Quality Not Quantity

Believe it or not, lifting 6 days a week probably isn't going to get you the results you're looking for.

Every week on Live Chat we get asked how best to modify our ever-popular Working Man’s Workout into a five day routine, and every week we try to explain that more isn’t necessarily better. It recently dawned us that maybe a blog post on the subject was warranted.

While most, especially those relatively new to the lifting game, believe that going to the gym more frequently will yield better results, the truth is that approach couldn’t be further from the truth. Do bodybuilders use isolation workouts? Yeah, of course they do. But they also use a steady regimen of steroids that send their testosterone levels through the roof.

So how do you, without taking cycles of HGH and looking like Ronnie Coleman, naturally increase your testosterone levels to increase your strength and size? Repeated studies have shown that heavy compound movements like squats, deadlifts, dips, etc. prompt a hormonal response in your body that isolation exercises like curls and tricep pulldowns simply cannot. What does that mean for you? It means if you really want to make a body change, step away from the fitness magazine workouts and start throwing some weight around. Why do you think most college weight rooms have very few machines and a whole lot of power racks and Olympic platforms? These types of exercises produce substantive results.

You’re probably thinking, “Awesome, so if I squat and bench every day, I’ll turn into an absolutely house!” Well… not so fast. The only problem with doing heavy compound movements frequently is that it takes your body much longer to recover from these sessions than it does from isolation work. Which is why, if you’re choosing a weight on each exercise that you’re failing on the last rep of your last set, you’ll likely need at least a day between lifts. Likewise, if you’re doing splits, you’ll probably need a day off after the split cycle is completed. In other words, the harder you work, the more time you’ll need to recover…

What does hard enough look and feel like? Here’s a hint: you’ll probably be sweating. You probably won’t be taking calls in the middle of your lift. And you’ll probably be too gassed to throw those bosu ball pushups in at the end of the workout.

There’s no reason why you can’t train smarter and harder, as opposed to simply training more frequently. Don’t be that six day a week guy that looks exactly the same five months from now as you do today. That’s not you, that’s not 1R.