When starting a strength training program, less is more. It’s usually best to keep your rest days between training sessions to just that – rest. Without enough rest, you essentially can’t recover for the next training session and in the end sabotage yourself. Strength training is like strong medicine. This means you take only the recommended dose and then carefully titrate that dose upward as is necessary and appropriate. Once a person has doubled or tripled their strength from where they started (usually taking from 3-6 months), they are usually a good candidate to begin two or three recovery day training sessions. These “mini-workouts” can speed recovery, improve progress, and if nothing else, just help you feel your best. To do this effectively, you should observe some guidelines to get the full benefit of some additional training time while avoiding common pitfalls that too often will derail your strength training progress.
Exercising for Beginners
The curse of the beginner is to try and make progress too quickly. We all get excited to see our training efforts pay off. The number one mistake that people make as they add in recovery day workouts is they make them too hard. Save the challenging work for your primary training sessions. Over-reaching during your recovery workouts only beats you down and interferes with recovery and doesn’t enhance it. Recovery workouts should be lightweight or easy bodyweight movements and should last between 10- 30 minutes. The goal of these workouts is to moderately elevate your heart rate, get your blood pumping and involve all the major muscle groups of the entire body. This equals light muscular work that aids in the recovery process and often has a slight hypertrophic response if the weights and movements are selected with that purpose in mind.
Recovery Day Workouts for Beginners
To meet these criteria, compose your recovery day workouts from 5-10 exercises performed in a circuit. Choose movements and weights that allow you to complete 20-25 reps per exercise, non-stop without coming to failure or even close. Feel free to use as wide a variety of exercises as you would like. If body weight movements are too difficult yet for that number of reps, then scale them back to a version that allows you to easily complete at least 20 reps. Then perform this circuit for one to three rounds. If you use fewer exercises, make them mostly compound movements. If you use more than 5 exercises, add in isolation movements. It’s ok to get your heart rate up and breathing hard, but at no time should this become anything close to a heroic effort. In a word, you should remain at a casual pace. As for the muscular effort to complete the exercises, let’s rate them on scale of 1-10, where 10 represents a maximum effort. You should remain at a level 4 or 5 during the workout and never surpass a level 6 effort. This ensures the weights are light. In fact, you have my permission to use weights that feel silly-easy.
Strength Training in Greensboro for Beginners
In review, most people brand new to strength training really just need to rest completely on their “off days”. After several months, though, recovery day workouts prove to be effective at enhancing recovery between the main training sessions and can be a great way to incorporate some additional conditioning work into your strength program. Keep the recovery day training sessions to lightweight movements and limit them to no more than 30 minutes in duration. Again, I will reiterate, the benefit of the recovery day workouts are that they are easy enough to complete that they enhance the recovery process over doing nothing between your normal training sessions and never so strenuous that they interfere with your normal training days. A good rule of thumb to follow is your recovery day workouts should leave you feeling energized and alert. They will also reduce stiffness or soreness that your normal training may cause. Stick to those parameters and see if recovery day workouts make you feel better and enhance your progress.