How Many Days a Week Should You Train to Grow?

Opener

Training seven days a week seems to be coming back in style. I've watched what it does to people, and I've never seen it build more muscle.

"I have a client right now who insisted on training seven days a week, and I told them it wasn't going to be optimal and they were going to burn out. Of course they didn't listen, and of course now they are burned out. I think that's the hardest thing to grasp early on. You watch movies like Rocky, and it's always like the training is where the growth happens. It's the opposite. The training is where everything gets broken down."

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1. Work it out from first principles

Start from zero and add sets one at a time. Early on, every set adds growth. Then you hit a point where it stops paying.

"I want to get a bigger chest and I'm doing zero sets now. If I go in and do one set of bench press, I'm going to grow more than if I did zero sets. If I do two, I'm going to grow more than if I did one. That continues until you reach a point, and I think everyone who trains is at this point, where you say I can't guarantee that adding another set on any workout is going to give a linear increase in muscle growth."