Is Strength Training Twice Per Week Really Often Enough?
Is strength training twice per week really often enough? The answer is yes, strength training twice a week is definitely enough and any more can end up being counterproductive!
"Strength Changes Everything" podcast co-hosts, Brian Cygan, Exercise Coach founder, and Amy Hudson, Exercise Coach franchisee, explain why whole-effort strength training twice a week is not only enough — it’s the optimal amount you need to achieve the best fitness results for your body in the shortest amount of time possible.
The most important thing you can do as you age is addressing the health of your fast-twitch muscle fibers. To stimulate and improve the quality of your fast-twitch muscle fibers, the exercise needs to be intense and brief. When we work our muscles in this way, it forces adaptations, which are the end results that we are seeking from an exercise program.
The flipside of this intense exercise is that you need to give your body enough time to fully recover, which takes at least 48 hours. All the results we want from exercise, like increased muscle mass, strength, neurological efficiency and improved insulin sensitivity are not actually caused directly by exercising. Our bodies produce the results we want once we’ve achieved adequate recovery. If you exercise more frequently than twice a week, all we are doing is disrupting the body’s innate ability to produce the very results we want. Overtraining can cause people to stall out and even go backward in terms of their fitness improvements.
If you’re not seeing results from your exercise routine, question whether your exercise is intense enough and whether or not you are giving your body enough time and resources to recover properly. The answer to getting the best possible results is almost never just exercising more. The key is a strength training program that is intense and brief to get all the results we want. To learn more about twice-per-week whole-effort exercise, listen to the "Strength Changes Everything" podcast episode 84.
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