Thread: How many days rest between gym sessions?

Hi all, fantastic forum here. I was hoping you may be able to give me a little advice.

My aim is to gain muscle, i dont want to be very big i just want some more muscle and to be more defined. Im in no rush either and have been trying to visit the gym about 3 times a week and have been doing so since August. I figured it was best to start early for summer 2007 seeing as i think alot of people rush to the gym when the sun pops out and wonder why they dont see results quickly, next thing they know the summer is gone

Anywayz my programme is the following:

3 sets of 10 on each of the machines.

Begin warmup with 10 minutes light cardio.
Use 2 upper body machines.
Do more cardio, 15 minutes of running.
Back on the machines again, I use another 2 upper body machines.
Do more cardio, 10 minutes on the ski stepping machine.
Finally i use the dumbells x 2 sets of 10.

And thats it, its nothing strenous i know but im pretty weak, but once i get into a 3 day routine i like to keep it and have been doing so. My results have been slow but i think my body isnt so good at building tissue as other. however i am seeing results.

ok, so on to my question. With the above programme, do you think it is ok to give myself a days rest of no gym before i return the following day? or does it really matter? bearing in mind i am going to be increasing this to the free weights in a week or 2.

There's really no clear-cut answer.

The amount of rest your body needs is related to how much stress you put on your CNS the last time you worked out. More stress means more recovery time. For example, everyone walks at the very least a couple hundred steps in a given day. Yet this happens day after day after day. Since the recovery time is so small, obviously this activity is not very taxing on the CNS. To contrast, lifting your 1RM can be very taxing, especially on an exercise such as the squat. You can't do this day after day after day and expect to be able to keep the same level of performance (assuming you're a normal person not on drugs).

So, the more taxing the activity, the more recovery time is generally necessary. It doesn't mean you can't lift at all until the recovery time is over, it just means it's a bad idea to push the same movements to their limits withing the recovery time.

As for your specific information, we don't even know which movements you're doing or how intense the work is, so we really can't give you a very good answer. I just hope that, when you switch to free weights, you also plan on implementing lower body work.