Quote:
Originally Posted by Orpheus
it really depends on your body--different people regenerate muscles at different speeds. one famous body builder was able to work out the same muscles every single day. that's superhuman. i think on average, most people need at least 3-5 days to recouperate.
|
This is exactly right, muscles need time to recover, particularly from workouts that really push your limits.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Orpheus
personally, i work out every muscle group on 5 day cycles, which seems to be exactly how long it takes for my muscles to stop being sore. that's for strength training. i break my muscles into 3 groups:
1. chest / triceps
2. back / biceps / shoulders
3. legs
.....
my schedule when losing weight:
4 mornings a week: 1 hour straight cardio @150bpm, 10min ab crunches, 10min stretching
mon night: muscle group #1 for 2 hours
tues night: muscle group #2 for 2 hours
wedn: rest
thurs: muscle group #1 for 2 hours
fri: muscle group #2 for 2 hours
sat: sport, like tennis or something
sun: rest
now, my schedule for maintenance / body sculpting
5 day cycles of:
day 1: muscle group #1
day 2: run 5 miles
day 3: muscle group #2
day 4: muscle group #3
then start cycle over
by the way....... these are very aggresive schedules, and WILL hurt. but i did drop from ~30% body fat to ~10% in 1 year. i also doubled my strength in most areas (benchpress from 140lbs -> 250lbs). most people are not as crazy though.... so adjust to your schedule as appropriate.
hope this helps,
dean
|
Here's where we part. I find that in addition to localized recovery, there's also systemic recovery that has to take place. You are spot on with your assertion that different people recover at different rates, and that's almost entirely determined by your genetics. But recovery from systemic fatigue is a seriously overlooked issued by most weight trainers, and it's this lack of generalized recovery that causes most people's progress to halt after 2-4 months. You can get by with too-frequent workouts for a while, but eventually it wears you down.
Ideally, most people with average genetics for recovery ability and muscle building, should work out no more than 2 times a week with weights. This will allow proper time for both localized and systemic recovery. They should also focus exclusively on large, multi-joint exercises. For example, a good workout would be:
Monday:
Bench Press (hits chest, front delts, triceps)
Bent over Barbell Rows (hits lats, midback, biceps, rear delts, forearms)
Thursday:
Squats (lower back, glutes, quads, hamstrings, inner thighs, hips, even calves).
Alternatly, another good routine would be:
Monday:
Deadlift (every muscle on the back of the body, plus forearms)
Thursday:
Parallel bar Dips (Chest, front delts, triceps)
Pulldowns (Lats, rear delts, biceps, forearms)
These are obviously highly condensed workouts, but they hit very large amounts of muscle mass in a very short time. They will do more to stimulate growth than a hundred sets of curls or tricep extensions will ever do.
Some other tips:
Keep sets very low. 2 sets total per exercise - One set of moderate weight for warmup, then one "work" set of all out effort.
Keep reps high - 10 to 12 is a good range. If you can only get 6 or less reps on a set, the weight is too high. It will cause excessive stress on your joints and increase your chance of injury over the long term. If you can get 15 or more reps, the weight is too light, and it moving away from anaerobic exercise (feuled primarily by stored glycogen) to aerobic (using oxygen, much less productive).
Go to failure - lift the weight on your "work" set as many times as possible. Do not stop doing reps until you literally cannot lift it again. If you are able to get more than 12 reps, increase the weight by 10 or 20 pounds the next workout. If you cannot lift more than 12 reps, keep the weight the same on the next workout until you can get more than 12.
Other notes -
You should get stronger every workout. Even when I was losing body weight, going from 210 and fat to 170 and lean, I got stronger on every exercise, either increasing the number of reps I could do with a given weight, or increasing the amount of weight I could do. When I started I could not do a single parallel bar dip, when I finished I would do 8 with 70 lbs strapped to my waist.
Keep a journal - If you don't write down what weight you did for how many reps, it's impossible to keep your workout on track. Besides, a small spiral notebook and a pen are cheap. Plus it's fun to flip back the pages and see that you went from 155 on squats to 245 for 10 reps within the last 6 months
And see that you are still gaining
Don't add more sets or exercises As you get stronger over time, the stress you place on your body goes up significantly. Your ability to recover from that stress doesn't go up at all. Never add more sets, it's worse than a waste of time, it's actually counter-productive. Just pour all the effort and intensity that you'd normally spread out over several sets into the single all out effort set. At first, maybe for the first month or 2, you will feel like you are not doing enough, that you should do more exercises or more sets. This is because you're body has not been re-trained to give 100% effort in a single set. As you stick to the single set over time, you will see that your ability to work and really grind out those last few reps of the set (which are by far the most important part of the entire set), that each set will become extremely taxing. Very quickly, as the weight you can lift goes up and up and up, the demands on your entire body becomes enormous, and you will finish the set and feel almost exhausted.
Aerobics While weight lifting must be very carefully regulated and not done very often due to how demanding it is on your body, aerobics are much less intense, and can be done with much greater frequency. One critical point about aerobics (and Orpheus alluded to this), is that they burn calories while you do them, but the do very little for raising your metabolism. Metabolic rate is directly related to lean body mass (muscle), so if you want a faster metabolism, hit the weights as hard as you possibly can. Then use aerobics for additional burning of calories.
I will note, that if you can be disciplined and get your diet to be around 1500 to 1700 per day, there's not really a need for aerobics. I went from 210 to 170 over 10 months by keeping calories in this range and simply hitting the weights super hard. But, if you can't get your calories below 2000 per day on a consistent basis, then doing aerobics to burn that 300-400 extra calories is an excellent alternative.
Final Note - Genetics As with everything else, people exist on a continuum with regard to their natural ability to excel in any given area. I know some people will say something along the lines of "But I know a couple of guys that got really muscular working out all the time and doing lots of sets and exercises". And I would agree with that completely. But I would also point out that some people are genetically gifted with regard to weight training, and that they would make progress almost no matter what they did. But what is true of the genetically gifted is not true of the genetically average (which is the vast, vast majority of us).
Look at sprinting as a parallel example. I'm a slow white guy. If I did the perfect training and perfect nutrition, and perfect everything, I would still never be as fast as Carl Lewis, even if Carl Lewis didn't train at all, or even if he trained in completely the wrong manner. He'd still kick my @ss on the track. But if Carl Lewis DID train completely wrong, but I looked at how fast he was and said to myself, "Man, he's so fast and he's using this particular workout, then if I want to be fast like Carl Lewis, I should use the same workout he does". Pretty silly right? But I hear people all the time say that if "If I want to look like Arnold, I should train like Arnold". It's the same mistake, just a different field of endevor. For the vast majority of people, even if they trained perfectly and had perfect diets and perfect everything, would never, ever look like Arnold, or even get close to looking like him. It's just not in the genetic cards for them. But you CAN improve, and improve a LOT, over where you are without proper (or any) training. Just like I could get faster if I trained properly, but regardless of how good my training, I'd never be as fast as Carl Lewis.
To sum up, keep the workouts very brief, super intense, infrequent, and have realistic expectations for your progress. This type of workout will be far more productive than the traditional 3-5 days per week, 3 exercises per bodypart, 3 or more sets per exercise, marathon weight training that many advise. But even if it's not "more" productive, even if it's only the same level of productiveness, wouldn't you rather only spend 2 days a week in the gym for 30 minutes each, rather than 3-5 times a week in the gym for an hour or more at a time?
