2. Training Frequency and the Importance of Rest Days

Well, welcome back to my blog! This week’s post will be a little more nerdy, discussing the importance of rest days, and how often a person should train for optimal results. Is there an ideal amount of days per week to train? Am I missing out on potential progress by training too much, or too little? Well, I’m going to go through some important ideas that may impact how you go about scheduling your training and non-training (rest) days.

First of all, why do we take rest days? What’s the point? Take it from me - rest days are ESSENTIAL for progress. Without them, our muscles will not recover from the training sessions that we do, we could directly cause injury to our joints and muscles, our immune system could become impaired and we could get sick, our sleep can be affected, and many other things too. What most people might be concerned about is ‘losing their gains’.. Christ no, that will not happen if you take a day or two off during the week. We don’t actually grow big muscles IN the gym. In fact, training sessions are what tear muscle fibres down, and we only actually grow from giving our muscles a chance to repair from these sessions, through sleeping (i.e. complete rest) and eating, essentially. There is of course research to suggest that ensuring sufficient quality and quantity of sleep is important for optimal athletic performance (Halson, 2008). With this optimal athletic performance, comes optimal muscle fibre tears during workouts, which in turn, requires sufficient sleep again. So, this is a pretty good cycle to get yourself into. Sleep well --> train optimally --> sleep/rest sufficiently to recover --> train optimally because you’ve recovered well, and so on. Make sense?

Next, I’d like to talk about training frequency and muscle protein synthesis (MPS). MPS is this wild complicated process, but in basic terms, it is essentially the growth of our muscles, due to the addition of amino acids (building blocks of protein) to their frame, as stimulated by resistance training. The extent of MPS depends on training intensity, also (Kumar et al., 2009). The longest increase in MPS after exercise is 72 hours (3 days) however it is usually in effect for up to 48 hours (2 days) (Phillips et al., 1997). All this wordy jargon basically means that our muscles are still working hard to recover (and grow) for up to 3 days after we train them. So, this would naturally allow for all muscle groups to be trained twice a week to make the most of MPS, with at least one rest day in between. It has been suggested that training a muscle 2-3 times per week is more optimal than 1 time per week for muscle growth (Schoenfeld, 2016), even if it’s the same amount of volume (sets/reps/weight) split across 2 or 3 sessions, due to the fact that MPS is stimulated more than once. However, this could mean training 6 times a week (for example - push, pull, legs, rest, push, pull, legs).. is this too much? The general argument would be that if you have your nutrition, sleep, recovery strategies, supplements etc. all in alignment with recovering optimally from 6 weight training sessions per week, that this wouldn’t be an issue in terms of ‘progress’. However, weight training is still very taxing on the central nervous system, immune system, mental strength and so on. Some of you ‘lazy fit’ people may be delighted to hear also that according to McGuff and Little (2009), training frequency can be significantly reduced with minimal sacrifice in results. But no Barbara, this isn’t a free pass to skip the training altogether!

Realistically, there’s no ‘perfect’ amount of days to train, just as there is no ‘perfect’ amount of days to rest. The most important thing to maximise your results is consistency. Fit in your training where you can, but please don’t hate yourself if you can’t fit in 6 plus workouts in a week. If you love training, then go for it and train more – of course, eat accordingly too. But if you’re only in it for the results themselves as opposed to the love for training, maybe reel it back a little bit, because the extra benefits of all that extra work in the gym may not be worth the potential recovery difficulties (of all the body’s systems, not just our muscles) that may come with it. As I mentioned earlier, rest is SO important, it literally is part of the program, and to push it aside would do our bodies no real benefit. Personally, I am in that ‘happy medium’ area, where I train 4-5 times per week, but if my priorities are elsewhere on a certain week and I can only go 2 or 3 times, that’s okay too! Training should be a destressor for your mind, not a stressor.

I hope this post wasn’t too science nerdy for you! For PT enquiries, feel free to email me at kpfitnesskate@gmail.com or message me on my Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/KPFitness/

References:

Halson, S. L. (2008). Nutrition, sleep and recovery. European Journal of Sport Science, 8(2), 119-126.

Kumar, V., Selby, A., Rankin D., Patel, R., Atherton, P., Hildebrandt, W., Williams, J., Smith, K., Seynnes, O., Hiscock, N. & Rennie, M. J. (2009). Age-related differences in the dose-response relationship of muscle protein synthesis to resistance exercise in young and old men. The Journal of Physiology, 587(1), 211-217.

McGuff, D. & Little, J. (2009). Body by Science. United States: McGraw-Hill.

Phillips, S. M., Tipton, K. D., Aarsland, A., Wolf, S. E. & Wolfe, R. R. (1997). Mixed muscle protein synthesis and breakdown after resistance exercise in humans. American Journal of Physiology, 273(1), E99-E107.

Schoenfeld, B. (2016). Science and Development of Muscle Hypertrophy. Human Kinetics.

#science #training #rest #fitness #gym #workout