Will working muscle group once a week be enough?

[MrsPea]

Hi Cathe
You've stated that you're seeing good results using your new aerobics/concentrated muscle group workouts. I'm intrigued. I've been led to believe that you had to work your muscles more often to see results, i.e. twice/week for maintenance and thrice or more/week for increasing strength/size. Am I mistaken? I could stand to lose a couple of pounds of fat but since I only seem to manage four workouts/week, I use up two of them for weights as I don't want to lose my muscle mass. If I could manage only one weight workout/week that would certainly help reduce my fat content. What do you think?

 

[Cathe Friedrich]

working muscles once per week

Before I get directly into my answer, I just wanted to kindly reply to the first part of your question. When it comes to lifting weights to increase strength and size, the old saying of "more is better" definitely does not apply here. Heavy weight training, which is what is needed to increase size, requires much more recovery time. Therefore, lifting once or two times per body part per week is plenty. Doing more than that will diminish your results.

Unfortunately there is no exact answer to your specific question of giving up a weekly weight workout in hopes of maintaining the same strength benefits with one session per week. Many factors influence your strength gains. For instance, the intensity of each workout, where you are in your lifting program, the exercises selected, the focus per muscle group, age, genetics, the duration of your workouts, your nutrition program, etc. What works for one person may not work for another. All I can suggest is that you try a variety of approaches to see which one your body responds most favorably too. Hope this helps!

 

[Joni O]

Interesting Article I Read

I'm sorry I can't quote who did this study, how many participants there were or the exact statistics, but I was very intrigued by an article I read in our newspaper (although it was picked up from a national publication) about a year ago. Basically, what the study found was that the strength/size gains from doing a strength workout 3X per week versus 2X were miniscule. Something like a few percent. Well, that was all I needed to convince myself not to bother doing a total body strength workout more than 2X per week.

I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but it was very interesting to me. I do think that it all depends on the person. What works for one might not work for another - but, like I said, the results sort of surprised me!

 

[Nancy C]

joni...hehehe

If I know you well enough...you dropped that 3rd weight workout like a hot potato....no looking back babe!

.

nancy:O)