Frequency of Weight Training

[Nick]

When I go to the gym most people that I know there work out a split routine doing certain muscle groups on certain days. Well I've always done full body workouts 3 days a week. This may surprise a lot of people but Steve Reeves (the inspiration of many bodybuilders including Lou Ferrigno, Arnold Scharwzenneger, and Sylvester Stallone) says that you should only train 3 days a week. When Steve got into movies he only had to train one month a year and that was it cause his muscles didn't go away. Those overtrained weightlifters lose their muscle faster. I know this because I've met some of them at the gym. Take a look at Steve and see what it did for him. He never trained more than 3 days a week. Steve says that any more than that is overtraining. In order to build muscle you must not only exercise but also rest. While exercising the muscle tissue is broken down and rebuilt while resting. So make sure you schedule rest days in your workouts. Over a long period time, training too much will cause you to lose muscle.

[Tim]

I struggle with going between not training enough and overtraining all the time. I've been weightlifting for most of my life and I feel like at 40 I'm just getting somewhere. I'm still not huge, but I think I'm getting more ripped than I've been in a long time, and of course I have more muscles than when I was in high school. The biggest thing that's helped me is changing to a stricter diet.

I think some people just don't gain muscle that easy while others just naturally get muscles by just picking up a weight. For the most part these days I try my best to change my workout around all the time so as not to overwork anyone particular muscle.

I've made some recent gains in squats, but bench is hard for me to get any progress. I've tried once a week forever, with nothing so I'm trying to do a heavy bench day, and a lighter one using just machines to get the blood pumping into my chest muscles more than once a week. Hopefully, that won't make me feel overtrained.

[Nick]

I've tried a few workout plans since I started weightlifting and I would do them over long periods of time. Of course I gained muscle but not very much.  Mostly my muscles just got a lot tighter, but not much bigger. Then I switched to the Steve Reeves workout and now this seems to work a lot better. I wish I had discovered this routine a long time ago. Like you said, I feel like I'm just getting somewhere.

Well for bench pressing you may want to consider doing this, 3 sets of 10 as much as weight as you can do in perfect form, 3 days a week. Do 8, 10, or 12 reps. If you can do say, 140 pounds at 3 sets of 12 in perfect form, then the next time you work out do 3 sets of 8 with 150. Once you can do 3 sets of 12 perfectly its time to move up about ten pounds. Doing 3 days a week with at least one day of rest in between keeps you from overtraining or undertraining.

I like bench pressing on the smith machine. I like it because the weight is on top of you like regular bench pressing, but doing it this way also makes it easier to control the weight.

I don't really change up my workout plan too much. The plan itself stays the same but every month I try to swap out one of my exercises for each muscle group. It keeps the workout from getting stale.

[Tim]

I love changing out my workout as much as possible. I guess I've been doing it so many years that I get bored easy. I haven't done benching on the Smith Machine really. I might do that just to do something different.