Hello, due to work and travelling I’ve recently found I can only get the training in on 4 days consecutively in the week Mon-Thursday. I’m trying to figure out how to organize the volume like maybe a traditional Lower/Upper or Monday: Full Body, Tuesday: Mobility stuff & cardio, Wednesday: Upper and Thursday: Lower. Would this allow enough recovery? I know I need at least 48 hours before hitting a muscle right?
The current recommendation is to do resistance training with at least 1 day of rest in between sessions. Garber 2011 This origin of this recommendation is unclear, since there’s not really data supporting this practice as far as outcomes like strength, hypertrophy, cardiorespiratory fitness, etc.
One really interesting study looked at trained individuals squatting a 1-rep max for over 30 days in a row. The subjects were 3 individuals - 2 powerlifters and 1 weightlifter, with many years of training experience. On days 1 to 30, each subject did a 1RM squat, followed by 5 volume sets 5 sets of 3 @ 85% or 5 sets of 2 at 90%. They also Benched or pressed 2-3x/wk, but did not do any deadlifts. Subject one increased their squat from 473 to 500 pounds, subject 2 increased their squat from 275 to 303 pounds, and subject 3 increased their squat from 484 to 530 pounds. Zourdos 2016
Another study of five resistance-trained men had them train arms for 21 days in a row. With 1 arm, the subjects did a 1RM biceps curl every day and with the other arm, they did a 1RM plus 3 back off sets everyday. In this study, the 1RM kept getting better for about 12 days before it started to plateau. Ultimately, both groups improved their 1RM biceps curl after 21 days by about 2kg. The arm doing the additional back offsets got bigger, whereas the one only doing the 1RM test did not. Dankel 2017
A final study took 30 recreationally active men and had them do the same 3 day a week program of leg press, lat pull downs, leg curls, shoulder press, and leg extensions. 1 group trained 3 days in a row and the other group trained on nonconsecutive days. After 12 weeks, both groups got much stronger- adding an average of 50kg to their 10 rep max leg press, but there were no differences between groups. They also gained muscle mass, but again, there was no difference between groups. Yang 2018
For most people, I think scheduled rest days should primarily depend on their schedule vs. any sort of “recovery-based” concerns. In a very high volume, high intensity training phase, scheduling may be more important, but I think that’s more speculative. I think trying to achieve the most amount of training possible for an individual’s schedule and tolerance should be the goal.
I discuss this in detail on our podcast here:
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Those studies are very interesting. So I presume it’s all about the weekly stress, not that you are necessarily needing 48 hours to recover at least?
I think that training stress accumulates over weeks, such that total ~ monthly training load is likely more predictive of results than weekly or certainly daily.
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