Should You Workout Everyday?
The workout itself simply stimulates muscle growth, when you do hard weight training you are breaking down muscle tissue. It’s only when you give your body time to rest and recover in between workouts when actual muscle growth takes place.
If you try and workout everyday, like a lot of people do, then you will actually break down your body faster than it can recover. While you maybe able to get away with doing daily workouts for the short term, it’s eventually going to catch up with you and your workouts in the gym are going to suffer. This is what’s known as “Over Training”. Basically you are breaking your body down faster then it can build back up.
A good structured workout program will have rest days planned out in advance. Taking rest days will allow for better recovery of your muscles and central nervous system. This will give your body time to fully rest, recover, and grow between workouts. Then on the days when you do workout; you’ll feel stronger, have more energy, and be able to train harder in the gym.
Building muscle comes down to stimulating growth in the gym and then allowing your body time to rest, recover, and grow. You can’t short-cut this process.
As for how many rest days you should take. It really depends on your fitness level, experience, what type of program you’re following, etc. But a good general rule of thumb that works well for most people is to workout every other day.
Having a full 48 hours of rest in between workouts to rest will allow you to hit the gym feeling strong and fresh. When I look back over my training journals I’ve generally made my best size and strength gains when following an every second day workout schedule.
Now some people may like to stretch this out and workout 2 days on and 1 day off and they find that this works well for them. Bottom line there are a lot of variables involved so there isn’t a one size fits all answer. But I think every single strength and conditioning coach will agree that taking rest days off from the gym is an important part of any workout program.
So if you are one of those guys who likes to workout everyday and your progress is stuck in a plateau, try cutting back on your workout frequency and taking more rest days. The extra recovery time maybe just the thing you need to start growing again.