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How Many Days per Week Should You Exercise?

by Melissa Bell
4 minutes read

When begining their fitness journey, many people start doing intensive training – either in the morning or the evening – most days of the week. However, exercising every day of the week won’t necessarily help you achieve your fitness goals. Check our article to find out why.

Your muscles need time to recuperate

To get the best all-round definition for your muscles, you need to work them equally on a weekly basis. Many professional athletes and bodybuilders dedicate one gym session per week to a particular muscle group (4 Muscle-building Mistakes to Avoid). Although they may be training every day, they’re only training one particular muscle group per week. This break of seven days allows these muscles to recuperate and recover.

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If you do train one set of muscles every single day, chances are very good that they will fatigue over time. You will find it more difficult to lift weights with these particular muscles – more so if you’re constantly loading more weights onto them. The result will be that you’ll do damage to them which will result in injury and you not being able to work them out for a particular period of time.

See how much time you can dedicate to exercising

So, you’re probably wondering how many days per week you should be exercising. The answer to this depends on what your fitness goals (Essential Tips and Tricks to Build Muscle Mass Fast) are and how much time you can dedicate to exercising on a weekly basis.

When setting your fitness goal, put some thought into it. Don’t just rip out a page of a fitness magazine, present it to your personal trainer or stick it up on your fridge, and say that you want to look like the fitness model in the picture.

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Remember that because these people’s jobs are to look the way that they do, they spend a good portion of their lives in the gym. (They usually do a fasted cardio session in the morning and a weights session in the afternoon.) So if you’re trying to build a business or have other similar pressing requirements that you need to fulfil, you’re probably not going to be able to make that type of commitment to your fitness routine.

By all means, take your inspiration from fitness magazines. However, critically evaluate what you’ve isolated and see if it can fit into your life. A useful acronym to evaluate goals is to see if they’re S.M.A.R.T (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive). If they’re not, then adjust them to make sure that they are.

Personal trainer

Hiring a personal trainer to help you along your fitness journey is a good way to help you get the best possible fitness results in the least possible time. This is because these people are highly trained professionals who have studied and trained for many, many years to help their clients become their best selves, fitness wise.

So, if you decide that you can only dedicate two days a week to exercising, and you want to develop lean muscle mass, get on down to your local gym and check out the personal trainers who work there. Have a chat to a few of them and perhaps have an introductory session with a couple to see which one suits you best and will help you get to where you’re going. Yes, hiring a personal trainer will cost you a bit more over and above your base gym membership however, the results that you’ll get will be totally worth it!

There is no set standard on how many times per week you need to be exercising. As we’re dealing with the human body and each person is different, the number of times that you should be exercising will differ from the next person. But always remember the rule of thumb when it comes to exercise: if you’re experiencing joint or bone pain when you’re exercising, stop immediately. This is your body’s way of telling you that something’s wrong. There are loads more exercises out there to help you get where you want to go. You just need to try them out.

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