Likewise, in college, I prided myself on working out days per week, and at one point I went a whole month straight of working out every day. I would spend hours in the gym per day, lifting weights constantly, hitting an hour of cardio at the end of every session, and so on.
What did I get out of it? Absolutely nothing. Recently, a study sought to examine whether purposefully eating more protein than is recommended caused bodybuilders to gain more muscle. They used competitive bodybuilders in this study, and gathered data on their training and diet habits.
Ultimately, they found that people who consumed more protein than standard recommendations did tend to be leaner than their counterparts.
However, one interesting side effect of the study was that they also tracked how much these pro bodybuilders trained. That makes this pretty decent data on how pros actually train.
The results? Here's a link to the study. Interestingly, they only trained, on average, about 5 days a week, for about an hour plus or minus a little bit at a time. Interestingly, the higher protein intake group tended to work out less than their lower protein counterparts, despite generally being leaner and having a bit more muscle. When designing a bodybuilding routine, it's important to consider your exercise selection, reps, sets and rest times. One factor you might not automatically think about however is the total duration of your workout.
While you need a certain amount of time in the gym to stimulate gains in muscle and strength, more is not necessarily better and training for too long could be detrimental. As a bodybuilder, your main goal is increasing muscle size -- a process known as hypertrophy.
This type of training requires moderate to heavy weights and a moderate to high training volume. During a typical session, you may include five to six exercises for three to six sets each, which will probably take around an hour.
If you're training for strength however, your total number of sets may be higher, but with lower reps and heavier weights. This kind of strength-building session will likely take a little longer, probably around 90 minutes. The amount of time you rest between sets has a big impact on your workout duration. A study published in "The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research" found no difference in muscle hypertrophy between resting two minutes and resting five minutes between sets.
We often carry over that mentality into our training frequency and volume. We assume that hitting the weights more often and beating up our muscles for hours will give us the best possible gains. Even on the surface, that premise is flawed. If more training automatically meant more gains, we would, theoretically, become our absolute biggest by training 16 hours a day, meaning every minute of every waking hour, every single day.
Instinctively, we understand that's too much, but how much should we be training? The answer to that question requires an understanding of the process of muscle growth and the role recovery plays in it. In the early years of modern bodybuilding, when men like John Grimek, Steve Reeves, and Clancy Ross reigned, a typical training program was to work the entire body in one session, three times a week, often on a schedule such as Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. They hit every muscle group three times a week with brutal full-body programs that would take two hours to complete and interspersed those workouts with four full days off to recover.
By the early s, bodybuilders had discovered through trial and error that they could do a better job of effectively targeting individual muscle groups if they focused on just one or two at a time, and the split routine was born.
During the Pumping Iron era of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno in the s, many bodybuilders—if they could find the time, that is—trained on a "double split," working out twice a day. They might do chest in the morning and then back in the late afternoon or early evening. They worked the whole body over three days, usually twice in a row, taking off the seventh day to rest. Each of the two daily workouts took hours. A chosen few like Arnold thrived on that rigorous workload, while many others failed to see the gains they'd hoped for.
In his revolutionary Nautilus Bulletins, Jones took a scientific approach to the subject of building muscle. Training stimulated muscle growth, he explained, but that growth would only occur if the muscles were given adequate time to recover, along with proper nutrients and sleep. If workouts were too long, they could not possibly be intense enough to stimulate growth.
Jones also preached that muscles require more time to recover than any of the bodybuilding experts at the time understood.
He designed training protocols for his Nautilus machines around these theories and reverted to full-body workouts done three times a week or, at most, every other day; however, they contained only work sets per exercise and these were taken to failure.
Many were suspicious of Jones' motivations, as the programs seemed like a convenient way to minimize crowding at the Nautilus gyms that were sprouting up across the USA and around the world by the late s.
Mentzer's pro career ended prematurely after just two seasons when he quit in disgust because he felt he'd been judged unfairly at the Mr. Yet his books and articles continued to influence millions around the world who adopted his program that emphasized less training and more recovery for superior results.
It's likely that bodybuilders would have continued training days a week, working each muscle group twice per week, had it not been for the six-year Mr. Olympia reign of the U. Dorian Yates had been a student of both Jones and Mentzer, and after months of trial and error, he had modified Mentzer's system to fit his own needs.
Yates ultimately arrived at training four days a week, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, working each body part only once a week with a handful of exercises. Yates would do a few warm-up sets, gradually working up to one all-out work set to failure and often beyond. He dubbed his training style Blood and Guts, and it was immortalized in a gritty, black-and-white training video that motivated legions of would-be Dorians around the world.
Dorian set an entirely new standard of shocking mass with grainy condition, and most believed it was his dogged work ethic in his dungeon-like Temple Gym in Birmingham that set him apart from his rivals at the time. This was the training split he followed:. Dorian's workouts lasted an hour or less, and he took three full days off from the gym every week.
Any arguments that he didn't train enough were refuted by his brutally thick and rugged physique. None of the men who trained longer and more often were able to beat him, and this gave great credibility to the practice of training harder but with more attention paid to recovery. Lifters often justify training as frequently as six days per week by pointing out that they are working different muscle groups each day.
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