There is a lot of debate around how often people should exercise when trying to improve their strength. The frequency, or how often you work out, is a very important part of your workout program. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to the best weight to lift for a workout. It depends on other factors like intensity and volume, and everyone is different.
It can be difficult to determine how often you should workout when there are various lifts that need to be focused on- and numerous recoveries that your body needs. If you work out too much, your body will feel bad. You are not a bad athlete if you are not working out at the gym every day. There is no definitive answer to how often you should workout. It depends on a variety of factors, none of which have to do with what you should do.
How often you should exercise depends on various factors, which will be discussed in this article. These factors can influence how often you should exercise, and a few things you should consider when finding your ideal frequency.
Defining Exercise Frequency
How often you exercise per week is referred to as your exercise frequency. It’s influenced by a wide range of things. How much lifting experience do you have? Do you have very intense training sessions? Are you getting sufficient sleep? Should you work out every day, even if you want to? The frequency of your training is crucial to making any program work optimally for your body, your brain, and your goals.
Think about how often you work different muscle groups or movements when trying tofrequency of exercise. How often you work out is not the only important thing, what you do during your workout is just as important. A full-body split three times a week means you will hit your legs three times each week. The first workout plan requires you to train four or five times a week with two specific leg days. The second workout plan has a higher overall training frequency because you are required to train your legs three times a week instead of twice.
Best Exercise Frequency for Beginners
You don't need to work out every day to experience fitness gains, according to a study from 2015. If you're new to strength sports, you only need to train once or twice a week to stimulate growth.
The study looked at how training once or twice a week affected the muscular strength and size of the elbow flexors (biceps) in untrained participants. The researchers divided 30 subjects into two groups who performed the same amount of total volume during their week. One group trained on Monday while the other group trained on Monday and Wednesday. The subjects in this study didn’t have any experience with resistance training.
The participants all did the same exercises and number of reps, which included lat pulldowns, seated rows, and barbell bench presses. Both groups saw an improvement in muscle thickness, arm circumference, and peak torque in the right arm flexor at the end of 10 weeks. The group that trained twice a week saw more improvements than the group that only trained once a week.
You can improve as a beginner by training just once a week. You will see more muscle growth if you are willing and able to train twice a week.
Best Exercise Frequency for Intermediate Lifters
If you've been lifting weights for one to three years, you fall into the category of an intermediate lifter. If you're looking to safely increase the intensity of your workouts, you'll probably want to start lifting more often.
The study found that the group that trained six times per week saw greater muscle growth than the group that trained three times per week. Even though they trained differently often, participants all did the same workout volume throughout the week.
After the study was completed, the researchers observed that both groups had increased their 1-RM back squat, bench press, deadlift, powerlifting total, and Wilks score, and that their body composition had changed in a similar way. The researchers suggested that the volume of training may be more important for improvement than the frequency.
This means that an ideal training frequency for an intermediate lifter would be around 3 times per week. You may be able to train up to six times a week if you can recover well. You can get the same benefits by sticking to the same volume over a shorter period of time.
Best Exercise Frequency for Advanced Athletes
You've been lifting weights for more than three years, and you love nothing more than the feeling of being in the gym on a slow Sunday morning. One might be tempted to try to achieve new goals by working out more frequently. If you want to improve your performance, one way to do it is to increase your training frequency. Working out frequently can be enjoyable and emotionally gratifying when done safely and with proper recovery time.
But more frequent doesn’t always mean more effective. A study conducted in 2019 followed 23 cisgender male participants through two different eight-week protocols. The first group trained each muscle group five times a week, while the second group only trained each muscle group once a week. The total volume and intensity were the same across the weeks, but the amount of time spent exercising differed.
Both groups showed similar improvements in strength and muscle size. Based on the text, it can be inferred that volume and intensity are more important variables for success in the gym than frequency.
If you have a lot of experience with lifting, you can work out your entire body almost every day and see big improvements. You can still make a lot of progress by training just once a week. You can train every day, focusing on one major muscle group each day, and still experience big improvements. This means that when you have enough training experience, you can do whatever you want at the gym. You can largely choose how often you work out each week, as long as you do approximately 10 sets per muscle group.
The Best Training Frequency for Building Muscle
Optimal training frequency is a hotly debated subject.
There is a debate among fitness experts about how often people should train their entire body. Some believe that people should do this two to three times per week, while others think that this approach can lead to overtraining, injury, and burnout.
Anecdotal evidence is all over the place as well.
If you read through online forums and talk to people who go to the gym regularly, you'll hear stories about people making great progress by training each major muscle group once a week, as well as stories about people who train those muscle groups 3, 4, or even 5 times per week.
Weightlifters who mix it up and train different muscle groups with different frequencies may see better results.
Some argue that small muscle groups such as biceps, shoulders and calves, need to be trained up to four times a week, whilst large muscle groups such as legs only require one intense workout a week.
If you look to scientific literature for answers, you will not find many that are reliable.
There is divided opinion on how often one should work out to make the most progress. Some studies suggest that working out more frequently yields the best results, while others contend that fewer workouts per week are just as effective.
So, what should you do?
Should you be more cautious and keep frequency low, or more extreme, or somewhere in between?
Here’s the short answer:
How often you should train a muscle group per week depends on how much total volume you do for that muscle group.
The frequency with which you train is not as important as ensuring that you have an optimal weekly volume in order to build muscle.
There is no easy answer to how often you should train. It depends on various factors.
The frequency of training depends on the person and the circumstances. The frequency at which you should train depends on several factors, according to research.
A review study conducted by scientists at the University of Goteborg helps explain this phenomena.
They looked through every scientific study from 1970 to 2006 that talked about how often you need to work out to see muscle growth.
The scientists only looked for studies that…
The gold standard method for quantifying muscle growth is considered to be using MRI or CT scans to measure muscle growth.
Used healthy, uninjured people aged 18 to 59.
The authors reported the number of sets and reps the subjects did for each exercise as well as what exercises the subjects performed.
The studies they looked at excluded any cases where the subjects were in a negative energy balance, which would significantly reduce muscle and strength gains.
The researchers found that training each major muscle group two to three times per week generally produced the most muscle gain.
The researchers emphasized that this is just a general guideline, and that you should tailor your training program to fit your goals, experience level, and capacity for recovery.
The researchers said that people who are just starting to lift weights can often make good progress by working out less often, while people who have been lifting for a while may need to work out more often.
In other words, if you are new to weightlifting, you may only need to train a muscle group once or twice a week to maximize muscle growth. However, as you get closer to your genetic potential for muscle gain, you may need to train that muscle group up to three times per week.
Other studies have supported the results of this review.
Weightlifters who are experienced can train major muscle groups just once per week and still do well.
What gives?
The study found that people who had healthier microbiomes were more likely to have higher IQs. Researchers found that people with healthier microbiomes were more likely to have higher IQs.
The researchers looked at 25 studies that looked at the relationship between training frequency and muscle growth.
The results were surprising.
While previous studies have found a relationship between training frequency and muscle growth, this study found no such relationship. This means that working a muscle group multiple times throughout the week won't necessarily lead to more muscle growth.
There’s a catch, though:
The only time this was true was when they looked at studies where both the high and low training frequency groups did the same amount of total training volume.
Both groups would gain a similar amount of muscle even though one group did 30 reps while the other group did 20 reps. This is because both groups did a total of 60 reps of chest exercises per week.
The researchers found that if one group did more volume than the other, higher frequencies usually led to more muscle growth.
This means that if you are doing a lot of repetitions for a certain muscle group, you will generally see more progress if you do the repetitions over several workouts rather than trying to do them all in one session.
You can do a moderate amount of volume for a particular muscle group in one workout without reducing your results.
The authors concluded that as long as you do enough total volume, you can choose how often to work out each muscle group based on what you prefer.
This means that the number of times you train a muscle group per week will depend on how much work you do on that muscle group each week.
Before we continue, it's important to note that there are different ways to measure training volume.
I would rather measure the training volume by counting the number of sets that are close to technical failure because it is a better indicator of the amount of work being done.
In the future, when I use the term “volume,” I will be referring to it in the context of performing a set number of repetitions. This change does not significantly alter what we have talked about thus far in regards to the connection between volume and frequency. It just makes it simpler and more manageable.
