered when the training and other stresses being imposed exceed their current capacity to recover and adapt. True overtraining syndrome is a much more serious and prolonged condition, and is far less straightforward than simply “doing too much”.
And this is where I would change the original question. Rather than asking, “How many hours should I train?” I would ask, “What adaptation am I trying to produce with each of those hours?” Swimming 4.5–6 hours each week clearly contributes towards swimming endurance. Cycling adds another 3–4 hours of aerobic work, with a further 3–4 hours coming from running and walking.
But doing more endurance training doesn't necessarily maintain everything else. Strength is a good example. Research looking at reduced training doses suggests that strength can often be maintained with surprisingly little training, provided the intensity of the strength stimulus remains sufficiently high. How little depends on the athlete, their training history and what we are trying to maintain. For this athlete, I wouldn't simply throw a few exercises into the gaps between endurance sessions.
Importantly, being postmenopausal doesn't mean strength training suddenly stops working. A large 2026 meta-analysis involving more than 4,000 women found substantial improvements in strength in both pre- and postmenopausal women, without a significant difference between the groups. Other systematic reviews specifically involving postmenopausal women have similarly found meaningful improvements from resistance training.
So I wouldn't describe strength work in this program as something to “add throughout the week”. I would give it a defined place. For an endurance athlete in her 50s, two properly constructed strength sessions of perhaps 40–60 minutes would usually be a sensible starting point. The sessions need enough load and progression to actually provide a strength stimulus. Otherwise we can easily end up spending more training time without producing much additional adaptation.
Speed and power deserve some consideration as well. Swimming, cycling and steady running provide enormous cardiovascular benefits, but generally don't provide the same exposure to high rates of force production as deliberate strength and power work. Preserving some of that neuromuscular capacity can still be useful as we get older, but for an athlete preparing for a 70.3 and the Rottnest Channel Swim it remains a supporting quality rather than a major training priority. A small amount of high-intent work incorporated into strength sessions or warm-ups may be enough, depending on the athlete. The aim is to maintain exposure without creating yet another significant demand on the training week.
This is one of the mistakes Masters athletes can make when trying to protect against the effects of ageing: they keep adding things. More aerobic work because endurance matters. Strength because muscle matters. Plyometrics because power matters. Mobility because movement matters. Recovery sessions because recovery matters. Eventually the program contains everything except actual time to recover.
There is another problem with the word “maintain” in the initialquestion. A 70.3 and the Rottnest Channel Swim aren't maintenance goals. They are substantial endurance-performance goals. At different stages of the year, the athlete will need to build specific swimming, cycling and running capacities beyond their current levels. Trying to keep every physical quality fully developed while also building everything required for both events is neither necessary nor particularly efficient.
Good programming doesn't give every ability equal priority all year. There might be periods when swimming volume increases because the channel swim is approaching. At another stage, bike and run preparation may become more prominent. Strength might move from a developmental phase towards a lower-volume maintenance dose as competition gets closer. Speed and power can remain present without consuming large amounts of recovery capacity. That is periodisation in its most practical form: deciding what needs to grow, what needs to be maintained and what can temporarily receive less attention.
So is this athlete currently doing too much, or failing to recover from what she is doing? We can't determine that from the number of hours. What I would want to know is what has happened to her performance and recovery over the previous six or eight weeks. Are normal swimming sets suddenly feeling harder? Are bike outputs dropping despite increased effort? Is running pace deteriorating? Is she regularly unable to complete the quality work she previously handled? Has sleep deteriorated? Is soreness persisting rather than disappearing? Are minor injuries beginning to accumulate? Is motivation disappearing? Is she getting sick more frequently?
One difficult week isn't particularly interesting. A consistent trend is. Research and coaching practice around endurance athletes support exactly this approach: monitor training alongside subjective recovery, performance, illness, life stress and the athlete's own perception of how training feels. Recent work examining world-class endurance coaches found that daily follow-up, training diaries, training-intensity measures and performance testing were among their most valued tools for identifying developing underperformance.
Nutrition also becomes increasingly important as training volume rises. An athlete doing roughly 12–15 hours of training each week needs to adequately fuel that workload. Sometimes what looks like an inability to tolerate training is actually an inability to adequately support that training.
Low energy availability can impair both health and performance. The IOC's Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport framework considers inadequate energy intake relative to exercise expenditure rather than simply how much an athlete weighs. For a postmenopausal athlete there is an additional wrinkle: menstrual disturbance can no longer provide one of the possible warning signs that energy availability may have become problematic. That makes monitoring performance, recovery, bone health, injury patterns, nutrition and general wellbeing even more valuable.
None of this means a woman in her late 50s shouldn't train 12 or 15 hours a week. Quite the opposite: age shouldn't determine an arbitrary ceiling on what an athlete is capable of doing. Training history, current fitness, injury history, nutrition, sleep, rate of progression and individual recovery capacity are far more useful pieces of information.
But I wouldn't try to answer this athlete's question by telling her how many hours she is “allowed” to train. I'd start by looking at those hours and asking what each one is there to accomplish. She probably doesn't need more general exercise. She is already doing plenty.
She needs enough swimming, cycling and running to progressively prepare for the enormous endurance demands of her goals. She needs enough genuine strength training to protect and develop strength rather than merely tick the strength-training box. If maintaining speed and power is part of the goal, those qualities probably need only small, deliberate exposures. And she needs enough recovery and nutrition to absorb all of it.
The aim isn't to find the maximum amount of training a 57-year-old body will tolerate.
It's to work out what she needs to improve, what she needs to maintain, and give each of
those things enough training to do the job. The number of hours matters. But what is inside those hours — and whether she can recover and adapt to them — matters much more.
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