Is Twice Per Week Really Often Enough?

Join us for this replay from the archives and learn more about the optimal amount of exercise…

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.