When I have a new personal training client, I am often asked “how often should I workout?”. Well the answer is varied, however, if you are completely new to strength training, my suggestion is 2 times a week.
First, you obviously progress faster than once a week, second, you don’t want to push yourself too much to start with, lastly your body will be used to it, and later you can do 3 times or more in a week.
Reaching the plateau
If you have been training for years, you will most likely have the moment “I am not gaining the strength / bigger by the training”.
The answer is quite simple. You need to train harder.
Once the body adapts to the stress imposed on it, no further gains are made. Therefore, the body must experience an intensity or overload that is greater than what it is used to.
If training is too hard
When muscles are stressed beyond their normal demands, they respond in some way to the imposed stress. If the training stress is much greater than normal, the muscles react negatively to high levels of tissue microtrauma. Although exceptionally challenging training sessions are typically associated with several days of muscle weakness, fatigue, and discomfort, they may not lead to larger and stronger muscles.
Training systematically
When muscles are stressed beyond their normal demands, they respond in some way to the imposed stress. If the training stress is much greater than normal, the muscles react negatively to high levels of tissue microtrauma. Although exceptionally challenging training sessions are typically associated with several days of muscle weakness, fatigue, and discomfort, they may not lead to larger and stronger muscles.
Resting is part of training
It depends on the type of training you choose. However, research indicates that muscular strength increase significantly above baseline levels 72 to 96 hours after an appropriately stressful session of resistance exercise.
Double progressive training method
There are two ways to strength training progression. The first one is to increase the number of repetitions. One thing you need to keep in mind doing this is each exercise should be completed in less than 90 seconds since that’s how your body moves anaerobically (important to increase muscle’s strength / hypertrophy).
If you are into pushups and can already do 50 repetitions, and adding more from here is not the smartest way to train at all.
The second method is to increase the exercise workload as you may guess.
But which method should you use? If you want to train safely, you always want to increase the repetitions. Say you are working on 10 repetitions of lat pulldown, and you start to feel it is not tiring at the last rep of exercise, you go up to 15 repetitions of 3 sets, then you may feel easy on it again, you add the weight but not more than 5%. Double progressive method can be used for any repetitions range and quite versatile for training beginners and experienced one.