How many days do you have inbetween strength sessions?

Depends if you are boxing with it, doing other forms of cardio, and so forth.

 

are you looking for muscle gain? as in low reps high sets and high wight? or are you thinking about toning, high reps, low sets lower weight? The Idea is that each muscle group you train when doing muscle gain should preferably have approx a weeks rest. This is what I have been told. Approx a week is what is needed for your muscles to fully recover from such a session and if you do it more often you have the possibility of getting muscle fatigue, basically your muscles are still healing and building and you disturb the process. If you do Biceps on monday, do them again next monday is what I'm saying. Toning on the other hand is similar to jogging, you can do it several times a week without worrying about muscle fatigue although you should give the muscle group a 1-3 day rest during the week depending on the weight and the amount of reps you do.

Depends on what you want to do.

 

Pretty much everything you said is wrong...

 

Agree with this.
I know people who have strength sessions M,W,F and others who have it monday and thursdays. Depends on how your feeling. If you have enough rest/sleep and proper nutrition you should be able to have them every todays in my opinion but maybe someone will disagree.

 

Not true.

This part is not wrong.

 

At the moment I'm doing 5x5 twice a week. Nothing wrong with doing that 3+ times a week, depending on what your priorities and goals are and provided it doesn't interfere with your other training.

 

Sorry what exactly is wrong? This is what I have been taught and it works for me. The fact is if you do a little bit of a google search for Muscle rest period you'll find that there is a ****load of information all saying that optimal resting periods are between 48 hours and 7 days. reading deeper you'll find that it depends on personal physical capabilities and on the muscle group trained, intensity and what you want to achieve from it.

I Use to do the same muscle groups 3 times a week specifically some workouts like pushups and situps I would do almost daily. I found that within 2-3 weeks of me doing pushups 5-6 times I was unable to make any progression in the amount of pushups I could do and in fact towards the end of the 3 week periods I had a decline. I changed my workout doing strength training for particular muscle groups once a week and with the addition of bag work, shadow boxing and other high rep low weight exercies and I have now got the best results I've ever had with increases in muscle mass better then before.

Diet also plays a role in it.

 

Just want to point out that strength sessions dont always and in this i dont think it means a bodybuilder split of biceps, triceps, shoulder, chest etc on each day. If your doing lets say squats, bench press and deadlifts on a day. and you count that as your strength session why wait another week for that?

 

Muscular endurance and muscular strength are two different things

 

Look up Starting Strength, heavy squats 3 times a week...

Depending on how you do it, you can actually train near enough any muscle group pretty much every day if you wanted.

Don't believe the bodybuilder on steroids, destroy your muscles once a week bull**** you read.

BTW, pushups aren't exactly a strength exercise....

 

True in what Ovee says. There have been studies done on office workers who go the gym once or twice a week, and compare it to daily manual labor types. The office people become beefy ****s cause they get more rest in between. doesnt mean that the manual labor person is weaker, they just have less time to recover so damage to the tissue on a small scale persists from day to day. If you want hypertrophy, yes having adequate rest between the 'building sessions' works, feed the muscles on days you are recovering. Endurance and conditioning is whole other matter, thats based on how well the blood circulation is to the working limb, and the heart being able to pump blood over a drawn out period of time. Muscle size alone counts as pure strength has limitations despite them looking big -thats your gym guy from the office who doesn't do anything else than that. I use the term 'strength' very loosely though. quantity is not real quality in gauging this thing called 'strength'.

 

The fact that people doing manual labour jobs require way more calories for maintance then a person sitting on a desk has nothing to do with it? Like i said if your eating enough i doubt you need a whole weeks rest for one session

 

Dont know about the nutritional side of things, not according to that study anyway. Protein synthesis and muscle fibre repair rate has a cap. But yes, a week is a long lay off indeed.

 

I brought up the pushups because they were the most consistent form of exercise I was doing as it was being done 5-6 times a week and it was the most evident case of muscle fatigue in my case.

Yes I know there is a difference between strength and conditioning and I included that in my first post saying that conditioning exercises can be done more often then strength training and that there is adifference in the two.

The question that the OP asked was how long to wait between strength sessions and I answered with what I have been taught and what I have been doin, it seems to have been working for me thats why I offered my side. I may have been a bit hasty and not included that between 2 and 7 days is what is mostly recomended. The fact is though that it all depends on what information you are following, there is even a school of body building, it is very rare but still practiced, that specifies increasing rest periods and low reps, this form of building can achieve up to a month of rest period inbetween strength sessions and people still swear to its effects (increased strength).

An important thing to note is that when considering strength rest periods are necessary like pugsley said there is tissue damage that remains. Whether the best rest period is 24 hours or 7 days I am not sure but I am at least offering information that seems to work for me. most of what I have said is deff not wrong, maybe it is not the most efficient way of strength building but it is a viable way.

If you disagree with what I say then please offer up information to counter or build on it and not just stick to 'that is wrong'.