Basic Primer on Effective Training – Frequency

The “laws of bodybuilding” seem to say you have to train a muscle once per week on a split routine. For example: Monday: Chest/Biceps (this is International Chest & Biceps day around the entire world) Tuesday: Quads/Hamstrings Wednesday: Off Thursday: Back/Rear Delts/Traps Friday: Shoulders/Triceps Saturday: Off Sunday: Off Unless you’re part of the genetically elite – those who can pretty much do anything they want and turn into freaks – hitting a muscle group this infrequently is going to result in less than optimal results. Yes, this goes against the grain, but be open minded. Training muscle groups more frequently can have a very significant impact on your overall development. Provided you’re training fresh and are hitting your muscles with varying stimuli, the more often you stimulate a muscle to grow, the more it will grow … up to a point of course. Most people will simply grow better with higher frequency. In addition protein synthesis peaks and returns to baseline within 48-72 hours after exercise so if you’re only training muscle groups once every seven days you’re reducing the amount of time you could be growing. In fact, you’re likely detraining between workouts for the same muscle group. It could definitely be argued that frequency is one of the most importants factor in your rate of development. Maybe you’re thinking, “what about overtraining?” The skeletal muscle system as a whole is a very adaptable system. It will adapt to the stresses placed on it. You want faster recovery? Force your body to recover faster. How? Train your muscle groups more often. What about soreness? A number of studies have shown that complete metabolic recovery can occur in as little as 48 hours. There might be a little lingering DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) when you first adopt a greater training frequency, but you’ll adapt. The key though is training the same muscles with a different training stimulus later in the week and managing the volume per session. In addition, there is plenty of research that has shown that training a muscle while it’s still a little sore does not negatively affect recovery. In fact, the increased blood flow that results from training again (with a different set/rep scheme) may help with recovery. Training in a different rep range will stimulate different muscle fibers and will result in a different overall physiological response.

So how do we split it up? Upper/lower splits are one great option. For example:

Monday: Upper Body

Tuesday: Lower Body/Abs

Wednesday: Off

Thursday: Upper Body

Friday: Off

Saturday: Lower Body/Abs

Sunday: Off

You might be thinking that you can’t do enough for each muscle group if you have to train your whole upper body in one session. Sure you can. Remember that you want to focus on compound exercises; exercises that recruit a lot of muscle mass. You’re training movements more than you’re training muscle groups. As well, you also want to manage your overall volume per session; not just the volume per muscle group. So, with these types of splits, you’ll want to do less volume per muscle group, but remember, you’re also training the muscles twice per week instead of once, so at the end of the week the volume is still going to be significant. For example, you might do 100 reps in one workout if you were training a muscle group once every seven days, but you could also have done the same weekly volume by doing 50 reps in two workouts. Those in the once-per-week camp tend to do more volume per session but regardless, protein synthesis is still going to return to baseline at it’s predetermined time. Training with greater frequency (on an upper/lower or even a full body split) keeps protein synthesis elevated more often which can have a significant impact on overall progress.