I’ve been hitting the gym every day for a month now. I’m doing 45 min of aerobics followed by a couple of sets on 4 different weight machines. I heard somewhere that one should wait a day between excercising the same muscles, but I’ve been doing the same machines every day. I am definitely seeing some results.
What’s the straight dope? Should I alternate days exercising specific muscles or just keep with my daily regimen?
I have often wondered this myself. Traditional wisdom says every other day and I have read that it takes a muscle 48 hours to recover from heavy lifting.
But people use many muscles every single day and it would seem that muscles are built for use. The heart for instance, is often exercised every single day. We all use our legs every day and many people have jobs that require their legs to be worked hard every day (as well as their backs and other muscles used for loading and lifting.)
And so I have wondered this myself and actually have thought about posting this very question recently. I can’t give you the definitive answer though. Sorry.
Hey Dan,
This is a real can of worms, and you will probably get a different answer from each person who replies, but i train regularly in the gym and have been kickboxing for around 9 years so will give you my own view on this.
Firstly it depends what you want to do and where you are at now, if you have extra fat that you are trying to get rid of then the cardio you are doing will definately help, if you are trying to bulk up and pack on muscle then i suggest you need to ease off on the daily training of the major muscle groups as training them every day can lead to burnout, remember that muscle growth occurs when at rest not when you are in the gym and if you are hitting the weights every day then you may not be giving the muscles the time to rest.
Also if bulking up is your wish then you need to be supplementing your diet with a good whey protien (at least 2grams per pound of bodyweight per day) and also a good Creatine monohydrate supplement will help you trian harder for longer.
Ask any questions on this and i will help any way i can form my own admiddedly limited knowledge.
I agree largely with what Diablos said, in that it entirely depends upon what your goals in weight training are. If you’re trying to bulk up and doing very heavy weight, many muscles can go about a week or so. If you’re just doing light weights with lots of reps and trying to burn fat, then you can hit them almost every day. Again, to echo what Diablos said, because it can’t be emphasized how important it is, your muscles only grow when you’re resting, and overtraining is very common when starting out and can quickly lead to burn out and/or limited results.
Of course, there’s other factors to consider such as body-type, age, muscle-types, etc.
Anyway, I encourage you to share a bit more about your goals and routine and we might be able to be more specific about whether this is a good thing for you or not.
The heart’s a different beast entirely, so it’s not really relevant here. The people who do physical labor every day aren’t working with the intensity that’s involved in most weight training programs, so it’s much easier for them to recover after the initial adaptations.
I’m trying to lose weight, improve my cardio health, and add some muscle so that I look better.
I’m doing 30-45 minutes a day on the stationary bike for aerobic exercise. I’m assuming that is something I can do every day without problem. I’ve also been doing weight training for my upper body which has never been as strong as my lower body. I’m doing 2-3 sets of 10-12 reps of bicep curls, chest presses, tricep exercises, and crunches. My arms have started to get good definition.
How so? Although it is involuntary, it is a striped muscle rather than a smooth muscle. Therefore it is composed of tissues similar to all the voluntary muscles.
The heart is made of cardiac muscle.
The wiki article also points out that
striated is another term for striped.
adj. also stri·at·ed (-td)
In other words
Did you read the rest of the article I linked to, where they went on to point out all the differences between skeletal and cardiac muscle?
Yes, they talk about the difference between mononucleated, binucleated and multinucleate cells. Forgive me for being dense, but if you elaborate your point, I can make a more congnizant response.
The differences between the muscles may not be that big of a deal however. Doctors have been experimenting with using back and shoulder muscles to build an auxilary heart and they find muscles will transform from one type to the other.
MUSCLE FASHIONED INTO AUXILIARY HEART IN DOG link
Hey Dan,
I should think you will be ok with the cardio each day, 30-45 mins is within acceptable levels for daily workouts and the only issue i was going to rasie about daily training in this sense is to just keep an eye on what you body is telling you, ie if your knee begins to hurt then lay off til it feels better.
It can sometimes be an issue with people who go “street running” on hard surfaces every day and then develop shin splints or some such other “niggle” which then develops into a bigger problem because they keep on running anyway.
In terms of the resistance work you are doing on the weights as a rough guide try to split your training into three groups and train non-competitive groups together (never train biceps and triceps on the same day) a typical split can be;
Starting out you will see gains very rapidly but bear in mind that the body is a wonderfull tool for adapting, you MUST change your workouts round every three months to keep seeing results, (doing 20 bicep curls at 20k for a year will just make you very good at biceps curls and not build more muscle).
If you are in a good gym then the gym supervisors should be able to offer advice on new workouts etc or use the net to find new ways to do excercises.
Lastly remember the old adage that muscle is heavier than fat and although i have been hitting the gym seriously for about two years and have lost lots of body fat as well as bulking up loads i also have stayed more or less the same weight, this is just one of those things.
Good luck
Intense body building routines can have an 8-day week, wherin each key body part is intensely worked twice every ‘week’.
It depends on how many sets and reps you do per body part. If one day you do just 4-6 sets of benches for chest and you do about 6-10 reps each set, you can probably hit your chest again in 2 days.
But…Hit it with 3-4 sets of flat beches, 3-4 of inclines, 3-4 of pec deck, 3-4 of decline dumbells and 3-4 of flys and you can forget about hitting the chest muscles for another 4 days – Maybe more.
I’m not sure that anyone yet knows the definitive straight dope on this. I’ve been involved in self-training for at least 20 years, and every five years I notice that the rules change!
What follows is my own observations plus what reading I’ve done on the subject:
If you do weight training “to failure”, then you’ll probably feel a bit sore within several hours of each workout, and perhaps more so the first few times. If this describes you, then you may get better results by working the particular muscle every other day.
More and more evidence suggests that amateur athletes with a lot of willpower end up overtraining, resulting in diminished results and injury.
I have found that it makes sense to start out slower than you’d like, with less volume than you want, and fewer times per week than you’re motivated to do. It takes a good deal of time to get your body ready for a high-activity lifestyle, but if you take your time, you can do it.
Keep in mind that your body recovers more slowly as you age.
Remember the coach’s saying: You don’t get stronger when you’re working out, you get stronger when you’re recovering.
This suggests that a volume of maybe 45 minutes of below-threshold cardiovascular workout and 30 minutes of strength training every other day is plenty to start out with. If you feel like doing more, sit in a relaxing warm bath until the feeling goes away.
I have a running coach who is constantly cautioning me about this. Whenever I feel strong during a run, he tells me to ignore it. He believes that the foolproof measure of training capacity is resting heart rate. Take your heart rate immediately when you wake. In fact, try to stay lying down while you do it! Then monitor it on a regular basis. If it gets more than 10 bpm above “normal”, you’re overtraining.
Cardiac muscle physiology is very different from that of skeletal muscle. The heart is designed to contract every second or so for seventy years. This workload is very different from what you expect from your biceps. I could talk about Z-lines, action potential curves, myosin and troponins, the sarcoplasmic reticulum, etc. but some people just believe what they want to believe, you know?
Working the same muscles everyday will pay dividends but only in the short term, until burnout. If you hope to increase in strenght or size the key is to work the muscles out 2-3 times per week at higher intensities – if the workout is tough enough (and tough does not mean “long”), you wouldn’t want to do it daily.
Dr_Pap, MD, B.Eng (Biomechanical Engineering)
I am 61 and go to gym every day Gradually increased work I did and weight trained every day same exercises. I have been ill for 1.5 years with continual coughs colds flu etc Very depressing
Doctors just said it was one of those things. Have only just realised that if you train as I have been doing immune system drops and you catch every disease going round. Since I have been doing weights every other day feel much better and I am not Ill at last! Obviously the recovery periods are very important!!
If doing intense loads, such as typical strength routine of 3 sets of 5 reps, you’ll need about 48 hours to recover as a novice. More advanced lifters can require much longer. This is the basis of strength training - load the muscles to the max to stimulate a need for adaptation, and give it sufficient time to recover and grow stronger for the next time at the gym. If you’re not doing “intense” work, you may not need as long to recover.
The people who go to the gym to lift without a day of recovery in between (and know what they’re doing) are splitting the workouts into different muscle groups, giving each enough time to recover. For novices, this is not the ideal thing to do and should be saved for intermediate+ lifters. Novices should do a limited number of effective, non-isolation lifts such as squats, bench press, overhead press, deadlift, and pullups, working most of the body at the same time (a single day may include squat, bench press, and deadlift).
Overtraining is another phenomenon, and it’s systemic, not specific to certain muscles. It happens when you try to do too much for too long. It has negative effects on the whole body.
Also, you should probably do the aerobic stuff after the weight training, so you can actually load muscles as much as possible to stimulate adaptation, rather than having them be tired when it comes to lift.
The answer is: somewhere in the middle. Working out literally every day - never taking a day off - is a bit excessive, your body needs some recovery time occasionally. But equally there’s no need to take every other day off unless you’re just starting out and your body is really sore after each session.
This study goes into a lot of detail about the “frequency” you should train for different types of resistance training. It varies a little bit depending on whether you’re trying to work out for tone, strength, muscle mass, size, etc, but their basic conclusion is this:
Novice or beginner - 2 to 3 days per week
Intermediate - 3 to 4 days per week
Advanced - 4 to 6 days per week
The difference is down to whether you’re doing full-body workouts, or focusing on specific muscles each time - ie. if you’re an intermediate and you’re doing full-body resistance workouts, do it 3 days per week. But if you’re an intermediate working certain specific muscle groups each day, then go 4 days per week. It notes that the highest-level athletes, such as elite bodybuilders or Olympic athletes, will use that same time structure but may have multiple sessions on each day - for instance they might do two or three short sessions every day, 5 days per week, focusing on different muscles in each session. The study found that if you train every single day you won’t get optimal results because your body needs a certain amount of recovery time.
Note that all of that is for resistance training, which is weights, weight machines or body weight exercises like press-ups and sit-ups. It doesn’t provide data for the optimal frequency of aerobic exercise. But I imagine the advice is something similar: don’t train 7 days a week, but at the same time 3.5 days a week is needlessly restrictive. Go for 4-6 days a week, depending on how your body feels (personally I find I can usually tell when I need a rest day or not, simply from how sore or fatigued the muscles feel).