Jeff, that all depends on your body and the workouts.
I currently do 4-5 days/week on a 3 part rotation and am going fine with it, although it’s about the limit for my hypocaloric diet.
I have found though that I can’t work a muscle group hard 3x in a week, not without using supps and massive eating, and even then I dont know.
2 days in a row of the same group of course wont work for most either, and a lot of consecutive days is probably best left up to the “pros” using extra stuff.
Jeff: Working out more than 4 days in a week is overtraining? That’s not necessarily overtraining. I do a 5 day split during certain times, and 4 day split other times. However, I only hit every body part once per week, and do less than 20 total worksets. That’s not overtraining (for me).
The way I see overtraining is when your system can’t adapt to rapidly recover from the stress caused by muscle breakdown. I find it is highly dependent on caloric intake, sleep patterns, quality of food, type of workout, stress levels, and a whole host of other issues.
I find it easiest to tell if I’m overtrained when I find my last 1 or 2 workouts of the week difficult to do. I say this because I work out each body part once a week, and so if I’m working a “fresh” body part late in the week, and I’m wiped, I’m overtraining. Furthermore, if I find I’m still tired from my workouts (that excludes the times I go out late at night) on my second rest day of the weekend, I’m probably borderline.
Just listen to your body. Sometimes you have to push yourself mentally. Sometimes you have to rest yourself physically. Pay attention, and you’ll figure out what YOU need to do and when.
Best of luck.
Metabolic recovery and it’s effect on overtraining is extremely overrated. To say that one can only train a muscle once a week is absurd. Nothing about weight training is that concrete and simple. The majority of my clients train 5-6 days a week and are making the best progress of their lives. Overtraining is mostly a product of overtaxing/exhausting the central nervous system (CNS). CNS fatigue is by far the most important variable to consider when determining whether an athlete can train again. Here is a section from a recent article that helps to explain this more:
I have also found that the best way to keep CNS fatigue to a minimum is to keep the duration of each session short (30-45mins). Normally, I’ll only recommend training a max of two muscle groups in a single exercise bout. The point is to leave the gym feeling fresh and motivated, not tired and run down. By doing things this way, it is easy to increase your training frequency without excessive CNS fatigue occuring or overtraining issues arising.
Joel
As i said, it looks like I have been mislead.
In the past I seemed to not have good results with an increased overall weekly volume. For years, I have trained 3-4 days a week, for an hour or less per workout. That is until I started doing more of a strength training workout.
For me the hard thing about devoting 5 or six days to training is that I like to do other activities outside of the gym.
Joel, I feel completely spent after workout, never refreahed. Sometimes I have a hard time motivating myself with a 3 day a week program.
Jeff: The reason why you find it hard to motivate yourself w/ a 3-day-a-week training split, is because when training 3 days a week, you have to do a lot of work each session to cover the whole body once. You’re spliting up all that work in only 3 sessions. Overly long training sessions drain the CNS. You don’t look forward to your workouts because the thought of spending 90 minutes in the gym is one you dont want to even deal with. Try decreasing the length of each session and increasing the frequency of your workouts. You’ll be able to train each muscle group more frequently while still staying fresh.
Overtraining can be a problem. But you can generally train as much as you want (within reason) if it is balanced with enough food and especially enough sleep. Training is only one facet of improving your body. Definately leave at least 36 hours between training the same muscle group because it is physiologically impossible for the muscle to repair itself to an acceptable degree in any less time. And periodise your training which includes taking a week off for total repair of all muscles, tendons, ligaments etc etc in readiness for the next cycle of periodised training. good luck…
Currently, I’m doing 3 workouts week, about an hour in duration. When I get home from these workouts I want to collapse. If I doubled this workout, doing it twice a week, I don’t believe my CNS would handle it and I would be overtraining.
But, it does appear that I’m not doing enough volume in a week’s time.
For many years I’ve had the concepts of overtraining drilled into my head. It’s been so hard for me to accept that what I learned was not correct.
Jeff I guess I would just try to add another day into your workout week. See if you can handle that.
[quote]Set up your workouts so that you are training often (close to everyday), but make it so that each session is short and sweet. This will keep you motivated, fresh, and looking forward to each session. We have found the following workout split to work well with this approach:
Day 1: Chest and Biceps
Day 2: Quads and Calves
Day 3: Back and Triceps
Day 4: Hamstrings and Shoulders
Day 5: Off
Day 6: Repeat
If you are motivated, skip day 5. Perform abdominal training outside of the gym once to twice weekly whenever you have some spare time to “destress.” This approach will allow you to get in a few extra workouts each week without further draining your CNS.[/quote]
Also, if you are on a higher volume program, such as GVT or my Max Size program, you can split the sessions into AM and PM to keep each workout around 1/2 hour in duration. For example, on “day 1”, you’d train chest in the AM and biceps in the PM.
I realize that not everyone is able to visit the gym twice daily, but for those that can it really helps to keep you fresh and looking forward to each training session.
Joel
Joel,
With that, you recomended 5 sets of one exercize per bodypart?
For 5x5, yes.
Louie Simmons works out 14 times per week.
Please reserve comments such as stonner,pothead, burnboy, ect. Thank you. Extra stress, bills, work, exercise, girlfriends, tax the CNS making recovery more difficult. So since smoking weed relaxes me would it have it’s place in my supplemental regime?