” I don’t understand, I work out 5 – 6 and sometimes 7 days a week, why am I not seeing any muscle definition? “.
Our body builds muscle when we are at rest not when we workout, so if you are not resting your muscles will break down and NOT grow. This means: If you are working out 5 -7 days a week, you will never see any muscle definition on your body.
If you understand how the body works, you will understand that you shouldn’t be working out more than 4 days a week with strength training.
When we train with enough intensity we create micro tears in our muscles, the body recognizes the tears and begins to rebuild it. If all you do is tear tear tear, guess what – the body cannot repair therefore build, and you will come to a constant state of overtraining. We need rest, otherwise you will see no results.
The main rule for your training should be: feel energized after every single workout you do, if you don’t feel energized it’s a first sign that you are overtrained.
The whole point of working out is to feel great and full of energy, NOT tired and wanting to pass out.
The symptoms of over training are the usual symptoms:
- Lack of motivation
- Muscle Twitching
- Restlessness or having a hard time falling a sleep
- Loss of appetite
- Loss of strength
- Mood swings
If you want to never get stuck with your training and build muscle the proper way you need to train in cycles 6-8 weeks and then rest for about a week. If you always working out without not having that week off for your body to reset, what end up happening is not only you will hit plateau, but you will loose motivation in training, you will also begin to loose strength and this is how most people give up working out all together.
You can of course choose your own working out cycle this is just an example.
- Monday – Semi intense Cardio like FitFlow
- Tuesday – Lower body Brazil Boom
- Wednesday – Upper Body
- Thursday – Active Rest – Do a beach walk
- Friday – Lower Body
- Saturday – Upper Body
- Sunday – Complete Rest
If you don’t like to split your routines into lower and upper body then you can do full body workouts 3 days a week, but you always have to rest the following day.
But the most important thing to know is that working out is only 20% of your results, the other 80% is all in your nutritional approach. If you are not eating the right foods you are not going to get great results no matter how much you train or for how long. Nutrition is art and if you want those lean muscles and if you want to see your abs, nutrition is where your answers are. So ask your self are you training correctly? Are you getting plenty of rest? Is your nutritional approach matches your training?
