But if you do a dedicated arm workout, that changes dramatically. In this study, beginners doing 8 sets of preacher curls caused enough muscle damage that, after 4 days, their biceps were still recovering. Not only does that volume add up, but those workouts are also fairly quick to recover from, allowing you to train your arms more often. For example, in this study , we see twice as much growth in our triceps if we do both the bench press and the triceps extensions.
The same is true with many of the other muscles in our arms. So, after doing your compound lifts, you could add in some biceps curls, triceps extensions, lateral raises , and forearm curls. Or you could add a fourth workout day, giving your arms a day all to themselves.
Our abs recover quite quickly and can handle quite a lot of training volume, meaning that we can train them a few times per week without any issues. And since our abs are active during most of our lifts, we often train them every workout—even if we never do any ab isolation exercises.
Like your arms, your abs will get a little bit of work during most of your workouts. The chin-up, push-up, overhead press, front squat, and a variety of other lifts all train your abs.
But if you notice your abs falling behind, doing some crunches or hanging leg raises at the end of your workouts can work wonders. Working out 3—6 times per week tends to be ideal for building muscle.
To build muscle at full speed, we want to train each muscle at least twice per week. That means doing 2 full-body workouts. Why would you do 2 full-body workouts per week? You can work out just twice per week and still get pretty good results. Plus, lifting twice per week is enough to get most of the health benefits of weight training. What are the downsides? Most of your energy will be eaten up by squatting, bench pressing, deadlifting, overhead pressing, and doing chin-ups.
To build a 2-day workout program, we recommend making 2—3 different full-body workouts and alternating between them. For example, the first workout might have 3—4 sets of front squats, the second might have no squats, and the third might have 2—3 sets of Zercher squats.
That gives you a squat frequency of 1. That frees up time and energy for mixing in a wider variety of lifts, allowing you to make your program more balanced, and allowing you to keep each workout from becoming overly fatiguing. We only need to train our muscles twice per week, so not every workout needs to train every muscle. That makes things much easier. For instance, we can squat and bench twice per week, but train our shoulders and arms three times per week.
The research on full-body workout routines is quite good, too. For example, in this study , putting a rest day between the full-body workouts allowed the participants to fully regain their strength, allowing them to train hard again. This is important because it means that even just that single day of rest is long enough to allow us to outlift ourselves every workout, achieving progressive overload. Why would you do 3 full-body workouts per week?
Your hands will get a break, so will your traps, so will your back, and so will your connective tissues. Even as an intermediate lifter, doing 3 full-body workouts is often enough to allow you to build muscle at full speed overall. That can mean doing specialization phases, where you spend a few months focusing on just a few muscle groups.
And that works very well, too. There are so many great exercises for building muscle , and we only have so much time to do them. By adding more workouts, we give ourselves more time and energy to do more lifts.
To build a 3-day workout program, as with the 2-day workout routine, we recommend making 2—3 different full-body workouts and alternating between them. For example, the first workout might have 3—5 sets of the bench press, the second might have the overhead press, and the third might have a close-grip bench press. This is the approach we used in the 3-day Outlift workout routine. You only need to train your muscles twice per week, so now we can explore body-part splits, perhaps even using a combination of full-body workouts and body-part splits.
For example, in this study , the participants doing a 4-day routine increased their chest circumference by slightly more, but overall, gained the same amount of muscle mass as the group doing 3 full-body workouts per week. Why would you do 4 workouts per week? As you get stronger, your sets will become more draining, requiring longer rest times. Workouts can start to get long, and it can be hard to grind through exercise after exercise. There are no major downsides to training 4 days per week, other than the extra time investment, especially if you need to commute to a gym.
Our connective tissues still get plenty of rest, and most people can recover from them fairly well. So if you want to add an extra workout day, I say go for it. To build a 4-day workout program, there are a variety of different options, and many of them are good.
Here are a few great ones:. Why would you do 5 workouts per week? As you get stronger, longer workouts can become hard. By working out more days per week, you can spread the exercises out over more days, keeping your workouts short.
A lot of people find those shorter workouts easier to manage, especially if they enjoy going to the gym or enjoy training at home. It becomes part of their daily routine. Even if you use an elaborate body-part split that keeps you from training your muscles two days in a row, you still need to watch out for fatigue, especially in the areas being worked every day, such as your spinal erectors. To build a 5-day workout program, you could do short full-body workouts every day, cycling through a variety of different exercises for each muscle group.
For instance, Monday is the squat, Tuesday is the leg extension, Thursday is the leg press, and so on. A more popular approach is to use a body-part split routine. For example, you might use a workout routine like this:. But there are many different body-part split permutations, and many of them are good. Why would you do 6 workouts per week? Other people enjoy going to the gym or find it easy to dip into short home workouts. If you want to lift weights more often, this is a good way to do it.
The workouts tend to be short, and you may need to intentionally use smaller lifts to avoid fatiguing your stabilizer muscles: seated shoulder pressing instead of standing, exercise machines instead of free weights, t-bar rows instead of barbell rows, and so on. And that works great, giving each muscle a day or two of recovery between workouts.
Even just lifting weights is great, and lifting does improve our cardiovascular fitness, but some dedicated cardio can help. Training your muscles 2—4 times per week is ideal for building muscle. There are many different workout routines that can stimulate your muscles 2—4 times per week, ranging from a 2-day full-body routine all the way up to a 6-day split routine. As a default, we recommend 3-day full-body routines for beginners and early intermediate lifters.
Then, once those workouts start getting too long and hard, or if you start running up against a plateau, consider adding a fourth day. There are a lot of good routines for building muscle.
When that soreness abates, you can train the muscle again. And, as always, if you want a customizable workout program and full guide that builds these principles in, check out our Outlift Intermediate Bulking Program , which includes both 3-day and 4-day workout routines. His specialty is helping people build muscle to improve their strength and general health, with clients including college, professional, and Olympic athletes. I work out at home and 6 short workouts are easier to fit in than 3 long ones.
Plus, I CAN do my workout at 9pm after kids are in bed if something prevents it during the day. To your comment about managing fatigue, I found that splitting the 4-day Hard Outlift routine in to 6 days was too much for me, especially in that 5th week. Average workout length across the 6 days and 5 weeks is about 35 minutes. Still leaves room for a little cardio a couple times per week. And in that case, I hear ya. I find long workouts a grind, too, especially with a young kid.
I still only train 2—4 days per week, but I use specialization phases so that I can still fight for progress in some areas. Right now I workout every other day, alternating between push and pull days. For example: push bench, overhead press, squat, shoulder and triceps acessories , off, pull chinup, deadlift, curls, row , off, push, off, pull etc.
Is there a better way to program? I am thinking of moving the rows to the push day and overhead press to the pull day, to even things out a bit. Working each body part twice every 8 days is perfect. Would it be even better if you were training your muscles twice every 7 days instead? I doubt it would make a meaningful difference.
But, yeah, you could spread the lifts out a bit. We do that sometimes in our programs. It works quite well. Hi Shane, very important topic you have addressed. Mostly the internet is full of articles that discuss frequency of training same muscle. Frequency of total workouts is not addressed so much. Anyway, as you have mentioned that muscle building continues days after which it cab be trained again.
But what if soreness persists for, say, 5 days if you have hit the muscle very hard? Compound lifts are exercises that are known in the fitness world to be the best bang for your buck since they recruit multiple muscles at a time. There are many compound movements, but the most common — the "big five" — are as follows:. If you are working with weights, it is important to make sure that you are using the right amount. For muscle definition, choose a weight that has you fatigued by the end of six to 12 repetitions.
This may take some trial and error. Keeping track of the weights you used will help you know what to choose for your next training session. Once you can do 12 repetitions with the same weight, it's time to progress to a heavier load. Good practice, says Rizzo, is to keep a log of your workouts, including how you felt during the workout and how you feel on your days off. A record like this will help provide valuable insights into how you are recovering and whether you should adjust your training.
As you advance, training frequency becomes a matter of individual preference and training styles. Maintaining the two-to-three-days-a-week regimen is acceptable for most people. It's a matter of listening to your body and testing to see what works best for you while using a log of your workouts, of course.
Advanced lifters should continue to perform the same compound lifts that they started out doing while increasing the number of sets, reps, or resistance. To challenge themselves, advanced lifters can add on some more complex exercises to their routines if desired. He suggests trying your hand at these more advanced exercises:.
Sticking to the recommended two to three lifting sessions per week should help you avoid overtraining , but it is also important to always listen to your body. Some of us recover much slower and react to different stimuli differently," says Rizzo.
It is important to know that more is not always better in strength training, there is an optimum. Your training goal defines how many strength training workouts per week you need to do. When asking how many strength training workouts-per-week you need, to begin with, the end in mind, think backward and determine what is your desired goal? What is our training goal, is it to get stronger, is it to become bigger, and is it to be more powerful, or do we just want to be able to endure longer?
If you want to become stronger, you are probably better off with two to three strength training sessions per week. This form of strength training, also referred to maximum strength training has an effect on the nervous system and requires a lot of time for the nervous system to recover. Available information and evidence state that we need 48 to 96 hours between these kinds of training sessions to recover.
Though this is not always practicable; however, it gives an idea that you need longer rest so as to recover from these sessions.
If you want to know how many strength training workouts-per-week is needed to increase our strength, it is important you do two to three training session per week with a minimum interval of one day rest in between the strength training sessions. The ideal number of strength training workouts to develop maximum strength is between 2 — 4 strength training sessions per week. If you are interested in hypertrophy; there are basically two mechanisms, functional hypertrophy and non-functional hypertrophy.
Functional hypertrophy, also termed myofibrillar hypertrophy, leads to a growth of active contractile tissue, which means the muscle tissue is growing. Non-functional hypertrophy, also termed sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, leads to an increased energy storage in the muscle combined with more water being stored in the muscle and resulting in bigger muscles. Please note, that the set and rep scheme provided is just a guideline, the number of repetitions you can do varies from individual to individual also referred to inter-individual differences , as well as it varies between different muscle groups also referred to as intra-individual differences.
More information on inter-individual differences and intra-individual differences read the small article Inter- and Intra-individual Differences in Problem Solving Across the Lifespan a bit of a heavier read, but explains the difference pretty well. However, it has a stronger effect on the muscle tissue leading to more muscle damage.
This is the reason why people that are interested in gaining and maximizing muscle size tend to split up the training they do for the different muscle groups also referred to split training or split-routines. For instance, a simple split could be in the first training session, we do upper body; second training session, we do lower body.
There are various different split routines and even more different philosophies on split routines, covering all those would go far beyond the scope of this article. Bottom line:The ideal number of strength training workouts for functional hypertrophy and non-functional hypertrophy is between 3 — 6 strength training sessions per week.
The ideal number of strength training workouts for functional hypertrophy and non-functional hypertrophy is between 3 — 6 strength training sessions per week. If you are an athlete and compete in a sport, you will probably be interested to become more powerful at any point in your season. Power can be trained with a broad variety of intensities, depending on your training goal and the adaptation you want to see.
You can see an outline of the different intensities Power Training workouts in the articles. For power development, you tend to have lesser frequency per week because it also has a very strong influence on the central nervous system.
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