How Often Should You Work Out?
How often should you work out? Once per week, twice, five times? The answer differs depending on how trained you are.
Beginners Vs. Intermediates
A beginner can get away with training the entire body several times per week, as a lot of the exhaustion he feels doesn’t come from the muscles being exhausted, but from the brain, which is trying to command the muscles into doing the movements. The better this connection works, the more muscle fibers are recruited into the movement and the more weight the beginner can move.
An intermediate or advanced trainee will have established most of this connection and in order to gain strength, his muscles really have to gain in size and that leaves them exhausted for longer:
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But what about one of our strongest members here at askscooby.com, dodothebird, who has found that working his muscles with less intensity, but more frequency has given him the best strength gains in comparison with working each muscle group one time per week?
I’m sorry, I meant volume, not intensity.
Well, either the muscles are exhausted after one workout or you do each workout with less intensity and accumulate the exhaustion over more than one workout.
In other words: If the intensity per workout is lower the total volume can be higher.
Personally I find it more difficult to keep track of things that way and if you judge it wrong, might go into overtraining.
Understood, thanks Evil!
At first, I really apreciate your work here. The videos are easy to understand =)
I have one question. I decided to follow your plan for beginners, (I can do 30 wide pushups, but not pullups). I´d like to know how often should I do full body exercise when I do thaibox 2-3 times a week, and my biceps and calves are really tired after that (we do more than 100 pushups there) Maybe I shouldn´t do more pushups other days??
Heah Lenny, I think the Thai boxing does two things: it covers cardio pretty good for you and b) you already do a freaking lot of advanced difficulty push-ups 🙂
My suggestion is to do the push-ups during the boxing training as close grip,
https://evilcyber.com/fitness/triceps-training-closegrip-pushups/
which will be a better challenge, and that at home you should concentrate on working the back (pull-ups + dumbbell rows, for example) and legs. Right now you seem to be way stronger in the chest than in the back and that has to be taken care of.
This is agreeable for the average person, but then you have Olympic weightlifters training over ten times a week!
liftersblog.blogspot.com
Well, most people aren’t Olympic weightlifters, are they? 😉