For muscle growth and growth, they need time to recover after training. The more intense your workout, the more time your body needs to recover. Also, the recovery period is affected by your age and physical fitness.

Questions often arise: how many times a week should you train and how often can you train a particular muscle group? Everyone considers it true to train small muscle groups more often, large ones less often. In the gym, you will often see how people train biceps not once a week, but two or even three times. The people who perform deadlifts twice a week are few and far between. Of course, training the biceps is easier and more enjoyable than pulling this stupid barbell off the floor. Although many beginners do not understand what recovery is.
They are partly right in that they train the biceps twice a week, and they do the deadlift only once a week. The recovery of small muscle groups – such as biceps, forearms, hamstrings, triceps, abs – is much faster than the recovery of large muscle groups (quadriceps, pectoral muscles, back muscles, deltoid muscles). The recovery time for small muscle groups takes from 2 to 3 days, for large ones – from 4 to 7 days. But all this is relative and is taken as an average. Everyone has their own characteristics, and for some, even three days may not be enough to restore small muscle groups, while for someone these three days will be enough for almost complete restoration of large muscle groups.

Energy recovery
This item includes sleep and proper nutrition. Muscle recovery is equally affected by both. For a student, sleep should be within 8-10 hours a day – especially if you work on the mass. Fractional sleep is also welcome. Fortunately, energy is restored quickly – one day is enough. An extra two or three hours at night on the Internet or snacking on sandwiches and smoked meats will also affect the recovery time, and decently.

Hormones

If you can describe testosterone in a nutshell, then it is responsible for male libido and fighting qualities in training. Also, testosterone is responsible for catabolism, and cortisol, which is produced in any stressful situation, is responsible for muscle breakdown. After training, testosterone levels rise above baseline, but not for long, and then it drops to below baseline levels. There is a hormonal imbalance that takes time to repay. And you should not drive the body into the most severe stress, training legs today, and chest tomorrow. Simply put, frequent heavy training will affect catabolism, not anabolism.

muscles

After that workout, you injured muscle fibers, and half an hour after it, their treatment begins. The healing process has different terms, but it depends on the work done and the above factors. Also, the harder (more voluminous) the training, the longer the recovery process. Muscle recovery after training can be conditionally divided into four phases: the phase of rapid recovery, slow, supercompensation, delayed recovery and the phase of nerve recovery.

Rapid recovery phase

This process lasts up to an hour, but the issue is essentially very controversial. Now we are touching the protein-carbohydrate window. There are prerequisites that all this is an invention of sports nutrition owners, who thereby exaggerate the importance of their products, such as protein. Of great importance after a workout is energy recovery, and its surest source is carbohydrates. Carbohydrates play an important role after a workout. After the loading of carbohydrates has occurred, proteins must enter the body. The best sources of recovery of the first phase will be considered carbohydrates: from sports nutrition these are gainers, from ordinary food – fruits and vegetables, cereals.

slow recovery phase

This is the closing of the carbohydrate window at the beginning of the opening of the protein window. During the fast recovery phase, you had to “boot carbohydrates”, restoring some of the energy that would be spent on building destroyed muscle myofibrils, that is, muscle cells. If we translate this into an accessible language, then carbohydrates are builders, and protein is a building material.

Supercompensation phase

It comes after 2-3 days, lasts about five days, but these figures are arbitrary. Supercompensation is the accumulation of something (in our case, muscle fibers) in excess of the previous level. The topic of supercompensation is very extensive – in short, it is possible after a complete recovery of a muscle group and after an increase in the work performed for a particular muscle group. In part, this is a progression of loads.

delayed recovery

This phase occurs when when supercompensation has not occurred. This happens very often, and for many athletes, including experienced ones.

Nerves

It takes the longest to recover the nerves, which, like the muscles, receive a lot of stress. The most limiting factor on the way to big weights is the nervous system.

Muscle recovery after training
The founder of bodybuilding, Joe Weider, never thought about the process of muscle recovery, promoting his training system, which consisted of six days with heavy weights. Schwarzenegger, Colombo, Zane, and other Mr. Olympia title holders trained exactly according to Vader. But why then did they achieve so many results in bodybuilding? Of course, the nutrition, the regime were correct, but even this is not enough for such muscle growth. The whole point is that they took anabolic steroids, which, in turn, accelerate recovery processes. So Uncle Joe’s scheme doesn’t work for us.

But one day, Arthur Jones realized that the muscles needed to be given more rest for recovery, and came up with high-intensity training (HIT), but Mike Mentzer “patented” his creation, who wrote his book called “Mike Mentzer. Supertraining. The essence of the training was completely opposite to the training methods of Joe Weider. If Vader said train as often as possible, then Mentzer’s book said the opposite.

Let us briefly describe the principle of HIT. It consisted in the fact that the whole body training cycle lasted 16 days and two exercises were given to each muscle group, one approach each, performed to failure, which was to be obtained in the range of 6-10 repetitions.

What is the disadvantage of such training that Uncle Mentzer gave us? All those who practice according to his instructions soon (in a month or two) face a stop in muscle growth. The fact is that the body adapts to the loads, and a further increase in weight on the bar will affect the injuries of the tendons and joints. You have to increase the number of approaches and repetitions – thereby increasing the volume of training. It’s one thing if you take 40 kilograms for biceps and do 6 sets of 8 repetitions, this will give you a total of 1920 kilograms. And it’s completely different – if you do 1 set of 8 repetitions with a weight of 60 kilograms, this will give a total of only 480 kilograms. And the whole essence of bodybuilding lies in the power performance!

Conclusions:

the more often the workouts, the easier they should be;
the more weight on the shells, the more the nervous system is strained, limiting the subsequent weight;
when the muscles are not restored, but the training is still being carried out, stagnation can occur both in the weights on the projectile and in your own weight.
Try not to go beyond the generally accepted rules and train muscles no more often than it says in the training program.