All great workouts to build muscle allow enough time for your muscles to recover. After all, the whole point for working out is to become stronger, and in this case, larger. In order for your body to do this you MUST allow your muscles enough time to recover. Not only that, but you need to ensure that you don’t over train. This article is going to be dedicated to teaching you exactly how often you should be training each muscle group.
What are great workouts to build muscle? Simply put, they are compound exercises combined with sufficient rest. Let’s quickly review how muscles grow to illustrate the importance of rest. Your muscles don’t get larger at the gym! After you workout you look bigger, this is only because your muscles are flooded with excessive amounts of blood. In fact, your muscles at this point are actually smaller. The fibers have been broken down due to the exercises.
So how much rest is enough? You must focus on each muscle group only ONCE per week. Great workouts to build muscle are ones that take your target muscle group to complete failure after 5-7 reps. This just enforces the fact that you need to put all of your effort into each workout. You need to make it count since you won’t be training that muscle group for another 7 days!
The biggest problem with this strategy is that since all of the great workouts to build muscle are compound exercises, it’s difficult to only train one muscle group per session. For example, if you’re training your chest, you will be activating your triceps, shoulders, AND chest. One thing that needs to be stressed here is what muscle group is being focused on. Sure your triceps and shoulders will get a moderate workout, but they won’t be the muscle group that is taken to failure.
With this said, you still need to be careful how you workout to ensure that you don’t train two muscle groups indirectly back to back. For example, if you train chest the first day, you won’t want to be training triceps the next day. A proper split will look something like this.
1) Chest
2) Back
3) Legs
4) Ams
5) Abs/ calves
Overall, it’s critical that you allow your muscles an entire week of rest before targeting them directly again. How you divide up your muscle groups is also important. The best workout routine to gain muscle are compound exercises so it’s easy to overlap muscle groups and not notice it. Now that you’re aware of this, you have no excuse! Hit the gym hard, and stay informed.