workout for weight gaining

[tightmaniac]

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Just go to the gym 3x a week

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I have a question about this too. I have been going 3x a week sometimes 4x. When I first started I heard that going more often is bad if you are trying to gain weight since it doesnt give the muscles time to rest. Now that Im getting closer to my target weight is it fine to go more often like 4-5x? how often do those of you who arent necessarily trying to gain or lose a lot of weight aim to workout?

[Wu36]

As a general rule, as the intensity of your workouts increase (I'm assuming you're doing something like smiley's plan above) the amount of stress placed on your central nervous system increases as well. So the more experienced you become, you should be lifting less frequently and with higher intensity.

But you don't have to do it this way (I'd recommend it at this stage). Lots of powerlifters/olyimpic lifters train 4 or 5x a week, but they usually utilize some form of periodization so they're not constantly lifting all out (Westside had Max effort and Dynamic effort days, the Bill Starr program I talked about in another thread goes 3x a week light/medium/heavy etc..)

Personally, I lift when I feel recovered from prior workouts. I'd advise you to stick with a high intensity 3 day split until it starts to become too taxing on your body, at which point you can consider making some adjustments.

Note: I've been lifting for 5-6 years now but I'm still just a 20 year old kid, and I've been registered at the cyberpump boards for around the same amount of time so there is a pretty strong HIT bias. I don't want to come off as an authority on the subject. This is merely my opinion. This is my disclaimer for all the other threads I post in too, cause I'm far too lazy to write it more than once.

[skunkworks]

Wu, I disagree with this:

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So the more experienced you become, you should be lifting less frequently and with higher intensity.

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As you get more advanced, you have to lift more frequently to provide enough stimuli to your muscles to force them to adapt (disrupting homeostasis). We agree that you have to lift with more intensity which causes more damage and requires more recovery time, but frequency should be increased as well. As a direct consequence of increasing workout frequency, intermediate and advanced lifters need to move to a lifting program that incorporates dual periodization (cycling light and heavy workouts) to provide their bodies more time to recover and adapt while avoiding overtraining.

[Wu36]

skunk,

Agreed, 'more experienced' was a poor choice of words as I was still referring to beginning lifters who were just getting past the 'newbie gains' stage and can no longer go all out 3x a week doing nothing but heavy compound lifts.

I did briefly mention some periodization schemes in the next paragraph and would like to clarify that I do agree with switching to a cyclical program once you pass the beginner stage (personally, I'm a big fan of westside and waterbury's stuff).

K, now you can pick that apart if you want (not being sarcastic or anything, I think weightlifting forums more than most others need a steady stream of arguement to keep bad information to a minimum).

[skunkworks]

Wu, no hate from me. You've been dispensing truth since you started posting here -- how can I criticize that? Health and fitness is such a nebulous and imprecise thing anyhow, so going into it with an intellectual ego is a sure way to make yourself look stupid when your beliefs are refuted.