No pain, no gain…right? #Hustle #Grind #NoDaysOff.
Bullshit. All of it.
Should you be moving every day? Of course. But that doesn’t mean you need to be killing yourself in the gym, in fact that is very counterproductive. To start, you should understand what is actually happening in the gym. When you are working out through resistance training, you are causing DAMAGE to your muscles. You are creating little microtears in your musculature which your body recognizes as a problem and rebuilds the muscle bigger and stronger so next time your body endures that, it won’t happen again. That’s why when you start at the gym, a 10 pound dumbbell might feel heavy and then after a few weeks, it feels easier. Your body has adapted to the stress (damage) and built the muscles back stronger so it can handle a 10 pound weight. If you are looking to increase your strength and overall muscle mass, you want to cause this microdamage to your muscles. However, there is very much a limit to how much damage is good and how much can set you back, and everyone is different.
Recovery is important. Your body needs time in between weight training sessions to rebuild and repair the damaged tissue. Some people need more recovery time than others, experimentation comes into play here. This is also a big component of what steroids do; they help the individual recover faster so they can train harder and more frequently. For normal general population clientele, 24-48 hours in between training sessions is likely ideal for recovery. It can extend beyond that depending on how your nutrition, sleep, and stress management is being handled.
It IS possible to resistance train daily, although some more thought is required. If you plan on training consecutive days in a row, cycling body parts, to assure that each body part is allotted appropriate rest, is important. There are two points to consider with this:
- Frequency is the name of the game in resistance training. You are going to see better results training your back 3x per week instead of once. If you are doing body part specific training, it will be harder to find time to hit the body parts multiple times per week.
- It is hard to isolate body parts. Sure you could be training “shoulders” in this session, but your triceps, upper back, core, and even legs can be assisting in those movements. They are still getting work and could get fatigued.
So how many days should you resistance train? And in what capacity? I am a firm believer that for general population clients, 2-3 days of effective full-body strength training is plenty. Ideally if you can give yourself 24-48 hours in between sessions that would work great. On the off days, staying active through steps and movement, as well as completing recovery/mobility work will really show good results in a few months. Give your body time to rest and recover and stop driving it into the ground!
