What's the frequency?

If you train too soon, you will not fully recover. Wait too long, and you'll lose some of the training benefits. For this reason, frequency of training is an important element for success. This article will explore the right way to help determine your optimal training frequency.

Physical Recovery

Physical recovery is one aspect of the training effect. Training depletes your energy stores. To perform work, your muscles undergo a chemical reaction. A molecule, or nucleotide, called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is split leaving behind adenosine diphosphate (ADP). Some of the ADP can be paired with creatine to recreate another ATP molecule. More energy, however, is taken from stores of carbohydrates in the muscle cell called glycogen. Special proteins, called branched-chain amino acids, are also used. Muscle tissue is damaged, a condition referred to as microtrauma, and amino acids are released into the bloodstream. Some amino acids leak into surrounding tissue. One particular amino acid, hydroxyproline, may cause inflammation and could be a contributing factor to delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) or the soreness you get a few days after an intense training session.

Full recovery depends on several factors. Your body must replenish its ATP, indirectly through the restoration of creatine and glycogen reserves. It must also repair the damaged muscle tissue. The overcompensation principles states that if the training is followed by adequate recovery, most likely your body will overcompensate and build more muscle tissue than previously existed (hypertrophy).

These processes all happen at different rates. Some tissue may repair within hours, while intense workouts involving extremely large muscle groups have been shown to take several days to fully recover. Creatine replenishment can happen within days and may be accelerated through intake of creatine supplements. Because creatine occurs naturally in flesh meats, vegetarians may benefit more from creatine supplementation than those who incorporate animal proteins in their diet. Glycogen replenishment can occur within hours of the workout provided adequate carbohydrate is supplied. This is why post-workout shakes are popular because it is believed they can accelerate recovery from the workout.

As a general rule of thumb, expect several days to recover from intense workouts involving massive muscles (such as leg muscles, chest muscles, and back muscles). Some of these muscles may take a full week to recover. On the other hand, muscles that are involved with daily movement and posture such as arm, wrist, calf, abdominal, and lower back muscles may recover with 24 hours of the workout session.

Neurological Recovery

Physical recovery is not the only factor involved. Every training session taxes your central nervous system (CNS) to a certain extent. The CNS recovers by increasing efficiency and coordination. Improved efficiency with coordinating muscular contractions results in strength gains - this is why you can improve strength without gaining muscle mass. In addition, coordination and spatial awareness can be improved. This causes your actions to become more efficient, conserves energy, and can also improve strength and agility.

The central nervous system can become fatigued by too much stimulus. While physical recovery may be isolated to the muscles involved in the workout, neurological recovery is more universal. A heavy leg workout followed by a heavy upper body workout may tax different muscle groups, but both workouts will impact the central nervous system. It is more difficult to measure recovery with this system, but many strength coaches advise taking at least one day of full rest from resistance training after two consecutive days of intense training. This may vary between individuals due to genetics, training experience, and other factors.

How Much Recovery?

The amount of recovery depends on the workouts. As a general rule of thumb, workouts that burn more calories will require more physical recovery while workouts that burn fewer calories will require less physical recovery. A short workout that involves 3 sets of 12 repetitions will take far less time to recover from than an intense 'German volume training workout' with 10 sets of 10 repetitions. This high volume of training may require a week to 10 days to fully recover from.

The intensity of the workout is a good indicator of neurological recovery. Intensity refers to the percentage of the maximum total weight you can move. For example, if you can bench press 100 kilograms one time then 100kg is your one-repetition maximum (1RM). This is 100% intensity. Therefore, a set of bench presses with 50kg would be 50% intensity. Higher intensity workouts require more recovery time for the central nervous system than lower intensity workouts. This is why cardio can be performed more frequently than heavy resistance training - because it is lighter intensity despite the longer duration.

Large muscle groups such as the legs, back, and chest take longer to recover than smaller muscle groups such as the upper arms, shoulders, and calves. Postural muscles (abdominal muscles, lower back muscles, hip flexors, etc) recover more quickly but are also involved in more movements. For example, while your biceps (upper arm flexion) may recover quickly, they are also involved in all pulling movements. Any back workout, whether a pull-up, row, or dead-lift, is going to involve the biceps to a certain extent. Any extension of the arm, whether it is from a shoulder exercise such as the military press or a chest exercise such as the bench press, is going to involve the triceps.

Active Recovery

One final factor to consider is active recovery. While it may take several days for a muscle to recover both physically and neurologically, a principle of training known as the use/disuse principle states that if you wait too long until your next training session, you may begin to lose some of your gains. One way to work around this is to use what is known as active recovery. You can work the same muscle, but in a different way. For example, if you are doing heavy sets of squats for your legs on Monday, doing a light jog on Wednesday followed by an easy workout with leg extensions on Friday can help maintain the training effect while allowing for full recovery. Cross-training is another example of using active recovery - find a different movement. A bench press early in the week might be paired with a session with the punching bag later in the week.

Putting it Together

Now that you are familiar with the principles involved, it's time to put it all together.

1. Pick the days of the week you can train. If it's every day, fantastic. Most people, however, have only three or four days they can hit the gym on. Let's say you are able to train any day of the week - Monday through Friday - for our example.

2. Slot your training so there are never more than two consective days of training back-to-back. So, in our schedule that allows for five days (Monday through Friday) we'll go ahead and take Wednesday off or use it for some other form of training like cardio. Now we have Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday available.

3. Schedule your heavier movements first. In our case, we're going to use German Volume Training (GVT) which is extremely high volume. So we'll start on Monday with squats and dead-lifts. Because this will be so difficult to recover from, we're going to push our upper body with bench press, military press, and rows to Wednesday.

4. Fill in the gaps with lighter training. So on Tuesday we'll do our abs, upper arms, forearms, and calves with just a typical 3x12 (3 sets, 12 reps). On Thursday, we'll do lower back (better on Thursday than Tuesday due to the heavy squats and dead-lifts on Monday), then use some leg extensions and leg curls for active recovery from Monday's workout.

5. This creates a nice weekly schedule for an intermediate to advanced trainee. If you find that you are having trouble recovering from this style of workout, however, you might also alternate weeks of heavy and light. Instead of repeating the split on week 2, you might do a traditional 3x12 workout with the same exercises on Monday and Friday, then go back to the GVT on week 3.

As you can see, there are many possible combinations. While this article provides a general guideline for piecing together the workout frequency, you'll have to learn how your body responds and make the appropriate adjustments for you. This is why it is a great idea to keep a detailed journal. I can look back on previous years of training and determine exactly what frequencies produced the best results. The more information you keep available, the better you'll be at dialing into your optimal frequency of training.