How much rest do you need between training sessions?

Muscle grows in the hours and days after a session, while your body works through what you asked of it. We wrote about the night as the biggest part of that process in sleep and recovery.

The question that follows comes up in the studio almost every week. How many days do you leave between two sessions, and what do you do on the days in between? The answer depends on the muscle group and on how hard you went, and it sits closer to "you can train more often than you think" than most people expect.

What happens in the days after a session

A heavy set damages muscle fibres at a microscopic level. Your body clears that damage, repairs the tissue and builds back slightly more than was there. That is the adaptation you train for. The process starts straight after the session, is strongest in the first twenty-four hours and then tails off.

How long that tail runs depends on what you did. A steady session with moderate weights is dealt with inside a day. A heavy leg session with plenty of volume takes two to three days. Your nervous system comes into it as well: lifting heavy asks for sharp co-ordination, and that sharpness is missing for a while after an exhausting session, even when your muscles feel fine.

How much rest a muscle group actually needs

Allow forty-eight hours between two heavy sessions for the same muscle group. Train lighter, or work a small muscle group such as your arms, and twenty-four hours will do. After a genuinely heavy session for legs or back, plan three days.

That is not an argument for training twice a week. It is an argument for spreading the load. Train legs on Monday and you can work your upper body on Tuesday; those muscles are rested. That gets you to four sessions a week without leaving any muscle group short.

Past forty the picture shifts. In practice we see muscles keep adapting readily while tendons, ligaments and joints ask for more time. What you notice usually sits in a knee or a shoulder that nags, while the muscle itself finished days ago. We wrote about that in strength training after 40.

How to spread your week

The Dutch physical activity guidelines ask for at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week, spread across several days, plus muscle and bone strengthening activity at least twice a week.¹ The NHS lands in the same place and adds that you are better off spreading that load over four to five days.²

Translated into a training week:

• Twice a week: two full-body sessions with at least two days between them.
  
• Three times a week: full body every other day, for instance Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
  
• Four times a week: split into upper body and lower body, twice each.

What rarely works is three heavy sessions back to back followed by five days of nothing. Your body responds to regularity; a spike followed by silence returns less than the same hours spread evenly.

What a rest day is for

A rest day is not a day on the sofa. Walking, cycling or easy swimming keeps the blood moving and takes the stiffness out of your legs faster than sitting still. Ten minutes of mobility work for the joints you train tomorrow is worth more than the extra set you could have done yesterday. If the stiffness hangs around longer than a few days, massage helps to get the tissue moving again.

Recovery also needs material. Eat too little, or too little protein, and you give your body nothing to build with. That is often the real bottleneck for people who take enough rest and still stand still; we work on it within nutrition and lifestyle coaching.

When rest is not the problem

If you are still flat after three days, your training frequency is rarely the cause. Look at your nights, your working week and your stress level first. A body that runs in top gear all day does not drop back on its own in the evening. That is the ground our coaching for burnout and stress covers.

If one specific spot nags after every session, it has stopped being fatigue. Overuse complaints usually build up because someone started doing a lot more in a short space of time; the advice is to spare that spot briefly and then rebuild carefully.³ That is exactly what we do in injury recovery, in a build-up you can follow.

How we plan your rest at de Werf

We plan rest as deliberately as the sessions themselves. Your programme sets out which muscle group is up when, how heavy a week gets and where the easy week sits. If a block runs too high, we bring the volume down before you stall. That is the rhythm in our approach: load and recovery moving around each other. You can see how that works in physical training.

A real example from our practice

"I was training four times a week and slowly getting worse. Every session felt heavy, I was stiff every morning and the weights had not moved in months. Ian took nothing out, he simply spread the four sessions further apart and put an easy week after every three. It felt like a step backwards at first. Eight weeks later I was lifting more than I had all year, and I got up in the morning without having to unlock my back first."

Want to organise your week better?

Schedule an intake at de Werf in The Hague, with no obligation. We look at your sessions, your week and your recovery, and put the load where your body can do something with it.

Schedule an intake

Read also:
Our coaching in physical training and injury recovery.

Sources:
¹ RIVM - Dutch physical activity guidelines (in Dutch)
² NHS - Physical activity guidelines for adults aged 19 to 64
³ Thuisarts - Sports injuries (in Dutch)