A Second Training Mistake, 72 Hours of Recovery
In the last article I discussed that the biggest training mistake I had ever made in training was to believe that I must continuously find ways to train harder in order to continue making progress. In this article, I will discuss a second big training mistake, which was to listen to the “experts” who said that muscles take 72 hours to fully recover. Some said it took longer. The experts were actually right because they were the same experts who believed that you should annihilate your muscles if you want them to grow bigger and stronger. There came a time when I realized that following expert advice on recovery was not helping me to improve at all, and I had absolutely nothing to lose by trying something they said would not work because my training was already failing to work.
I Took The Risk of Training my Whole Body Every Day
I took the risk of training my whole body every day. I thought it might lead to a training disaster, but I was surprised to find out I didn’t lose any strength. I didn’t gain any either until I learned how to change the way I trained. When I learned to stop a set when rep speed started to slow down, and I learned to only repeat sets for a muscle group as long as I was at full strength, I found that training my whole body five or six days per week actually worked. This went against everything I was taught about training and recovery as a skinny hard gainer, but it no longer mattered what I had been taught, or what other people thought, I cared more about results than I did about popular weight training trends.
Variable Recovery Times
I do not proclaim that everyone must work their whole body every day to get bigger and stronger. This would be absurd as there have been multitudes of lifters, bodybuilders, and athletes, who train a body part only once or twice per week with fantastic results. What I advocate, is to start out training a muscle group three times per week, and see if it works. If it works, stick with it. If it doesn’t work, you can try using a higher or a lower training frequency until you find one that works best. However, please understand that recovery time between workouts can be highly variable according to how hard, how heavy, and how long you work out. If you try training three or more times per week and it’s not working, the problem might not be with your training frequency, instead, it may be related to how hard, how heavy, and how long you work out. I learned that if I couldn’t maintain a steady even rep speed during a set, and I trained a muscle group past the point of being at full strength, progress would stop.
While I do not advocate that you should use high frequency training if you are already making progress by training a muscle group once or twice per week, I would encourage anyone who is not making progress with a lower training frequency to give high training frequency a try regardless of the constant warnings that it causes over training. You may be surprised to find that it works for you if you use it in conjunction with correct training practices. Best of training to you.