How often should you do muscle building workouts for optimum effectiveness? Working out every day, or even three times a week is a mistake. Timing must allow for full recovery. Medical research on how long this takes may surprise you.

Muscle Building Workouts – All About Dose-Response

One of the most common mistakes that trainers make is to advise their clients to workout too often. In our society, we have the notion that we should do some kind of exercise every day or we will not make good progress. And heaven help anyone who is so slovenly as to work out only once per week!

All of these notions are based either on assumptions or on inertia … we always did it this way, so it must be the best way to do it. Now here is a surprise:

The folks at BodybyScience.net have really dug into the medical research on the issue of “dose-response” for exercise. In other words, how much/how often (dose) for what result (response). Since one of the guys behind this program is an MD (Doug McGuff) and since the other one is a studious and experienced science-based trainer (John Little), you can expect that what they have to say is backed by scientific research.

What they have discovered regarding timing for full recovery from muscle building workouts is that the every-day, every-other-day, or three-times-a-week standard frequencies actually undermine muscle building. They do not allow for full recovery. And full recovery is crucial for optimum muscle building.

Dr. McGuff writes long articles that offer extensive details and explanations of what he has discovered. Whenever possible he also cites his personal experience or his experience training others at his own training center in South Carolina.

I suggest that you take some time and see how you can optimize your muscle building workouts by reading this article by the BodybyScience folks. It is well worth it.

FULL ARTICLE: THE DOSE-RESPONSE RELATIONSHIP OF EXERCISE

The really nice thing about this approach is that it makes ‘living in the gym’ totally unnecessary … actually even going to the gym more than once per week is counterproductive.

Updating muscle building workouts,

FitScientist
(Dennis)