Recovery Time after Each Training

There are a lot of questions that usually come from gym newbies that I have shared in the previous posts. For example, I've shared about how much weight you have to lift, resting time between each set, and now, I'm going to share about the suggested amount of recovery time after the workout.

People usually start to workout when they want to shape their body. The reasons are various, some want to lose weight, some want to build their muscles and get buff. However, in achieving our goal, we tend to want to get the fastest results. We thought that the harder we train, the faster we'll get to that goal.

Like many aspects of our lives, doing something excessively is not always good. It's the same with workouts. Training harder won't get the best results, only increase the accident risks.

When we train, we're stressing our muscles that it creates tiny rips in our muscles. When we rest, our body will repair those rips, making our muscles stronger. This process will be repeated over and over again until we reach the goal of our training. Therefore, enough rest and nutrition is as important as the workout itself.

image credit to tascha.ch

Always rest your muscles for at least 24 hours. But that doesn't mean that if we train our chest muscles today, we can't train our back the next day. What I mean is, the same muscle group should not be trained constantly, because it won't get the chance to recover. Therefore, if you do full body training in one workout, it should not be more than 3 times a week.

However, if you train one muscle group in one training, then you better arrange your training schedule. For example, if you train your chest on Monday, train your legs on Tuesday, shoulder and back on Wednesday, then train your chest on Friday. You can see in that example that that way, you're training your chest and giving it a couple days to rest.

This method is used by people who understands about recovery and trains very hard so that their body needs longer time to rest. Even professional bodybuilders rest their muscles for 5 days before starting another training. It doesn't mean that you train once in every 5 days, but with the above pattern, they give long enough rest so that their muscles are getting the maximum recovery.

There are still a lot of gym newbies that haven't understand the importance of recovery time. They thought that by training harder and more often, they'll get the results faster.

Remember, train smarter, not harder!