Adapt Your Muscle-Building Program to Your Own Rhythm
Often when you decide to begin a muscle-building program that a professional has recommended, you find yourself unable to keep it up because you just don’t have enough time.
To avoid and solve this problem, this article will give you some tips to adapt your muscle-building program to the time you have available. Don’t skip this read!
The myth that complete workouts must be lengthy
First of all, we need to dispell this myth that training has to take a long time to be effective. Before anything else, it’s essential to differentiate among different forms of physical activity.
To do this, it’s necessary that a professional in sports science evaluates your physical fitness. That way, you’ll be able to develop your fitness routine to your own physical qualities and needs.
Muscle-building program: quality over quantity
For your muscle-building program to be as effective as if you had all the time in the world, you need to pay attention to quality. To meet this requirement, it’s important to put emphasis on the correct techniques for the exercises.
At the same time, it’s a good idea to do interval training in your muscle-building program. That will help you work at higher intensities even if you don’t have much time.
How many weekly sessions should you do?
As long as your program is adequate and you maintain a balanced diet, three sessions a week should be enough to meet your objectives of muscle-building.
In addition to that, leaving a day for rest is good for your recovery. That will help your body adapt to the training rhythm as well.
On the other hand, the sessions we’re talking about could be short in duration, even less than an hour. In that case, they should be intense. You should mix maximum strength exercises with hypertrophy with resistance training so that the adaptations are as effective as possible.
Adapting your muscle-building program to the time you have
The reality is that there’s no one hour of the day that’s better than another to exercise. That’s why you need to adapt your exercise schedule to your own rhythm and choose the times that work best for you.
If you have more time at the beginning of the day or in the afternoon because of your work or school, you should look for a time that’s a bit later. Here are some of the benefits of training in the evening:
- Resting at night: even though it hasn’t been proven, there are studies that indicate that working out at night helps you sleep better. However, this could be counterproductive if you do it too close to bedtime.
- Take advantage of your energy deposits the body has accumulated during the day.
- It can alleviate stress or anxiety produced during the earlier hours of the day from work or school.
On the other hand, if your daily activity requires you to choose a time during the early hours of the day, here are some benefits of that option:
- It lets you take advantage of the hormonal regulation produced when you sleep. When you wake it will be at a decisive and advantageous point.
- It can give you enough energy for the rest of the day. Morning exercise makes the rest of our activities for the day easier and gives us a dose of energy.
- It facilitates the effect that endorphins on the body have. This will help to reduce your stress levels.
Organize your muscle-building program in three days
In this case, you can divide the body into three parts, working two segments during each workout. The work will be intense, so having more than 24 hours between each session will help you to recover from the effort.
In addition to this, you can take advantage of several important parts of the body. The biceps, for example, need only a few minutes to work until exhaustion if the intensity is appropriate. You can organize the three weekly training schedules in the following way:
- Shoulders and arms.
- Quadriceps and thighs.
- Chest and back.
Create a muscle-building plan on your time: conclusions
The excuse of time is not a valid one when it comes to your health and muscle-building program. Adapting your workout schedule to the time you have is very beneficial and worth the effort. Choose the best time of day for you to be more efficient and effective.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- King AC, Oman RF, Brassington GS, Bliwise DL, Haskell WL. Moderate-intensity exercise and self-rated quality of sleep in older adults. A randomized controlled trial. J Am Med Assoc. 1997 Jan 1;277(1):32–7.
- Schoenfeld, B. J. (2010). The mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and their application to resistance training. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 24(10), 2857-2872.