After a grueling workout at the gym, consisting of muscle breakdown and fibre damage, your body needs time to recover so that the muscles can grow back bigger, stronger, and denser. Recovery is a major part of fitness, and at Alpha Pharm we prioritize everything that means maximum results. Try out our cannabis products, or recovery anabolics like Jeotrop or MK-677. Generally speaking, studies from Brad J. Schoenfeld and colleagues suggest that training a muscle two times per week is optimal for muscle hypertrophy. However, training splits such as the body part split conclude training a muscle once per week, or the full body split with 4x a week. With the help of this blog, as well as our others that you should check out, you should have a guaranteed answer to the question at hand. So, how many times a week should you train and what’s optimal for your goals?
What do studies say?
Overall, studies conducted by sports & muscle scientists say that training 2x per week is optimal, while 3-4x per week can be helpful for quick-recovering muscle groups such as arms, abs, and calves. Back in the early days of training, it was thought that the optimal way to train was to obliterate one body part per day (the body part split), for it to be sore for the entire week, then to hit it again with the same intensity the next week. With anabolics, it was possible to recover from these deadly single-muscle focused sessions, but not for the average lifter. However, now with anabolic steroids plus new training-frequency science, muscle growth has been found to double. However, with new studies, tests, and training methods released, we now know that muscle protein synthesis “is more than double at 24 hrs, and thereafter declines rapidly so that at 36 hrs it has almost returned to baseline,”. To ensure full recovery, Alpha Pharm suggests that you rest a complete 48 hours (or 2 days) before you target those muscle fibres again — hypertrophic training specializes in acquiring strategic amounts of muscle damage and while waiting that 48 hours for recovery, you’ll be able to hit other body parts in the meantime. Our Alpha Big Stack is tremendous for boosted recovery and muscle-building potential, along with the other stacks we have on Alpha Pharm Canada. Some good training splits for hitting all your muscles 2x per week are: PPL (push/pull/legs), the Arnold split, Upper Lower, and some strategically planned Full Body approaches.
For strength progression and recovery, it’s suggested to wait an approximate 48-72 hours before hitting that muscle again. Recovery times for strength (i.e. powerlifting) training are slightly longer than when performing hypertrophy (i.e. bodybuilding) training, since you have to take joint, ligament, and central nervous system recovery into account more so when lifting heavier loads. Waiting this 48-72 hours is also fair game in strength training cases, to ensure that injury is least likely to occur under more taxing weights and lifts.
What does Alpha Pharm say?
Over here at Alpha Pharm, we want to make sure you achieve your goals as optimally as possible. Therefore, training your muscles 2-3x per week seems like the best practice, in terms of muscle protein synthesis and muscle, joint, & CNS recovery. For us, the two best training splits for this training frequency is either a 4-6 days per week Upper/Lower split, or a 6 days per week Push/Pull/Legs split. For more training tips, check out our other blogs for Alpha Pharm specialist advice.
