If you’ve ever wondered about how much rest between intense workouts then this article will help answer this question. We all know that muscles need time to recover, but how much time?

We have discussed that muscles should be worked to failure in order for a hypertophic response to occur. It doesn’t matter if it takes one or more sets to achieve this because the muscles need to be stressed to failure and beyond in order to activate the most muscle fibers. The recovery phase consists of protein synthesis to repair the microscopic tears caused by intense exercise. The process concludes by building more and bigger muscle fibers.

So then the question remains about how long does this process take and when can you return to training the same muscles? It is suggested, through scientific studies, that it takes between 5 to 7 days for your muscles to repair and recover. If, however, you fail to allow your muscles to fully recover you can drastically interfere and prevent it from maximum growth. On the other hand if you are using the same muscle to assist another body part or performing lower intensity cardio work you are not likely to affect recovery.

So here is how it breaks down; each muscle should be trained at full intensity only once per week to take advantage of a full recovery. A great way to make sure you are fully recovering after an intense workout is by using the split training method. This allows you to work out several times each week but and hitting each muscle group intensely once every 7 days.