How Often Should You Lift Weights?

The question of how often you should lift weights has several answers, which I will try to break down for you in this article. It depends on what your goals are, which muscles you train, how much you fatigue your muscles, how heavy you lift, and also your own personal recuperative abilities.

What are your goals?

Building muscle mass:

If you’re lifting weights to increase your muscle mass, this involves lifting heavy weights causing significant muscle protein breakdown in a short period of time (workouts are usually concluded within an hour) and requires significant rest (with good nutrition) to recuperate and grow. Generally, most people adhere to the 72 hour guideline – that you avoid (as best you can) working the same muscles within the same 72 hour period.

The more volume you lift (more repetitions and sets using heavy weight) will also determine the extent of the muscle protein breakdown, and it may take longer to recuperate if you do more – but don’t go too overboard or you will be overtraining and your gains will stop. (A good guideline for muscle builders is to do no more than 10 reps 10 sets with a weight heavy enough to challenge your muscles to failure or close on each set. Repetitions of between 6-10 and sets of 4-6 will usually suffice, though changing rep and set schemes regularly is part and parcel of building muscle.)

A typical muscle building program will mean you lift maybe 3-5 days a week, doing different muscles each day.

Building strength:

If your primary goal is to build strength you will have to lift heavy weights regularly, one way or the other. When you lift weights which you can only lift for between 1-5 repetitions per set before failing you are primarily training the CNS (Central Nervous System) and will gain neurological strength. Lifting very heavy weights like this is very stressful on the body – and doing so too often (particularly without changing exercises) will cause overtraining. It’s recommended you do single rep max training (particularly on the bigger lifts such as dead lifts, squats, bench pressing) between once every 5 or 10 days and no more.

Of course, a good strength building program won’t be 100% max effort lifts but will also incorporate lighter training with higher repetitions to help build muscle size, strength endurance and speed. (Check out the excellent, world famous Westside Barbell Book of Methods for a much more in depth analysis.)

Similar to a muscle building program, those training for strength will usually be on a program which involves training different muscles on different days.

Building endurance:

Not everybody lifts weights to develop big muscles or huge strength; some do it for aerobic reasons, conditioning or to enhance cardiovascular exercise. When you perform cardiovascular exercise, you’re using slow twitch muscle fibers which are much more resistant to fatigue than the fast twitch, aren’t broken down as much and recover much more quickly, hence you can train more often. You will soon know if you’re training too often with endurance training because you won’t see your work capacity raise and will know you need to back off a little. You may be able to train with weights for endurance every day or every other day.