How Often Should You Strength Train to Build Muscle?
When you’re looking to build muscle, it’s important to pay attention to how often you strength strain. While it was once conventional wisdom that you should exercise at the gym daily, we now know that isn’t true. And that can actually hinder your efforts to build muscle.
What happens when you exercise too often? If you hit the gym hard every day, you actually never give your body the opportunity to recover. You don’t actually build muscle while you’re working out.
That comes after your workout when your body rests and experiences recovery. At that time your body delivers amino acids to the muscle tissues to repair them and build new muscle mass. If you never give your body a period of rest, this recovery can’t happen.
Many people go to the gym every day and wonder why they’re not seeing results. Often it’s simply because they aren’t giving their body any rest in order to create the desired results. You need at least a 24 hour break after a workout.
And after a particularly intense workout you may need several days of rest to provide time for your muscles to recover. Most fitness experts recommend that you participate in high intensity workouts two or three times a week and spend the rest of the week in recovery.
While you may feel like you’re accomplishing more by becoming a gym rat, you’re actually preventing your body from having the time it needs to provide you with what you really want – more muscle mass.
Instead, schedule a routine that has you at the gym two or three days a week. On the days between allow your body to rest and recover. Make sure you get plenty of sleep and lots of good nutrition and you’ll start to see results quickly. In fact you need about eight to ten hours of sleep to truly recover.
On the days you do work out, try to target muscles on the entire body rather than focusing on just the upper or lower body. The more balanced your workout is, the more muscle you’ll build and the better your results will be.
When you’re beginning your workout routine, resist the urge to strength train every day. This will only lead you to a plateau and frustration from wasted time. Determining how often you should strength train to build muscle is important, and by limiting your workout time and getting quality over quantity you’ll have more success.
Strength Training
