Best Workout Frequency to Build New Muscle Naturally at Any Age

Workout frequency to build new muscle naturally at any age

This is a topic that really interests me because in order to build muscle we have to increase our training volume over time and one of the ways we can do this is by increasing our training frequency. But of course more isn’t always better.

When we first start working out we would increase volume by simply adding more weight to the bar or doing more reps as we got stronger. Training frequency was determined more by whatever program we chose or how much time we had available to train.

How often we workout in a given time frame is our training frequency. The most natural time frame to use, is that of a week as most programs are designed based on the week. But we need to break frequency down a bit more not just looking at how many times a week we workout but how many times we train a specific body part per week. This is what separates frequency from volume.

If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services.

Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-548844435514900/

My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50

My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; http://www.easywebautomation.com/app/?af=1679568 and use the discount code LFI20 you will receive 20 dollars off your purchase

The best way to explain this is to look at a 5 day a week bro split where each body part is trained one day of the week, so your workout frequency is 5 days a week but the training frequency of each body part is only once a week. Compare that to a full body workout where each body part and the full workout are done 3 times a week.

There was a meta analysis done back in 2016 and what they found was that when the volume was equal it was better for muscle growth to train a body part at least twice a week as opposed to just once.

In July of this year a study was published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Dr Brad Schoenfeld was one of the researchers. He was also a part of the team that compiled the data for the meta analysis back in 2016.

Now in this study they took a 5 day a week Bro split where each body part was trained once a week. And compared it to a full body workout also done 5 days a week. Total volume for each body part was supposed to be the same or at least the same number of sets and reps done to failure.

They did this for 8 weeks.

The workouts contained 5 different exercises with 3 sets per exercise each set was brought to failure within the 10 to 12 rep range. The rest times were 1 minute between sets and 2 minutes between different exercises. These workouts were done Monday to Friday with Saturday and Sunday off.

After 8 weeks both groups had considerable increases in strength with the difference in strength gains between the full body and split groups being considered not statistically significant, but is should be noted the full body group gained slightly more strength in all three areas tested, which were the squat, bench press and seated machine row.

When it comes to muscle hypertrophy and thickness the full body group had significantly more muscle growth than the split body group and this came from the increased volume they were doing.

They tried to make the volume equal in this study by keeping the sets and reps the same. But they also wanted to keep the intensity the same so that is why every set was brought to failure. Full body training had a bit of an advantage here in being able to move more weight in the last sets.

To make it more clear I’ll use chest for an example. With the split routine, chest day being true to the international bro split rules was on a Monday. With 3 sets of 5 different exercises being performed but only 2 minutes rest between the different exercises. Now with the full body training 3 sets of one chest exercise was performed each day for a total of five different exercises over the week. So the time between each chest exercise was 24 hours allowing for a lot more recovery than 2 minutes. Which enabled them to lift more weight.

But this study does show us that we can use workout frequency to build new muscle. Now if your just starting to workout then full body training 2 or 3 times a week will be plenty. As you become more advanced you might want to add in an extra day of training frequency. Just make sure this extra day of training increases your overall weekly training volume.

What I do with myself and my clients is I cycle or periodize the volume to create a fresh training stimulus slowly increasing the volume until we hit a peak then backing it off increasing the weight and slowly work our volume back up again.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326055694_High_Resistance-Training_Frequency_Enhances_Muscle_Thickness_in_Resistance-Trained_Men

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27102172