I touched on this topic when I wrote about your goals.  How often you are going to be resistance training over the course of the week depends on your goals and the level you are at.  The more experienced you get and the higher your expectations are, the more often you will have to go to the gym.

It isn’t just a case of how often you are going to have to go to the gym but what you are going to do there.  Are you going to train all the muscle groups each time or are you going to split your muscle groups up? Well again, this depends.  We will look at this from a beginner’s perspective to an experienced lifter’s perspective.

I believe that you should resistance train at least three days per week, saying that, I have had people make significant gains with only two days per week.  However, these people worked VERY hard over those two days and admitted there is no way that they would work that hard on their own.  Their goals were not to make major changes to their appearance but to mainly increase their level of strength.

If you are just trying to elevate your metabolism and toning up a little two days of resistance training per week MAY get the job done.  However, if you want to make sure you accomplish this, think about three days a week as your minimum.

Keep this rule of thumb in mind when planning your days of resistance training.  You never want to train with weights more than two days in a row.  Even if you are training different muscle groups, your body can only repair so much damaged tissue at a time.  Training more often could lead to a condition called over training.

Over training is a condition that is quite common with people who workout.  They don’t give their bodies enough time to recover from a workout before they hit the same muscle again.  Another cause is just working out too frequently where the body is always playing catch up regardless of the muscle worked. 

Signs of over training are, low energy levels, lower immune system, loss of strength in the gym, trouble sleeping, increased injuries, loss of appetite and a lower metabolic rate to name a few.  Basically an overall feeling of “Blah”!

Saying that, the two day rule applies to people who are training  “naturally”.  What do I mean by naturally?  Well if you are working out and eating properly, that is it.  You are training naturally.  If you are taking many supplements to increase the anabolic environment that your body is in and aid with performance and or recovery, then you are not training naturally. You may be able to get away with training more frequently.  This is something you will have to experiment with as we all recover at different rates.

Each muscle group recovers at a different rate and, therefore, some may be trained more often than others.  Everyone is different when it comes to muscle recovery so there are no set rules.  I have found that most people when training at a high intensity level need more time to recover the larger muscles than the smaller one.  Your quads, hams, glutes, chest and back can take many days to recover.  Your abs, calves, biceps, triceps and shoulders tend to recover faster. 

Without getting into the scientific reason why this is (mainly due to muscle fibre dominance within each group), we can determine our own recovery rate.  In the beginning, as you train your different muscle groups, try to gauge how many days it takes them to recover (or stop hurting).  Keep in mind though, the first day after a muscle stops hurting from the workout doesn’t necessarily mean that it is ready to be worked again.  It still may take another day or so.

If you are working your muscles hard, it usually takes 2-3 days for your abs, calves, biceps and triceps to recover.  It could take 3-4 days for your chest and back to recover and up to 5 days or more for your hams, quads, and glutes.  If you are going to work a muscle group again and still experience muscle soreness once you start to lift, it may not be ready to be worked and could become over trained.  In cases like this, just change up your routine and hit a different muscle group.

Just remember that you don’t build muscle in the gym, you break it down.  You build muscle through proper rest and nutrition outside the gym.  So you have to make sure you give your muscles proper rest and feed them with quality nutrients.

An easy way for you to understand why this is important is to look at the following graphs.

 

 

If you look at figure 1, you can see what happens to a muscle when it is given proper rest and nutrition.  The baseline represents its starting condition.  When you workout you breakdown the muscle.  Immediately after breaking down the muscle, the rest and repair stage begins.  The muscle will actually surpass its original baseline condition, if given the proper rest and nutrition.  This is called super compensation.  It is at this point that we want to train the muscle again and start the cycle all over.  If timed right, we should notice continued gains in strength and muscular development.  Obviously these gains cannot go on forever or we would have thousand pound body builders.  However, we should be able to establish a much higher baseline.

 

Now lets look at figure 2, as you can see we have the opposite thing occurring here.  Before the muscle has had time to repair, it is worked and broken down again.  This is a classic sign of over training.   Instead of the muscle super compensating, it is actually staying in a state of constant breakdown. 

 

Hopefully this example is enough to convince you that sometimes less is more.