Podcast 13

Is Twice Per Week Really Often Enough?

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SHOW NOTES

One of the most common questions we get at the Exercise Coach is “Is exercising twice a week really often enough?” Listen in as Brian Cygan and Amy Hudson explore why whole effort exercise twice a week is not only enough, it’s the optimal amount you need to achieve the best fitness results for your body in the shortest amount of time possible.

• Exercising twice a week is more than enough. In fact, exercising more often can actually be counterproductive.
• The most important thing you can do as you age is addressing the health of your fast-twitch muscle fibres. To stimulate and improve the quality of your fast-twitch muscle fibres the exercise needs to be intense and brief.
• When we work our muscles in this way it forces adaptations, which are the end results that we are seeking from an exercise program. The flipside of this intense exercise is that you need to give your body enough time to fully recover and super-compensate, which takes at least 48 hours.
• All the results we want from exercise, like increased muscle mass, strength, neurological efficiency, and improved insulin sensitivity, are not actually caused directly by exercising. Our bodies produce the results we want once we’ve achieved adequate recovery.
• If you exercise more frequently than twice a week, all we are doing is interrupting and disrupting the body’s innate ability to produce the very results we want. Overtraining can cause people to stall out and even go backward in terms of their fitness improvements.
• We should be able to measure the results of any exercise program, which is why this idea is built into every program at the Exercise Coach.
• If you’re not seeing results from your exercise routine, question whether your exercise is intense enough and whether or not you are giving your body enough time and resources to recover properly.
• During a workout, you are depleting the stored energy in your muscles so that they will build themselves back up over time. Your recovery time is just as important as your workouts. The consumption of your muscle’s fuel is a major metabolic signal that triggers these kinds of transformations.
• The answer to getting the best possible results is almost never just exercising more. The key is combining whole effort exercise and whole food nutrition to get all the results we want.

Our bodies generate the results we want from doing the exercise, but only after we’ve exercised while we’re recovering and once we’ve achieved adequate recovery, and that’s time, rest, nutrition.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. I’m Amy Hudson here with my co -host Brian Sagan, CEO and co -founder of The Exercise Coach. We are in a series answering your frequently asked questions. And today we’re going to answer the question we get is twice per week really often enough. We have run into people who have. taking a look at the exercise coach program that involves just two 20 -minute sessions a week.

And sometimes they say, I just feel like maybe I should do more. Do I need to do more than just two 20 -minute workouts a week? Is twice per week really often enough? So Brian, let’s hear your thoughts on this question.

My thoughts are that twice a week is definitely enough and that any more can actually end up being counterproductive. And I will explain. So we’ve talked before on this podcast about how the key to getting the most important results as people age is addressing the health of fast twitch muscle fibers. It’s really resisting usual aging process by restoring muscle health. This is the most important thing we can do from an exercise standpoint to fight the aging process and to experience optimal health and fitness to stimulate and improve Our fast twitch muscle fibers requires exercise that is of a sufficient intensity. It’s got to be of a high enough effort to actually stimulate improvements, to target and improve those specific muscles.

that are the fibers we’re losing as we age. And when we work our muscles in this intense manner, what happens is it triggers our bodies to produce a change, to produce what’s known as adaptations. These are really the results that we seek from an exercise program. There are these protective adaptations that our body generates in response to exercise, if that exercise is of a sufficient intensity, and then if we give our body the opportunity to recover from that stress, from that stimulus. And we know from research and our experience that when we apply a science -based high intensity strength training stimulus, what we call whole effort exercise, it requires at the very least 48 hours to fully recover. And we don’t just want people to recover, what we’re actually trying to do is to stimulate the body to recover and super compensate.

That’s just the term that means that the body has produced the adaptation that we’re looking for. And again, these are just the results. So increased muscle fiber size, increased strength, increased neurological efficiency, better insulin sensitivity, all the things that we’re looking for, whether mechanical or metabolic, all the results that we want from exercise are really adaptations the body is producing in response to what it perceives as the threat that’s imposed through the stress of exercise. It’s not really a threat, We’re applying it safely, but biologically speaking, the body perceives it as a threat. stress. And that’s why it responds by adapting.

But it’s so important to understand that exercise itself, while we are exercising, isn’t actually causing the results we want from exercise. Our body being just wonderfully and intelligently designed, produces the results that we want. In response to the exercise, our bodies generate the results we want from doing the exercise. But only after we’ve exercised while we’re recovering and once we’ve achieved adequate recovery. And that’s time, rest, nutrition, stress factors in, like psychological stress factors into recovery. We’ve got to give the body a chance to recover.

And if we exercise prior to giving the body a chance, to fully recover and respond to the stimulus of exercise. So more frequently than twice a week, when we’re doing whole effort exercise, all we’re doing is actually interrupting and disrupting the body’s innate ability to produce the very results we want. That’s what’s known as overtraining. So we found through our experience and looking at the research over many years, that the ideal target for people is to aim for two whole effort exercise sessions per week to get the best results. And any more than that, based on research and our experience will really in a very short course, lead to over -training where the individual’s not getting better and better as a result of each session, but rather they stall out and maybe go backwards. And that’s not at all what they want.

And at The Exercise Coach, we use technology to actually measure people’s performance in each and every workout. And the data we record from each session enables us to see if workout to workout clients are actually improving. That’s the whole point of exercise. We should be able to say from session to session, how am I measurably better than I was before? If we can’t say that and we don’t see that, then we have to ask, what are we doing?

And then the answer really is going to be, Is the exercise intense enough to stimulate results?

And are you giving your body enough time and recovery resources to recover and respond? Yes, that is a super helpful explanation, Brian. And like you said, our technology allows us to see clients improvement over time. And we are looking, especially as people just get started on the program for a continuous improvement in people’s performance and your strength as we can measure it. And something I explained to clients who are new to the program and just trying that challenging hiring workout is that what we are doing during this workout is we are depleting your muscles of the stored energy in them until they’re basically empty. And what they say to themselves is, Oh my gosh, I’m empty.

I need to replenish my energy and I need to adapt to this very exhausting experience I just had. And so what happens is you go home from your workout and they replenish pull energy out of your bloodstream, blood sugar out of your bloodstream, instantly normalizing your blood sugar levels. And in addition to that, your muscles repair themselves and they build strength. They get stronger in response to that workout you did so that next time you come back, because they’ve gone through that improvement, that strengthening process, when you were recovering, they are able to do more than you did the last time. And this is how we see that continuous progression with clients, especially when they first get started, and it is super encouraging. for people, but that recovery time is just as important as your workouts.

And that’s what we want clients to know. Would you agree with that?

Very well said. Yes. The exercise stimulus is really the degree to which we disrupt homeostasis. Like you said, there’s literal fuel in your muscles. And when we burn it up in a brief high intensity strength training session, our body has to refuel and recover. And it’s that burning up of that fuel inside the cell that serves as one of the very powerful signals that trigger our body to adapt and get better during that recovery period.

And then there’s also mechanical disruption that occurs during a good strength training workout, especially one that includes eccentric training like ours does that causes disruption in the cell itself mechanically that the body has to recover from. In conclusion, I think I would just say that sometimes people will wonder after a while, shouldn’t I do more? Maybe it’s because they’re not yet seeing all the fat loss results they wanted, or maybe it’s just they hear from other people, they should be working out more. But the answer to getting the best possible results, I would say, is really, really rarely or never more exercise. The answer isn’t going to be to spend more minutes exercising, or to just move around more. The answer is really about Again, whole effort and combining that with whole food nutrition to get all of the results we want.

So if you listen to this episode and you’re curious about really what is possible with just two 20 minute workouts a week, as we just explained, what the science shows is possible. I want to challenge you to try it. I want to challenge you to try the exercise coach. for six months to 20 minute sessions a week and see what you can achieve in your own body through that combination of whole effort exercise. I encourage you to add in whole food nutrition. We’re here to coach you on that and see what you can achieve in your body and in your strength and in your health with just two 20 -minute sessions a week.

If you are not an Exercise Coach client, visit exercisecoach . com and register for two free sessions at a studio near you. We can’t wait to meet you and show you what the program’s all about. We will see you next time on the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Have a great day.