Should You Lift Weights Every Day To Build Muscle?

If you are aggressively trying to build more muscle, then you must be interested in figuring out the right level of frequency for lift weights

Decades ago, the popular advice was that you should engage in weight training everyday to be able to get as much muscle as possible. However, we have realised that it is not true and training everyday can even hold back your muscle growth.

So, Why Should You Not Train Every Day?

Lifting weight intensely every day means you are not giving your body the chance to heal and recover from your workouts. And although your training is very important in the muscle building process, your body does not actually build new muscle tissue when you are lifting weights.

Muscle growth only happens after you have finished your workouts. During the period when your muscles are resting – this is when they heal and re-grow to slightly larger sizes.

It is during periods of rest that your body sends amino acids to the muscle tissues so that they can repair and grow new muscle tissues. So, if you are not giving your body adequate rest period, your muscles would never experience full recovery.

A lot of men hit the gym daily and get perplexed why they are not experiencing decent muscle gains. The major reason is that they are not giving their bodies ample time to rest so as to get the results they are looking for.

For starters, you need at least 24 hours rest after working out a particular muscle group (you can train other muscle groups while resting).

And if you have just completed an intense total body workout, you are likely going to require 2 or 3 days to rest so that you muscles can rest, heal, become stronger and grow to slightly larger sizes.

A lot of bodybuilding specialists advise that you engage in high intensity weight training sessions 3 or 4 times per week and then you take the remaining days of the week to rest and allow your body recover.

Although it may seem to you that you would get more muscle by lifting weights every day, the truth is that that sort of training frequency prevents your body from being able to build the kind of muscle mass that you are interested in.

As an alternative, plan your schedule so that you do intense weight training three or four days per week. Try to leave at least a day of rest between your workouts so that your body can recover.

You also have to ensure that you get adequate sleep at night and lots of good nutrition from your diet. After a while, you would begin to experience noticeable results. I would recommend that you aim for at least 8 hours of sleep each night to allow your body to recover from your weight training workouts.

During your workouts, it is better that you do total body workouts instead of concentrating on either your lower or upper body. The aim is to make your workouts balanced so your whole body benefits from strength training instead of just your upper body (which a lot men seem to only concentrate on).

If you have just started weight training, refuse to give in to the desire to workout daily. If you do this, it would quickly lead to stagnation in your muscle growth which could make your frustrated from the wasted efforts.

Figuring out the optimum frequency for weight training to grow your muscle mass is essential and by restricting the time your train and ensuring that you are favouring quality more than quantity, you would be able to pack on the kind of muscle mass that you are hoping for.