Weight Lifting 101 : How many days week ?

There is not a straight forward simple answer to this question. It really all comes down to two things:

    1 - How many days can you realistically devote to lifting weights?
    2 - How much improvement are you really looking to get from your program?

Before we address these two questions let me first say that lifting weights once a week is probably not enough and four or five times a week might be a little too much (especially for a beginner).

That leaves us with 2 or 3 times a week.

As you can probably imagine, 2 times a week is good but 3 times a week is better.

This is of course assuming that you are training every body part during each workout. Some people prefer to train 1 or 2 body parts a day. There are good and bad points to this.

The good thing is that since you are only training 1 or 2 body parts (an example would be training your chest and triceps) you can really do a lot of exercises for each body part. The bad thing is that if you train 2 body parts per work out, and since there are 6 major body parts (chest, back, triceps, biceps, shoulders, and legs), even if you work out 3 times a week you will only be able to train each body part once.

That's why I recommend training every body part, every work out. This way you'll be training every body part at least twice or maybe even three times a week. The most bang for your buck.

So, getting back to the issue of how many days a week. If you have the time and you are really looking to see some changes in your body, I definitely say go for 3 times a week.

With that said, if you really aren't sure about the time issue and if you are a beginner, start out at 2 times a week.

This will give you a chance to ease into it. Once you're comfortable, in a routine, and you find that you have time to add an extra day, then consider bumping it up to 3 times a week.

 

👉 How many sets and repetitions ?