If you want your muscles to grow and you want your body to run as efficiently as possible, you can’t just push yourself to your limits day in and day out without rest, because your body isn’t built to run at full blast nonstop.

But your muscles need a constant source of challenge, so the trick is to figure out a healthy balance without creating a ton of soreness.

You need to take the time to build a sustainable routine that leaves you with the time to rest effectively and actually build the muscle you’re working towards.

What Are You Talking About?

Your body is a machine that takes inputs from the world around you and adjusts accordingly. You can attribute nearly every single aspect of your health to something in the world around you. Something as seemingly inconsequential as the paint in your house to more obvious factors like your diet and exercise will come back to your body and it will respond positively or negatively to that input.

So when you’re looking at your workout routine you need to take a few things into consideration:

• What does your current training program look like? 
• Are you challenging yourself enough? 
• Is it consistent?
• Are you doing your exercises right?
• How much rest have you worked into your schedule? 

All of these are factors that might have had some effect on the progress (or the lack of progress) you’re making. Today we’re going to look specifically at how often you should work out each muscle group, and how you can work your way up to an ideal schedule without getting so sore you can't move the next day.

But first we should establish a good starting point. If you’re just starting out or you really can’t find the time, then a pair of decent full-body workouts each week is enough to see some results. You can see the results of working out twice a week in small, but tangible ways.

Research has shown that higher training volumes are associated with greater hypertrophy. However, there is a point of diminishing returns, where increasing volume further doesn't yield significant improvements in muscle growth.

That's great news if you're pressed for time but still want to maximize your hypertrophy efforts in the gym.

Because according to research, the sweet spot for hypertrophy seems to be around 10 sets per muscle group per week.

This number provides an adequate stimulus for muscle growth without causing excessive fatigue, allowing for optimal recovery and progress. It also allows you to program the muscle groups according to your schedule.

It's important to note that individual differences exist, and the ideal number of sets may vary depending on factors such as training experience, genetics, and recovery capacity.

For some people, 10 sets per muscle per week might be too much, while for others it may not be enough. Nonetheless, using 10 sets as a baseline provides a practical starting point that can be adjusted according to individual needs and responses.

The key is finding the point at which you can train without feeling like you got hit by a truck.

This usually means setting a small, but manageable goal of 2-3 intense workouts per week, and dividing the 10 sets per muscle group across the sessions. This will allow you enough recovery time to be ready for the next. 

Why Not Exercise Every Day?

Your body could benefit from a little bit of physical activity every day, but if you’re trying to maximize the muscle-building results of your workouts, then you’re going to need to add some structure to the way you do things.

Working out every single day is going to put you on the fast track for a lot of things that suck. In fact, working out as hard as you can every day is going to have the opposite effect that what you think it will. If you train every single day, you'll accumulate fatigue quickly and your progress will stall. When you go into your workouts worn out all sorts of things can go wrong. 

Your brain will be tired, so your endurance, decision-making, and your pain thresholds are going to be depleted. As a result your training intensity diminishes and and you’ll start tapping out earlier than you would if you had gotten the rest you needed.

You have to give yourself room for recovery. 

Building muscle is a constant stress test. If you don’t take rest days throughout the week and you keep training the same muscles, you’ll be coming into the gym with severe fatigue. It’s a bad way to workout, and your body won’t have had the chance to recover sufficiently, and you’ll just be stifling your growth.

Imagine building muscle as if you are building a brick wall. Every time you train a muscle group and give it the chance to rest sufficiently, you’re adding a row of bricks to your wall. If you never give yourself the chance to rest, you’re not giving your body the opportunity to lay those bricks.

Honesty Is the Best Policy

The long and short of things lies in being honest with yourself. You and your neighbor aren’t going to have the same body, the same levels of fitness, or the same goals. That means you need to figure out what’s right for you. This might mean a little bit of trial and error, it may mean keeping a log of how your workouts have gone, or it might mean plotting out a plan beforehand and working your way up there. Whatever works for you is going to get the best results. 

There are a handful of things to consider when building your program and build a sustainable plan around them:

• Time: You’re going to have to look at your weekly schedule and find places to make time for your workouts. If you only have a few days in the week that will accommodate a workout, then you’re going to have to fit your workouts into those slots. If you have several short windows available, then you can build a routine that focuses on a single muscle group each time.
• Your Body’s Signals: Your body sends out signals all the time, and it’s your job to listen to them. If your joints are aching and your muscles are sore to the bone, then you’re going to have to listen to those signals. Your workout should be frequent enough to challenge your body, but not so intense that it leaves you broken and battered afterward. You should have the energy to maintain good form all the way through your workouts. You’re pushing yourself past your limits, but that doesn’t mean you’re going so far beyond them that you’re literally breaking your body. Injuries are only going to set you back, in some cases permanently.
• Sustainability: When you build a workout routine, you need to find something that’s sustainable. If you’re off of work one week and you decide you’re going to work out every single day in the middle of the afternoon, but you don’t have that kind of time when you’re back at work, then that’s not a sustainable schedule. If you’ve built a workout that requires working out your three major muscle groups every day until you hit failure and you wake up in unimaginable pain every morning, that’s probably not a sustainable workout routine either.

Create a workout schedule that will fit into your normal schedule, and pick one that is manageable. You can be sore the next day, but your workouts should never be debilitating. When your training intensity is high enough you can get a great workout in 30-60 minutes.

• Progression: When your body has the opportunity to recover from your workouts, it overshoots with the intent to overcome the challenge that tore those fibers in the first place. That means that you’re going to have to keep moving forward each time you revisit those muscle groups. Your workout should include exercises you can vary in one way or another. That can be as simple as throwing on more weight week after week or adding a few more reps into the routine. Whatever you can do to prove to yourself that you’ve gotten stronger will push your muscles to the breaking point, which is what you should be aiming for to get in a good workout every week. 
• Clear Goals: Having clear goals will allow you to check your progress every week. If you’re setting out to beat a new personal record then you’ll be able to see how much you were able to lift relative to your previous attempts. If you’re trying to lose weight, then you can adjust your diet and aim for exercise that burns a lot of energy in a short amount of time like HIIT exercises or heavy weight lifting.

Here Are Some Basic Muscle Group Guidelines

All of the previously mentioned aspects together will give you the framework for a good workout routine. Now that you know what you’re looking for in your specific workout routine, we can look at some recommendations and pick a good starting place.

The CDC recommends either 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity, or two days with equal amounts of moderate and vigorous-intensity aerobic activity along with muscle-strengthening activities twice a week that targets your major muscle groups.

That’s a lot of jargon, we can break it down a lot easier by saying that you can either go for a series of brisk walks throughout the week, that averages out to 30 minutes of moderate activity a day, or you can push yourself a little harder about 3 days a week for a much shorter amount of time. This ends up being about 20 minutes of moderate cardio three times a week with resistance training targeting your major muscle groups paired with each of those days.

You can use this CDC framework to build out your workouts from there using a similar structure. 

Light Exercise

You can basically modulate from there. If you’re sticking to light exercise, you should do a little bit every single day. With light exercise, you’re not putting the kind of strain on your muscles that would require extended rest periods. This means that you can keep up the exercise every day and still expect to make some kind of progress.

Your progress using a light routine isn’t going to be as drastic or noticeable as more vigorous routines, but you’ll be able to enjoy the endorphins and sense of pride that comes from improving your health every day. Aim for about thirty minutes of activity each day. It doesn’t all need to be done in a single block, it doesn’t need to be the same every day, but it’s a good way to get your blood pumping. If you’re working a desk job, this is a good way to counteract the detrimental effects of being forced to stick to a single spot all day. 

Moderate Exercise

This is where we start to see more fat burning and weight loss. You’ll also see more noticeable growth in your muscles and your capacity to do strenuous exercise.

If you’re looking for how often you should workout your muscles while maintaining a moderate level of activity, this is probably one of the more simple schedules. Workout three times a week, targeting one muscle group each day. This is an easy routine to keep up with, you don’t have to plan it out too hard, you don’t have to switch things up every other session, and you don’t have to spend an insane amount of time in the gym. The more vigorous your workout is, the less time you’re going to have to spend on your workout each day

Intense Exercise

If you want to work out five or six times a week, you’re going to have to be a little bit smarter about how you plot out your days. If you’re working out a lot every day, and you’re wanting to hit your key muscle groups more than once a week, then you’re going to have to hop around a little bit in your routine. 

Try alternating between heavy and light days with your routine and alternate which part of your body you’re doing a heavy day with, and take your rest days seriously, because they’ll be the only day that you’re going to truly be able to add a row of bricks to your wall of progress.

For example, a 3-day workout could look something like this:

• Monday: Heavy upper body workout, light lower body (stretching, etc)
• Tuesday: Conditioning (Stairmaster/walking, etc), core
• Wednesday: Heavy lower body workout, light upper body active recovery (stretching, etc)
• Thursday: Conditioning (Walking, rowing, etc), core
• Friday: Heavy upper body workout, light lower body (stretching, etc)
• Saturday: Conditioning (Stairmaster/walking, etc), core
• Sunday: Rest Day (Conditioning - Stairmaster/walking, etc)

You can see from this example workout, you never target the same muscle group with a heavy workout two days in a row, and you’re still giving yourself rest days and plenty of active recovery. In this example you train upper body hard twice in one week, in the next week you'll flip it and perform lower body hard twice. You would just alternate from one week to the next. You'll be surprised at how good you feel doing this type of split.

This rotation allows you to get some movement in every single day while still providing enough total body recovery time. This sort of workout will give you the opportunity to keep all of your muscles in rotation, conditioning them and challenging them throughout the week without overexerting yourself.

Keep Up the Good Workout

A good workout challenges your body without overstepping the limits of recovery. You’ll want to keep your body active, but when you ask yourself how often you should train each muscle group, you have to step back and make a list of your goals and take the time to address the reality of your levels of fitness first. Once you do that you can design the best program for you and apply that knowledge to an effective and manageable routine.