Exercising regularly is considered a boon for the overall wellness of your body. As consistent training requires truckloads of determination and persistent discipline, the results are always satisfying.
Consistent training helps you bring down the possibilities of chronic diseases, aids in achieving ideal body weight and muscle mass. Research proves that regular exercise helps keep your mental health in check and elevates your mood. It also is a powerful tool to fix sleep schedules and maintain satisfactory energy levels.
What Are The Different Kinds Of Exercises?
Amongst the different types of exercises, here are some major types:
1. Aerobics
This fitness routine involves continuous body movements like swimming, running, and dancing. It is considered great for cardiovascular conditioning and helps enhance muscle tolerance.
2. HIIT
HIIT means high-intensity interval training. It comprises high-intensity exercises performed in multiple repetitions with rest intervals. This requires several muscle fibers throughout the body to be used rapidly in coordination.
3. Boot Camps
Fitness boot camps include resistance and aerobic exercises with combinations of timed high-pitched circuits. These are usually performed in groups and they offer a challenging yet fun way of workout.
4. Stability Exercises
Pilates, planks, and glute bridges are some exercises that strengthen the core and the muscles. They help maintain a body balance and create better coordination between the forces.
5. Flexibility Exercises
Muscle stretching helps recover muscles and prevent internal injury during a workout session. Whereas yoga helps one maintain a great lifestyle and healthy mind.
6. Callisthenics
These involve training large muscle groups at a medium pace. Lunges, squats, situps, crunches, pushups, and pullups are examples of this kind of training.
7. Strength Training
These exercises are performed using special gym equipment and help gain overall body strength and muscles. Resistance training and weightlifting are examples of such activities. Strength training is undoubtedly one of the best exercises for overall body transformation and wellness.
Why Strength Training Is An Optimum Exercise?
Strength training is considered to help you work on your bone health, increasing the productivity of cardio exercises and enhancing healthy aging. Studies have proven that strength training helps keep your heart healthy and build up muscles. Moreover, it simultaneously keeps a check on your body weight.
Strength training targets exercising specific muscle groups in opposition to external resistance. This type of training is not only efficient for bodybuilders who lift weights in the gym. It is also for commoners who aim to achieve their fitness goals irrespective of the age strata they belong to.
According to a study published in ‘Diabetes Therapy’ in June 2017, researchers believe that strength training combined with a healthy way of living can help treat chronic diseases and type 2 diabetes.
What Falls Under Strength Training?
Strength training combines coordinated pushing, pulling, and lifting movements for muscle buildup and weight management. This type of training involves contracting and toning your muscles under a resisting force. Hence it is also called resistance training.
How To Incorporate Strength Training Into Your Workout?
Strength training needs to be optimized to maximize all its benefits. Here are the top two ways to do that:
- Combine With Cardio
When cardio exercise is combined with resistance training, it helps you lose more weight since your body keeps burning calories while reaching a resting state when the session is over. This leads to longer metabolic activity and active tissues. According to a study, people with combined workout sessions of cardio and strength training lost more weight over some time than those who did cardio alone.
- Be In A Calorie Deficit
Maintaining a proper calorie deficit with scheduled workout sessions helps lose weight faster than practicing the two alone. Hence, efficient bodyweight management depends greatly on the way one goes about planning and executing the training sessions.
What Is The Right Training Frequency?
The number of times we train in a week will depend on several factors. Let us explore some of these that need to be considered when it comes to planning the number of sessions per week.
- Training Goals
When we are training, our primary goal is to build strength. There are also other goals such as losing fats and acquiring gains. The goal of training is always to elicit a stimulus that fits your goal, if you are unclear about what you want to achieve when you are training, you will be beating yourself up thinking you just want to be fit but there are no measurable results.
- Recoverability
When you create a stimulus, think of it as the demand. Training stimulus is also the training demand, the demand of getting stronger and leaner.
What happens if you have a lot of demand (having a lot of training effect in your sessions) but you are lacking in supply? You basically have a lot of customers waiting for their orders but the manpower is not providing the service and soon customers will leave.
Training also follows the same path. If there is less recovery, it will lead to stagnant growth. This, in turn, leads to a condition called Rhabdomyolysis which is the breakdown of muscle tissue to provide more energy to the body.
How Are Stress And Training Related?
Experts say that if you can’t increase the stress-bearing capacity of your body, it is harmful to increase training frequencies that build up stress. Hence, training within lifestyle is a sensible move rather than changing your lifestyle to accommodate your training goal.
What Are The Training Dynamics?
As training frequencies depend from individual to individual, it is affected by their body goals and also their ability to recover from the sessions. As muscle protein synthesis gets elevated for 24-48 hours after a training session, actual muscles are built during these hours.
This leads to some programs trying to train every muscle right after 48 hours. It is possible that training full body after every 48 hours can yield massive overall results for a beginner.
What Should Be The Training Frequency?
For beginners, training frequencies should be alternate days three times a week. As beginners cannot train at a high volume per session, this schedule would give them 48 hours for muscle recovery.
Volume is the total tonnage of individual muscle damage and it is commonly calculated with weight X reps X set. Hence, a full-body training with one exercise for each major muscle group can make sense. However, people that are intermediate to advanced need more volume as their threshold to elicit stimulus is much higher than a beginner. When you think about doing a biceps curl, you can grow your biceps with 10kg of 10 reps as a beginner but as you have been doing it for years. You will need 11kg of 10 reps or 10kg of 12 reps to grow it bigger.
Therefore, an intermediate lifter might be required to train a muscle group with 2-4 exercises per session. If you use the same principle of 48 hours elevated MPS post-training, you will take 2-3 hours in the gym to train every muscle with 3 exercises each. So perhaps a higher frequency will make sense where you can do half body split per session or simply train 1-2 muscle groups to their hardest (provided you can recover from it) per session and train every single day. Of course, we do not need to train every day because our nervous system needs to recover from hard sessions.
How Is Training Frequency Related To Body Goals?
If building more muscle mass, losing fats, and gaining strength is the goal, training frequency can be higher than three times a week. Moreover, as recovery on local tissue is way less detrimental than under-recovery on a global scale, training several muscles rigorously every day increases the risk for injuries.
Can You Lose Fat And Gain Lots Of Strength Simultaneously?
No, one cannot get bigger, lose body fat, and gain a lot of strength in a single go. But as a beginner when you get leaner, you look more muscular. When you learn a movement pattern, you get stronger and lift more weights. When you build muscles, you partition nutrients better and your basal metabolic rate increases so fat loss can happen in tandem.
Conclusion
As a beginner, you do not need to train at a high frequency (more than 3 times a week). Training two times a week however will be getting slower results and a training program that is not for gaining muscle mass as exercises are limited. That’s why 3 times a week will be the most effective through meta-analysis of research about training frequency.
The main considerations for how many times you as a beginner should train to depend on your lifestyle and commitment level. To keep yourself accountable, joining a fitness center would be optimal. With assistance from expert physical trainers, like at TSquared Lab, you’ll be able to reach your fitness goals effectively and efficiently. Then we can look at what is the best practice to optimize your training goal.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q. What are the benefits of regular exercising?
A. Consistent training helps you bring down the possibilities of chronic diseases, aids in achieving ideal body weight and muscle mass. Research proves that regular exercise helps keep your mental health in check and elevates your mood.
Q. What are the benefits of aerobics exercise?
A. Aerobic exercise is considered great for cardiovascular conditioning and helps enhance muscle tolerance.
Q. What is boot camp exercise?
A. Fitness boot camps include resistance and aerobic exercises with combinations of timed high-pitched circuits. These are usually performed in groups and they offer a challenging yet fun way of workout.
Q. How will strength training exercise keep your heart healthy?
A. Strength training is considered to help you work on your bone health, increasing the productivity of cardio exercises and enhancing healthy aging. Studies have proven that strength training helps keep your heart healthy and build up muscles. Moreover, it simultaneously keeps a check on your body weight.
Q. How will expert physical trainers help you achieve your fitness goals?
A. Proper assistance from expert physical trainers, like at TSquared Lab, you’ll be able to reach your fitness goals effectively and efficiently. They can help you out with the best practices to optimize your training goal.
