Is 1 day's rest enough?

[booze]

my local physio told me that muscles only need a days rest inbetween workouts so working out each muscle group every second day is not overtraining. Does this sound about right because i dont want to overtrain

[armorforsleep]

this may be true for body parts dominated by slow twitch fibers, such as your calves, forearms and abs, but even those need at least a days rest. the big stuff, your back, chest, legs, shoulders, need a lot of time. minimum 4 days but most here give it a week.

[abarlament]

Lots of research suggests that hormone levels and mRNA start to return to baseline after 48 hours. If you want to look at the research check out the HST website. Haycock basically saw the research and set up a program to incorporate all of it.

[Vas85]

Originally Posted by armorforsleep

this may be true for body parts dominated by slow twitch fibers, such as your calves, forearms and abs, but even those need at least a days rest. the big stuff, your back, chest, legs, shoulders, need a lot of time. minimum 4 days but most here give it a week.

the Calves if properly trained hurt me almost always 3-4days onwards, i tihnk atleast 3days of not utilizing the muscle is required for optimal rest, but even then i find it too taxing if you are to lift for dumbells twice a week with optimum intensity! it will work for like 2-3weeks and then your CNS just gets taxxed and you will bomb out eventually.

[DaRkAnGel]

Originally Posted by armorforsleep

this may be true for body parts dominated by slow twitch fibers, such as your calves, forearms and abs, but even those need at least a days rest. the big stuff, your back, chest, legs, shoulders, need a lot of time. minimum 4 days but most here give it a week.

4 days rest is nonsense... it varies greatly from person to person but almost anyone can get away with training the same part 48 hrs after training it the first time.

[DaRkAnGel]

Originally Posted by abarlament

Lots of research suggests that hormone levels and mRNA start to return to baseline after 48 hours. If you want to look at the research check out the HST website. Haycock basically saw the research and set up a program to incorporate all of it.

That also reminds me of the golgi body section in UD 2.0... im gonna have to look it up cause it talks about the same thing and what limits your recovery and etc.

If you look it up first please summarize here .

[abarlament]

I would, but I left my copy at my house this quarter. Dorm rooms are small, gotta prioritize space.

[Khaine]

Wouldn't this really depend on how hard you work your muscles each time.....? The difference in recouperation periods should be proportional to the intensity of the workout, no.....? Meaning, if you do 6 sets on a muscle group, a couple days rest may be enough, but if you do 10-12 sets of direct work in adition to all the assisted work throughout he week, I'd assume you'd need a longer period of rest......

Originally Posted by Vas85

i tihnk atleast 3days of not utilizing the muscle is required for optimal rest, but even then i find it too taxing if you are to lift for dumbells twice a week with optimum intensity! it will work for like 2-3weeks and then your CNS just gets taxxed and you will bomb out eventually.

This is pretty much my experience too.... You CAN manage hitting the muscles with high intensity twice a week, but not for long periods of time..... You'll just end up overtraining at some point....

[Cort]

Originally Posted by Khaine

This is pretty much my experience too.... You CAN manage hitting the muscles with high intensity twice a week, but not for long periods of time..... You'll just end up overtraining at some point....

Periodization. Volume.

You are saying this like its a bad thing, but it isn't.

Even if you do 12 sets as opposed to 6, it still isn't going to double the recovery time. Your body doesn't work like that.

It will differ from person to person, but I've never had trouble hitting muscles hard twice a week, and sometimes more than that.

[Vas85]

Originally Posted by Cort

Periodization. Volume.

You are saying this like its a bad thing, but it isn't.

Even if you do 12 sets as opposed to 6, it still isn't going to double the recovery time. Your body doesn't work like that.

It will differ from person to person, but I've never had trouble hitting muscles hard twice a week, and sometimes more than that.

Cort i did almost twice a week training, 4day split and i actually did increase my kg's for few exercises by upto 5-6kilograms more per dumbell, so its very good, but in the same sense i can't continue doing it, becuase it became to taxing and i didn't really have the time to do it, so now i'm back to a 7day split once per week, were for the last 3-4weeks i was doing a 4day split so i repeated everything twice in 8days.

As you call it periodization i think it is good, if you want to bust plateus i guess to new weights, i found i was able to up the intensity as i was training the 4day split but now its good, i have increased the weights significantly and i am now doing a 7day split.

[Vas85]

Originally Posted by Cort

Periodization. Volume.

You are saying this like its a bad thing, but it isn't.

Even if you do 12 sets as opposed to 6, it still isn't going to double the recovery time. Your body doesn't work like that.

It will differ from person to person, but I've never had trouble hitting muscles hard twice a week, and sometimes more than that.

But like Todd has mentioned, and i now stick to his idea of the 4-6rep range, were i am always performing 6 and no more than 6reps with weight that i can only handle for 6 reps, and i found with this that i cannot do more than 5-6sets for triceps bicepsp, and for chest it would be about 7-8sets, so with that said i think if you are training the 6sets with the maximum weight that you can handle, it wont even be possible to go to 12 sets?

[Cort]

Talk to Khaine about that, wasn't my idea. I was just pointing out that the recovery time wont double just because you do twice as much work. Your body may take longer to recover, but it isn't going to take 2-3x as long.

Once a week works fine, but I just feel that great results can be had from going twice, and even three times a week if you manage it properly and understand where to place deloading periods in your schedule to avoid over-training.

Just imagine that you only work a muscle once a week directly, and in 2-4 days you are fully recovered. You spend 3-5 days of wasted time where you could've already had another good workout. This is just going by my physical feelings though. After 2-3 days I'm usually feeling ready for some heavy lifting again, and if I don't do it I feel like crap, and by the end of a 7 day period I feel like that area has gone completely soft from lack of stimulation.

[rangers97]

I am attempting to take all this into consideration by embarking on a 3 day a week full body routine. My wife and I are going to try it. We experimented yesterday with doing two sets for some exercises and 1 set for others and let me tell you, I think we may need to adjust it because I didn't get through the workout! I felt like I was gonna puke by the end and I didn't even finish everything.

So I think we may go with a M, W, F full body workout, 1 set per exercise and set it up so that once we hit 10 reps of the exercise at a certain weight, we will bump it up 5-10 lbs and keep going from there.

I figure we will get the benefits of working each muscle 3 times a week, and by doing only 1 hard set for each exercise, I am sure we can control any overtraining tendencies.

I agree with Cort, I feel working a muscle once a week is a semi waste. Sure it feels great to trash your chest on tris on a monday, and you may still feel good in that area on thursday even, but by the weekend, you are going stir crazy cause you wanna lift again, but you *have to* wait until monday, by which time you are soft in a sense. If I can hit all my muscles with one hard set to *semi* failure 3 days a week, I really think it might accomplish more. By using the muscles all week long basically, it is my opinion that you must force your body to grow to compensate for the stresses you are presenting it. I highly doubt our bodies would just "fail" and not be able to press the loads, and by doing it more often, you encourage your body to step up its defense mechanisms and keep up with what you're doing.

Of course that's just my opinion

[TheBigness]

Ultimately i think the intensity at which one works out has a greater affect on recovery time than even genetics do. Workout your chest for 3 hours with heavy weights and try to do it 2 days later. It wont happen. work your chest for 15 minutes with heavy weights and try again 2 days later, you could probably keep that up for sometime before feeling stresses of over training

[Cort]

Yeah, but then who trains chest for 3 hours straight?