Many people believe that in order to get great results at the gym, you have to be in the gym all day, every day. The truth is that you can achieve your fitness goals by training just three times a week if you opt for quality gym time.
Often when people fail to commit to gym time it’s because when they couple that with busy lifestyles, work, family, friends and everything else in between, they feel they can’t commit to such a time-consuming task.
This just isn’t true, in fact spending all your time in the gym doing exercise after exercise, rep after rep may even hinder your results. Let me restate, you can achieve great results and build muscle by hitting the gym as little as three times per week.
The important part is how you prioritise exercise selection and programming, aiming to get the most bang for your buck in order to maximise muscle gain.
Compound exercises, such as squats and deadlifts, are the most efficient use of your time in the gym as they allow you to work your entire body with just a handful of exercises.
Isolation exercises such as tricep pushdowns, bicep curls and calf raises only work one muscle group and won’t cut it if you’re trying to progress with a minimal time commitment.
Increasing the amount of muscle groups like those in compound movements, leads to greater strength, heavier weights and muscle gain. On top of saving time, compound exercises also cause a significant rise in anabolic hormones, namely testosterone and growth hormone, two very important hormones for muscle growth.
A common feature of training five days a week is training a different body part every day, which would only work each major muscle group 1 or 2 times a week. This is one of the major reasons people don’t get the results they want.
Whereas with three training days with whole body workouts, you are working major muscle groups three times; hence less is more.
Rest and recovery are key after smashing a workout. Your muscles need time to recover from your workouts, but they do not need an entire week which is often the case if you train five days a week. Rather, muscles usually recover in around 48-72 hours. Training three times a week, spread over the week would translate to greater recovery times as you have at least one day for rest and recovery in between training days.
After the 48-72 hours, if you don’t train those muscles, you will experience a little detraining and that will delay your progress.
Lastly, all that time that you’re not in the gym will mean you have more time to prioritise your nutrition. If you don’t follow through with proper nutrition to fuel muscle growth, you’ll struggle to make significant gains. Even on rest days, you should be focused on a high protein intake to provide your body with enough resources to build new muscle tissue. Poultry, meat, eggs, legumes (beans, lentils, pulses) or a protein supplement are great sources of protein to help build muscle.
So, if your goal is to build muscle, consider training three days a week as it might be more beneficial to cut back on training days to increase training muscle group frequency, enhance recovery times and maximise your efficiency and time in the gym.
