It’s time to break a fitness myth. I remember being specifically taught, as if it were a fact that my life might one day depend on, that you should never train the same muscle for two days in a row. As it turns out, there is no such natural law. You can train what you want, when you want.
The version I heard looked something like this: After you use a muscle, it needs to recover. Exercise breaks down the muscle tissue and recovery time repairs it, so you’ll have to alternate both. Either you wouldn’t build muscle, or you would injure yourself, or maybe both. The fact that I was sore at times the day after a workout seems to confirm the idea. Best to skip if you’re still sore, right? ((It is not.)
I’ve believed this for years without ever having a particular reason to believe it, plus it’s what everyone has always said. This led to a number of questionable decisions, such as planning a training schedule for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and then throwing it out the window if I missed Monday’s workout. I couldn’t do it on Tuesday because then I would train Tuesday and Wednesday! Which would ruin everything.
But I should have seen through it. After all, we only use our muscles every day for activities of daily living. You’re not in bed on Tuesday just because you went for a walk on Monday. And even if you think of harder work, what about people whose work involves manual labor? Does every farm worker, every member of a construction team, every carpenter plan a day of rest after each working day? Of course not, and that should tell us something.
In the meantime, the process of muscle breakdown and repair does not take place every 24 hours. Some body adjustments to exercise take days or even weeks, and we don’t have to wait for them to finish before we can lift again.
G / O Media can receive a commission
What actually happens if you train the same muscle two days in a row?
Not much. You get two days of training. Sometimes you feel a little weaker on the second day, which is fine there Training days are not test days. You lift what you can and you just keep getting stronger.
What options do I really have?
If you only have two or three days a week to do strength training, the first thing to do is do a full body exercise so that you hit all of your muscle groups more than once a week. And it makes sense to plan these days as much as possible. A rest day between training days is not required, but it is convenient so that you can start each workout relatively fresh.
Or maybe you prefer the idea of breaking down your workout by body part. This is an idea that became popular At the time when bodybuilding and weight lifting branched out into different sports. The Olympic lifts all work your whole body, but if your goal is only to sculpt your body parts for their looks, you can give each body part its own special day at the gym. Nowadays, it’s common to do a 5-day split focusing on a different set of muscles each day (chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, etc.), or splitting workouts into upper and lower body days, or pushing and pulling days. These are all good ways to help spread out the work you do during the week.
Or, you can do full body workouts as many days a week as you want. Taking a long weekend for a vacation? Stack your three full body days side by side so you have four days off.
Or let’s say you want to switch from a 3-day training plan (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) to a 4-day training plan (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday). As long as you are careful about where to place your heaviest days of the week, this is most likely fine.
For the past few years I’ve been training five or six days a week and not breaking my lifts by muscle group, so pretty much every workout is a full body workout. It’s absolutely fine. I can’t believe I used to be scared of this.
What rules do you have to follow?
To exercise your whole body on a daily basis, there are just a few things you need to consider.
The most important is whether your overall workload is reasonable for what your body is used to. If you’re used to doing two full-body workouts every week and you think you might want to do six, it’s probably pretty miserable to make that switch overnight. But if you do three, you will likely get along well with four. And once you get used to four, you can easily jump to five.
Another thing to remember is that you don’t need to avoid fatigue, but you can plan smartly. I deadlift on my last heavy day of the week, either Friday or Saturday. And then on Monday, after I had the weekend to relax, snapshots happen, the elevator where I need my coordination and reaction time the most. I also remember that during the week the tiredness increases, so I put an easy day somewhere in the middle to give myself a break.
In other words, your body is resilient. You need to make sure you don’t work too hard, but it can adjust to a higher level of work over time. It is not strictly tied to calendar days. So play with your schedule to see what works best for you.
