This is Darrin’s view on muscle recovery time. To read Jason’s view, click here.
How long do your muscles need to recover between workouts?
That is one of the most important questions for any lifter – whether a newbie or a competitor. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the hardest to answer.
You’ve probably heard 48 hrs. Or maybe you’ve heard 72 hours. Some people even advocate a full week of rest between working each muscle group.
I wish I could give you an absolute rule. But I can’t.
Part of the confusion comes from mixing two issues: are we talking about recovery between workouts or recovery between working specific muscles?
For this article, we are talking about resting particular muscle groups, not about rest between workouts (unless those workouts hit all your muscles).
In general, you probably need more recovery time than you think.
I’ll give you some scientific and empirical evidence as anchor points so that you can evaluate muscle recovery time for yourself.
To make this easier to digest and act on, I’m going to score each recommendation in the rest of this article into three buckets:
a) tend towards a 2-day muscle recovery period
b) tend towards a 3-day muscle recovery period
c) tend towards a full week to rest your muscles
But all of the recommendations I make interact with each other – you can’t look at just one factor and say “ok, the ideal recovery time is X”. Some guidelines may trump others, so the key is to take this knowledge and start applying the ones that you believe will have the biggest impact on your particular situation. And then test.
One final preamble. We’re talking here about force recovery – the time it takes for your muscle strength to return to optimum levels for their next major exertion. It’s a proven fact that after working a muscle intensely, it is actually weaker while it is healing than when you started. It takes days until it is capable of exerting the same (or more) force as before the workout. And since you want to exert maximum force in each workout, this is the recovery time we are working with. So don’t equate soreness with recovery. Whether you are sore or not, is secondary.
The Factors That Influence Recovery Time
There are tons of factors that influence how long you should rest your muscles between workouts. And because there are so many factors, this is a very long article. LeanLifters Members get the full article. Everyone else gets the short version. Here are the factors:
Things You Don’t Control
- Your genetics
- Your age
- Which muscles we are talking about
Things Related To Your Workouts Themselves
- Your experience lifting
- What program/routine you are on
- How intense your workouts are
- What non-lifting exercise you also do
- What you are doing on your “rest days”
Things You Control, But Outside The Weight Room
- Your diet
- Whether you are taking steroids or not (hopefully not)
- Your sleeping
- Your stress levels
- Your mental strength
With all these factors, there’s no way to have a universal rule!
Factors You Can’t Control That Affect Muscle Recovery Time
Let’s start by talking about genetics, age, and different muscle types.
Fiber Types – Genetics
You may have heard about Type I, Type IIa, and Type IIb muscle fibers. Well, we’ll skip the physiology class for now and let’s just call them “fast” and “slow” muscles. Fast muscle fibers are designed for explosive movements. Sprinting. Jumping. Powerlifting heavy weights. Generally, these muscles require more time to recover between workouts (and between sets, but that’s a different topic). The slower muscle fibers are designed for endurance activities – jogging, for example. And they take less time to recover.
We’re all born with a mixture of types. But some people are skewed towards one end of the spectrum or the other. The split can be anywhere from 40% to 60%, vs 60% to 40%. But that 20% swing makes a big difference between whether you’ll be a champion marathoner or an Olympic shotputter.
Keep this in mind when we talk later about routines. But for now, just recognize that your recovery time is impacted by which fibers are used, what your mix of fiber types is, and how trained those fibers are.
Age
The older you are, the longer it takes to recover. It can be more complicated, but let’s leave it at that. How much longer? Well, that depends on your workout. But it’s not like a 50 yr old takes twice as long to recover as a 25 yr old. It’s more like 50% longer.
General guideline: 20 yrs old – tend towards 2 days; 50+ – tend towards a week for a muscle group to fully recover.
Muscle Groups
Arnold used to talk about how his calves and biceps recovered faster than his back and chest. I’ve found this to be true as well but it is related to whether you are doing compound or isolation movements (see next section). And it is related to the fiber type issues above. It appears, in general, that larger muscle groups take longer to recover. But that’s not an absolute rule. Anecdotally, some guys will say that their smaller muscles take longer to recover. Those are the same guys who try to do bench press 3 days a week…
General guideline: smaller muscles – tend towards 2 days; larger muscles – tend towards 3+ days; and then there are the back muscles hit by deadlifts – tend towards once a week.
Factors In Your Workout That Affect Muscle Recovery Time
Your Experience
I just heard Tom Venuto talk about this exact issue and I must agree 100% with him. (Duh, of course I’d agree with him. Have you seen him? Heard him? He’s got to be the smartest bodybuilder I’ve come across with the best physique. Anyway…)
When you are just starting out, full-body workouts every other day are perfect. You hit every muscle group in every workout, or 3x/wk per muscle. That also means each muscle (in fact, your whole body) rests only about 48 hrs.
But the more experienced you are, the more you’ll need extra recovery days. That’s mainly because (presumably) you are learning to be more intense with each workout as you get more experienced.
Pro bodybuilders (especially the few that are all-natural) end up often resting each muscle 6 or 7 days before working it again. That’s why 3-way split routines, with lots of isolation movements, are ok for bodybuilders. But for the mid-experienced lifter, 72 to 96 hrs is usually perfect.
General guideline: just starting out – tend towards 2 days; mid-level experience – tend towards 3 days; very advanced lifters – tend towards letting each muscle recover a full week.
Your Program/Routine
In line with your experience level, you will likely modify your routines over the years. The worst thing any newbie or beginner can do is jump into split routines. You really need a full-body lifting program. That said, I’ll try to step off the soapbox and simply describe the effect that different routines have on recovery time….
If your routine calls for you to isolate particular muscles, then you can lift more frequently. As long as you use different muscles in each workout. For example, if you did legs one day, you could do chest the next day, then back the day after that, then shoulders, then arms, etc. and workout 6 days a week. In practice, that’s very hard to do in a pure isolated fashion. For example, deadlifts use a heck of a lot of your muscle groups! In fact, all of The Big 7 exercises hit multiple muscle groups.
The workaround is to do 2-way or 3-way splits. A 2-way split is usually upper body/lower body. A 3-way split example is legs/upper pushing/upper pulling. Or legs/chest/back. And some people do 4-way splits by adding in either shoulders or arms. (I recommend only 2-way or 3-way splits.)
So, if you are doing a lot of compound movements, or hitting multiple muscle groups in a single workout, then you need more days off for recovery. If you are doing more isolation movements, then your “recovery days” are actually spent working different muscles. Those really aren’t days off, so to speak. The distinction is less about how much time each muscle needs to recover – it’s more about whether those recovery days should be “days off” or not. Make sense?
General guideline: full-body/compound workouts – tend towards “days off” recovery periods; for isolation type workouts, your recovery days are spent working other muscles.
How Intense Your Workouts Are
Forgive my presumption here, but I bet you are not making your workouts as intense as they need to be to see sustained progress. I say this with confidence, because I see it in 99% of the people at every commercial gym I visit. I’ll save the lecture, and stick to the facts: there’s a continuum of intensity and most of us are in the middle. The less intense your workouts, the less recovery time those muscles need. And of course, the more intense, the more recovery needed. [Note that I'm talking about lifting intensity for producing force, not cardio intensity.] Actually you could even do a test to see how intense your workouts really are. If two days later, you can lift the same weight for the same exercise for the same reps, then you most likely weren’t at maximum lifting intensity the previous workout.
Some notable exceptions: 1) newbies; 2) endurance workouts (like metabolic workouts or fat-burn workouts with weights). On both of these cases, you can be intense and still only need a couple days of recovery.
General guideline: extremely intense workouts – tend towards a week recovery for those muscles; if you are just going through the motions with little intensity – tend towards a 2-day recovery (better yet, just make your workouts more intense!).
Non-Lifting Exercise
This article is focused on weight lifting exercises, but I’m guessing (hoping) that most of you do other exercise too. For me, it’s running. But for you it might be basketball, or rowing, or swimming, or soccer, etc. I won’t go into sport-specific recovery (’cause I don’t know enough about it) but I can say that any strenuous activity will impact your recovery from heavy resistance training. Done moderately, all of these activities can actually help with recovery (see section below on active recovery). But done intensely, you’ll see one or more of these impacts: a) your muscles won’t recover as fast, ahead of your next lifting session; b) your performance in the other activities will be diminished if you haven’t recovered from your previous lifting session; c) injury; d) overtraining.
Again the key word here is intensity. The more intense you do the non-lifting exercise, the more you have to increase recovery time. You could do the non-lifting exercise right after lifting (for example, doing sprints right after you lift), and that will lessen the impact on recovery time, but then you will certainly see dramatic reduction in performance. If you’ve tried to do sprints right after a workout, you know what I mean.
An important consideration here is that most non-lifting exercises, when done intensely, will directly hit your legs hard. So, if you do a heavy leg day for lifting, then two days later play an intense game of soccer, you will probably suck at the soccer game. And you’ll have to rest even longer to recover. (Plus, if you play that intense soccer too close to your previous workout, you might even wipe away some of the gains your previous workout would have made.)
The biggest lesson here is that if you are trying to be super intense with your lifting, you probably can’t be super intense in another activity. I hate admitting this (given my love of running) but it’s true. I have successfully done weight training and marathon training but the result was very slow progress in both and my “best performances” in both areas suffered. But that was my choice and I knew that keeping my weight training intense while prepping for the marathon meant that my marathon time would suffer. I did it anyway because both are important to me.
What’s important to you? If your non-lifting exercise is just as important as your lifting, then recognize they both will suffer a little. You can make gains in both, but very slowly. For most people, I’d suggest picking your most important activity and train for progress in that, but choose less-intense versions of your less important activities.
General guideline: extremely intense non-lifting exercise – treat the muscles worked as though you were lifting, in terms of recovery time; moderate non-lifting exercise – time those activities to follow your workout so that your muscles still have the optimal recovery time thereafter.
Active Recovery Days vs. Non-Active Recovery Days
I don’t think many experts would suggest sitting in front of the TV like a couch potato and being sedentary on your recovery days. But let’s contrast “resting” with “using” your muscles as they recover.
For example, let’s say you worked your chest yesterday. Today, maybe you are working your legs. But is it better to not use your chest muscles at all today, or to use them lightly?
The answer isn’t crystal clear, but the evidence seems to gravitate towards MOVE YOUR BODY EVERY DAY.
So, you can stretch your pecs (active or passive stretching), do light activity, do a few sets of fast pushups (assuming you are not maxing out or anything), foam roll, try low-intensity cross training, do deep tissue work, etc. The idea is to get blood flowing into the muscle and the surrounding connective tissue.
Studies have shown that most of these activities can shorten recovery time (or at worst, not hurt it, and relieve some soreness). But it seems to be inconsistent. In other words, given all the other factors of your workout, diet, genetics, etc. you might find that passive stretching and foam rolling reduce your recovery time. But maybe massage and cross-training have no effect on recovery. But maybe for me, it’s the opposite.
However, I think it’s safe to say that you will find some type of active recovery works that speeds your recuperation.
This is also one of the reasons I don’t get too hung up on training multiple days in a row. Some people say “well, since you are doing compound movements, you can’t actually rest your deltoids between workout day 1 and workout day 2 – the delts are used both days”. But a good program will take this into account and the delts will not be the primary movers on both days. The fact that compound movements use more than one muscle group at a time doesn’t always mean every muscle used is used to the same degree. Again, a well designed program will take this into account.
General guideline: pretty simple – active recovery will shorten your recovery time somewhat but the exact extent will be unique to your situation.
Your Life Outside the Gym
Your Diet
You have full control over what you eat. Yes, even those of you who still live with mom. And it’s absolutely critical that you ingest a mix of protein and carbs within the 1 hr window of your intense workout. (I know, you’ve probably heard 2 hrs, but the value geometrically degrades with time so I always say within 1 hr.) This “within 1 hr” could mean that you have a protein/carb drink DURING your workout. Or it could mean real food after.
I don’t want to turn this post into a treatise on diet, but suffice it to say that workouts destroy your body. The better job you do at replenishing nutrients needed for recovery (protein and carbs), the better. Ideally, this would be a whey protein (acts fast) and a sugary carb (like fruit juice). Why the sugar? Because it speeds the effect of the protein. Craig Ballantyne advocates a couple chocolate milks. But let’s work on you ingesting carbs and protein within 1 hr every time, after every workout. Then later you can refine it further for even better performance.
Some people also believe that creatine helps with recovery.
There’s more to nutrient timing than just around your workout (though that’s the most important for both muscle growth and recovery). There are also some experts who advocate saving your fat intake to be 6 to 12 hrs after your workout and that this helps with recovery a bit. Personally, I find this strategy to be effective for avoiding fat gains (you need to eat fat, but preferably not with starchy carbs because that will cause fat storage, and you want starchy carbs around your workouts, so the only other time to have your fats is 6 to 12 hours later!). But I can’t find scientific evidence that it improves actual recovery.
Steroids
One of the major benefits of anabolic steroids is their ability to speed recovery. I’ve stated my opinion of steroids previously, so I’ll leave that discussion at that.
Are You Getting Quality Sleep?
How many hours of sleep do you need? 8? 9? 6? Whatever it is, you may find that it increases or decreases once you are working out intensely. But there is no optimal number. Don’t feel like you need to sleep 9 hours a day to maximize recovery unless your body is telling you need 9 hrs. In fact, if your body is calibrated to 7 hrs a day, and you force yourself to sleep 9, you will probably feel like a train wreck! You can oversleep!
That said, if you need 8 hrs and are only getting 6, you will eventually feel the impact. Examples: getting sick sooner, crashing on weekends to catch up on the missed sleep, reduced maximum lifting output, plateaus, irritability, etc. A lot has been written elsewhere about how in the US we are “sleep deprived”. I’m no expert on that, but I can say that forcing yourself to live on too little sleep will degrade your muscle recovery time and your workouts will suffer.
Much more important than the # of hours is the quality of sleep. Have you ever slept fewer hours than you are used to, but you awoke feeling totally energized and ready to go? Sleep specialists have studied the sleep cycle itself (usually involving 90 minute cycles, with a 45- minute microcycle, the the exact time periods vary individual to individual). If you wake up mid-cycle, you are more likely to feel groggy. You can get really advanced in optimizing your sleep habits by figuring out your cycle and setting your alarm to wake up only at the end of a cycle, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
Your Mental Strength
We’re getting into the softer part of this article, but perhaps one of the most important: your mental strength. One of the characteristics of top athletes is not just their physical prowess. It’s their determination and their joy of the activity. Joy and determination. Combine those with great genetics and you have a superstar.
Nobody can do anything about your genetics.
But you can control your determination and joy.
If you take two people with the same genetics and current condition but give one a leg up on either determination or joy or both, then they will recover faster.
Yeah, there are limits. But if you’re honest, you know you can attest to this yourself. Ever have a few weeks where you are so into your workouts, really having fun and really pushing yourself? Remember how you couldn’t wait to get back to the gym and push yourself again? Even though you were training harder than ever, did you need extra time to recover?
Now contrast that with a period where you weren’t enjoying your workouts, didn’t really push yourself much (and thus didn’t work very hard). I bet during periods like this, you started feeling like you needed extra recovery days, right? You know I’m right!
So how do you train your mind for joy and determination? That’s a future article. Combine them with positive visualization and you’ll be astonished at how hard you can push yourself and still come back for more. But the point here is that the better armed you are mentally, the less recovery time you’ll need.
Stressed Out = Lame Workouts
As we just mentioned, your mental condition affects your workouts. Negative stress (distress) makes it hard to focus in the gym. Plus, it’s been shown many times that distress reduces the efficiency of your body: more toxins are created and less toxins are cleaned out. That makes it harder to train and harder to grow. So you’ll need more recovery time the more distressed you are.
In Conclusion…
As I wrap up this long article, take a moment to think about what you’ve read. What are you doing right? What are you doing wrong? What advice can you offer fellow lifters? Please make a commitment to post a comment below ok?
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