How much effort you should be putting into your workout routine can be quite mystifying for many beginners. Coaches and fitness influencers are always talking about pushing yourself, but for someone who’s never worked out before, how would they know if they’re actually meeting such vague criteria? What does training hard really mean, and in reality, how hard should you train when you work out?
By nature, the human body doesn’t like being pushed to extreme conditions. When we get tired, that’s a signal that we need to rest and recover. Yet this seems to be the opposite of what’s expected of us when it comes to working out. We’re told that pushing through pain and exhaustion is what leads to progress. This sounds great, but it can be incredibly difficult to carry out. To what extent are we supposed to keep going? How do we know when we’ve done enough and can finally give ourselves a break? When will we know that we’ve thoroughly trained a muscle?
The problem is that these are all very abstract questions, which can take months and years to figure out if you’re just going at it alone. However, if we can break these down into multiple components, we’ll be able to have a much better understanding of what’s required. In reality, how hard you should train your body to effectively build muscle and increase strength is determined by a few key factors: frequency, volume, and intensity.
Frequency
The first part of understanding how to work out effectively is knowing how often you should work out.
Unfortunately, a lot of casual gym-goers don’t work out frequently enough to accomplish the goals they have. There are people who say they enjoy going to the gym when all that means is that they’ll go to the gym once every couple of weeks. There are also people who constantly cycle between months of going to the gym almost every day and months of not exercising at all.
As blunt as it might sound, the truth is that unless you exercise regularly and consistently, you’re not going to make progress. A one-time workout session won’t help you lose weight, gain muscle, or improve your cardiovascular health. Repeatedly stopping and starting a gym routine doesn’t lead anywhere, and neither does going to the gym intermittently. If you have serious goals to improve your health and fitness, the only way to achieve them is by making exercise a constant part of your life, as you would with eating or sleeping, even when your days get busy or you’re not feeling very motivated.
So what does exercising with regularity actually look like?
For beginners, aim to work out at least 3-4 times a week to get in the habit and build a routine. However, once you’re comfortable, try to increase the frequency to at least 4-5 times a week, because that’s when you’ll really begin to gain momentum and make progress.
Doing this will prevent you from not training often enough, but it’s also important to structure your workouts in a way so that you don’t train your muscles too much, which can stall growth and cause injury. Muscles typically take about 2-3 days to recover from a workout. Therefore, in order to avoid exerting your muscles too much, it’s ideal to space your exercises out so that you’re training a muscle group about twice a week.
Volume
The next step is figuring out how much exercise your muscles should endure during any given workout session.
A misconception I see when it comes to this is that some people believe they can adequately train a muscle by just doing one or two exercises. This most likely won’t result in optimal muscle growth, as it’s not going to provide enough total training volume.
In theory, your muscles might get sufficient activation if you were to do many sets of those one or two exercises, but this approach is still inferior to doing a moderate number of sets of several different exercises. This is because even among exercises that train the same muscle group, they can train those muscles in slightly different ways to fully develop all parts of that muscle, as opposed to training in a very one-dimensional way.
In order for your muscles to undergo a comprehensive workout, you should aim to perform 10-25 working sets per muscle group every week. A good way to accomplish this is to train every muscle group twice a week, each time doing 2-3 exercises and 3-4 sets of each exercise. When it comes to the exercises you do, try to select movements that involve a variety of positions and motions so you can emphasize different parts of the muscle with each.
This might sound like a lot to go through in one session, but you can combine certain muscle groups by incorporating compound exercises into your routine. For example, if you train your back and biceps on the same day, exercises like rows and pulldowns will recruit both muscle groups and can count as an exercise towards each.
Intensity
The last but arguably most important element of an effective training routine is how intense your workouts are. With every single set of an exercise, how many repetitions, or reps, should you do?
The question of how much effort you’re supposed to put into your training is one that often baffles beginners and amateurs alike. Do you do the exercise until you begin to feel tired? Until you start to get bored?
The answer is that you should do as many reps as you can until you’re near or at failure. Failure is when you’re unable to do another rep of an exercise with proper technique because your muscles are so depleted of energy. With every set of an exercise that you do, try to at least get within a couple reps of failure, if not completely to it. For reference, being 1-2 reps away from failure means you’re still able to complete the movement, but you’re struggling a lot along the way. In most cases, by the end of an exercise when you’re on the last set, you should be reaching total failure.
Now although assigning a certain number of reps per set can be arbitrary and baseless, it’s useful for gauging the weight you should be using for an exercise. For example, with most exercises, choose a weight that allows you to reach failure within 10-15 reps. If you’re hitting failure before that, the weight might be too heavy and you might be compromising your technique. On the contrary, if you’re still feeling fine after 15 reps, you should probably increase the weight.
In addition to that, how you perform each rep matters as well. I discuss this more in depth in my post titled What Is the Mind-Muscle Connection?, but essentially with every rep, you should focus on feeling and maximizing the tension in the muscle you’re working out, instead of simply worrying about lifting the weight.
Understanding how many reps you should be doing and how you should be performing each rep is crucial to effectively building muscle and making significant gains in the gym. For many people who go to the gym a lot but still don’t make much of a transformation, they’re likely being held back because they don’t fully grasp these points
A Cheat Sheet for Success
Far too often, I see people who want to gain muscle make errors in one or more of the above areas when it comes to how hard they should be training. What makes it worse is that they usually don’t realize they’re making these mistakes because there’s no one to tell them so. In addition, since progress takes time, it’s hard to immediately tell whether a routine is effective or not.
Because of this, a lot of beginners, including myself at one point, waste of lot of time early on in their fitness endeavors, and it can take years before they finally discover the correct approach. However, if you set off on the right path from the start, you’ll be able to accelerate your transformation and very quickly start to see desired results.
