One, two, three… Here’s how many times you should go to the gym, according to scientists.
Due to lack of time, you can’t go to the gym regularly and you have a certain frustration. Several times a year, you try to compensate by chaining together sports sessions and hoping that you will make up for lost time.
Published in theEuropean Journal of Applied Physiologya study was conducted by researchers at Edith Cowan University to find out how many times a week it is appropriate to train to get the maximum results. This study particularly concerns those who perform a lot of exercises with dumbbells.
In detail, the scientists recruited a group of 26 healthy young adults to participate in a four-week experiment before dividing them into two groups: one group was instructed to perform a single, three-second, maximal-effort biceps contraction two days a week, and the other was asked to perform the same exercise three times a week.
After four weeks, the researchers compared the participants’ bicep strength and found that those who performed the exercise only two days a week saw no significant changes. Those who exercised their biceps three days a week saw small but significant increases in their concentric strength (2.5 percent, which is when the muscle contracts and shortens when it produces a movement) and eccentric strength (3.9 percent).
“Now we have a clearer idea of the tipping point where you start to see significant benefits from such minimal exercise. These new results suggest that at least three days per week are needed, at least for the three-second single eccentric contraction training,” said study leader Professor Ken Nosaka.
While three times a week seems to be the ideal pace, the scientific team encourages doing a few extra days of exercise per week to obtain even more optimal results in terms of their muscular strength. It turns out that the participants in the previous study who did the exercise five days a week saw their strength improve even more, more than 10% increase… Elementary.