How Often to workout ?

How Often to Workout ? Wednesday Workout

Shall we do arms today ?

It's a perfectly reasonable suggestion that Personal Trainers many times get from clients. So what's wrong with it ?

The problem is that one small set of muscles get over-worked and the rest of the muscles get nothing at all.

So why do the top body builders split their training into body part specific work-outs ?

If you are working out hard and heavy with weights (or resistance) 4 days a week then using a split routine is the best way to go. Especially if you are doing cardio on another 1 or 2 days a week. A split routine means that you do upper body one workout and then lower body the next. Alternatively you could get creative and do front of body one workout and back (legs and everything else) at the following workout.

However if you are working out with a trainer less often, say once or twice a week then doing a split routine is a waste or your time and money.

If you are working out twice a week and do upper body one day and lower body on the other day, then you are not 'hitting' the same muscles repeatedly to get a big enough training stimulus. To get a training stimulus you need to 'hit' a set of muscles at least twice a week. Two times a week will work well if each workout is 'hard' meaning that reps per set are typically in the 5 to 10 reps per set. Somewhere between 5 and 10 reps the muscle being worked 'poops out' and is fried for at least a minute or so.

If you are working less intensively at say 12 and upwards reps per set then you probably need to work those muscles 3 times a week to get a good training effect.

If you've not been getting any noticeable results from your workouts then this might be worth pondering upon !

At this point you might be thinking "There aren't enough days in the week !"

The answer worth thinking about is going for whole body training 3 times aweek.
Whole body means exactly what it says.
You workout the majority of muscles at each workout.

To do full body workouts effectively you need three different workouts and you use them in strict rotation. The main principle is to 'hit' muscles with a different exercise each workout in a week. Fo instance, you could work on the pecs by using a dumbbell chest press or a barbell chest press or a dumbbell chest flye or a pushup off the ground or a pushup off an exercise ball or a chest press standing using a cable machine or . . . You get the idea, there are multiple exercises to go at any one muscle. You do not want to always use the same exercise for the same muscle. I've been encouraging clients to move to full body workouts and at the same time to increase workout intensity.

I've been creating spread-sheets of full body workouts for individuals and soon I'll publish them on my web site after I workout how to get spreadsheets reliably downloadable.

Early in the post I mentioned cardio. How does cardio fit with full body workouts ?

The basic rule is to keep hard cardio and hard weights workouts separated by at least 8 hours. The reactions of your body to cardio and weights are very different and can interact stoping you make good progress on either. Full Body Workouts will make you sweat and will get the heart rate up high. So you might not need separate cardio workouts.

However if a triathalon of half-marathon is in your fitness plans then you will need separate hard (and easy) cardio to prepare for your event.