Thread: Frequency of training sessions question

So lately I've gotten fairly busy in general really limiting my free time and in turn making going to the gym as frequently as I'd like rather difficult. In the past I've made good gains on training each muscle group twice weekly by means of upper body, lower body split. Right now I can visit the gym twice weekly, perhaps three times weekly at most but that would make things difficult. What I'm wondering is if it's possible to make at least small progressive gains on training twice weekly and what split would work best for that. I was thinking of doing either three of the following scenarios:

1) Going to the gym twice a week and doing a full body workout each time incorporating mostly compounds heavy lifts. This way I still train each major muscle group twice weekly.

2) Going to the gym twice weekly and doing an upper body and lower body day. This way each major muscle group gets trained once a week but much more heavily than with option 1.

3) Trying to squeeze in 3 workouts in a week doing an upper body day on monday, lower body day on wednesday and a full body day on friday.

Given my tight schedule which one of the above options would you guys implement? I'm looking to basically maintain my current physique with hopes of perhaps getting a bit bigger progressively. I'm also open to other suggestions. Many thanks in advance for your input!

for the most part the intensity at which exercise is performed at dictates the frequency since it takes the CNS longer to recover from high intensity exercise than does skeletal muscle. you may want to look into designing some sort of periodization cycle where you have high, medium and low intensity training days, etc. I usually tell people to determine how many days a week you want to devote to resistance training then design your program around that.