Strength training every other day

For the 90% of ordinary enthusiasts who do not rely on fitness for a living and do not have the logistical support of a professional team, practicing every other day is the most error-tolerant and most effective training arrangement. However, it is never an iron rule that must be followed. How to arrange it depends entirely on your training goals, recovery ability and actual time.

I was very nervous when I first entered the gym. I always felt that "the more you practice, the longer you will grow." My chest, shoulders, back, legs, and arms were spinning continuously, and I didn't spend a day in the equipment area. In the third week, when I was bench pressing, my elbow suddenly hurt, and the weight dropped by 10kg. The coach patted me on the shoulder and laughed: "You kid is using your muscles as a perpetual motion machine. Huh?" Later I realized that muscles really don't grow in the gym - when you do deadlifts and bench presses, you are actually creating tiny tears in the muscle fibers. The subsequent rest and protein supplement are the process of muscle repair and growth than before, which is what everyone often calls "excess recovery." The recovery ability of ordinary people is there. It takes 72 hours for large muscle groups such as chest, legs, and back to fully recover, and 48 hours for small muscle groups such as shoulders and arms. Training every other day just gives enough time for recovery. The training effect will not be compromised due to resting for too long, nor will fatigue injuries occur due to practicing too hard. For office workers who do not have so much time to study the training plan, three trainings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday will just fit in the rhythm of the next day, and they can no longer adapt.

But if you often go to fitness forums, you must have seen many people saying that "training every other day is an excuse for lazy people." Many veterans who have practiced for three to five years have posted about their plans to train six times a week, and their progress is much faster than those who train every other day. This is not actually who is right or wrong, but everyone's training logic is fundamentally different. What many people refer to as "training every day" is actually differentiated training. Today you train your chest, tomorrow you train your back, and tomorrow you train your legs. This means that each muscle group will be stimulated after more than 48 hours. Essentially, it is the same as the core logic of training every other day. It just splits the training of single parts into different days. There are also some enthusiasts who advocate "high-frequency training" and train the same muscle group 2-3 times a week. For example, they practice light-weight chest presses on Monday to find movement patterns, and hit the limit with heavy weight on Wednesday. This actually gives the chest enough rest intervals, but breaks the stimulation into smaller pieces and requires higher accuracy of movements. Newbies can easily get injured if they practice blindly.

Not to mention the arrangements for professional players. They are followed by team doctors, nutritionists, and rehabilitators, and even have the blessing of technology. Their recovery ability is several times that of ordinary people. It is no problem to practice twice a day. If you are an ordinary person and follow this, you may lose testosterone, suffer from insomnia and lose hair after practicing for two months. It is completely unnecessary. I once took a little girl who was just starting to learn the movements. In the first two weeks, she only used 20kg of weight to learn the movements. The muscle stimulation was not that deep. She practiced lat pull-downs and hip thrusts for a week in a row, and she was not so sore that she could not go downstairs. At this time, the insistence that "she must practice every other day" slowed down the progress of her familiarity with the movements.

Many people also have a deep misunderstanding of "practice every other day". They think that after practicing the next day, you have to lie down and do nothing. This is not true. The next day you can go climb a building, take a walk, dance for half an hour, or even do some light weight core training. It’s okay, as long as you don’t build the same muscle groups that you just trained the day before. I have a friend who believed in the saying "you must rest for 48 hours after training". After training, he insisted on running a half-marathon the next day, calling it "doing aerobics". As a result, he was lame for three days and had to rely on his colleague's arm at work. He completely misunderstood the rules.

I am not strictly stuck in the rhythm of "training one day and resting one day". This week, I have to squeeze in an hour and a half each on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday to catch up on projects. Last week, when I was free, I did chest training on Monday, back training on Tuesday, legs on Wednesday, shoulder training on Thursday, and core training for half an hour on Friday. I took two days off on the weekend to watch dramas, but I didn't lose any muscles. On the contrary, my condition was quite stable. To put it bluntly, when it comes to fitness, all the rules are for your body. If you are so sore the next day that you can’t lift your arms, just rest for an extra day. If you don’t feel much the next day, it’s absolutely fine to add a couple of weights or continue training other parts. You can’t violate the rule of “training every other day” and make yourself not want to move.