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When it comes to bodybuilding,
more is not always better. For instance, while your initial
temptation may be to take your ambitious mind and eager muscles to the gym
as often as possible, that strategy can actually work against you.
Again, one essential key is to know when to work out and when to
rest. Too much of one or the other and you've upset the apple
cart.
As you lift, you're actually
fatiguing and wearing down the muscle tissue. It's during the
recovery process that your muscles actually grow bigger and
stronger. So as you can see, you should never train the same muscles
on consecutive days since it's actually counterproductive.
That's where a split routine
comes in. This is a program in which you train different muscles on
different days. So while you might lift on consecutive days—chest,
shoulders, and triceps on Monday; legs, back, and biceps on Tuesday—you'll
be using different muscles each day. Not only does this allow ample
time for your muscles to recover, it means you'll be doing fewer exercises
on any given day. This prevents burnout, allows you to spend less
time lifting on each visit, and means you'll be able to work more
intensely on the exercises that you will do.
At the other end of the "too
many" spectrum, if you train too infrequently, the strength gains you made
in one session will be lost by the next. That means even if you do
the best routine in the world on January 1 and little or no training until
February 1, the result would be minimal at best in the strength gains
department. That should come as no surprise, but we hear people who
lift twice a month lament the fact that they're not making much
progress.
So what is the ideal frequency?
That varies from individual to individual and has a lot to do with how
hard each training session is. Here's another immutable rule to
note: A hard workout will require more recovery time than an easy
one.
Individual strengths and
weaknesses aside, two workouts per week is good; three may be
better. Whenever possible, we advise beginners to aim for three
workouts. If you manage to do two, fine; however, if you're shooting
for two, the tendency is that you miss one and compromise your
gains. There's another reason why three sessions may be better than
two. Early in your workout life, one of our primary goals is to get
your brain and body used to the exercises. At this stage we're less
concerned with intensity than frequency. So don't worry about your
body's ability to tolerate three workouts a week. Once your make
going to the gym a regular part of your life—when your bodybuilding
workout becomes part of your regular routine—we'll up the intensity and
really start to see significant gains.
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