How many days does one need to rest a muscle group after a workout?

Muscle recovery is essential, if you want them to get stronger and build mass.

Muscle recovery is essential if you want to build mass, whilst maintaining quality of life. Working too hard can be counterproductive. It’s a very challenging concept finding the accurate balance of rest and training. This of course, depends on a couple of things, such as how experienced you are, what kind of diet you have. The general rule of thumb is that muscles (when worked hard) need about 24 hours in order to recover fully.

What happens when we lift weight.

When you train with weights, your muscles become teared, and your body goes into repair mode, almost straight away. Those extremely small tears in the muscle, require time and nutrition, in order to recover. The good news is that when the body finishes the repair, you become stronger and build muscle mass in the process.

The magic of protein.

When your body shifts towards repair mode, it creates protein from amino acids found in your bloodstream. The amino acids are then transferred into the new muscle tissue, which your body lays down to replace the older and damaged ones. The regeneration process does occur slowly.

Repair and inflammation

Your muscles need a lot more blood to recover. That’s the way the body sends nutrients towards damaged tissue. This is what we call inflammation. The inflammation is the soreness we experience after a work out, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s required for recovery.

During the 24–48 hour period, your muscles then reach the peak of their inflammation, and begin to taper off (according to the 2107 research review published in the Journal of Applied Physiology). Therefore, it’s not necessary to hit the same muscle groups within a 24 hour period. The rest and rebuild process is still needed.

How to combat the recovery window & get more volume in

The amount of volume you do, should predict the amount of recovery needed. Just think of it this way, the more you do, the longer you will need to recover. The way to combat this is to split your muscle groups. This ensures that when you are working one group (legs and glutes), the other group is allowed to rest and recover accordingly (biceps and triceps). This will allow you to strength train 3–4 times a week, without experiencing any uncomfortable symptoms.

Nutrition

Always remember that proper nutrition allows for the adequate amino acids to repair muscle, and prevent extreme inflammation. You can opt for a BCAA supplement before and after training, and perhaps a pre-workout. As always, you can get these nutritional hits from the food you eat, mainly organic meats and poultry, vegetables and fats.

To get your sweet spot, there will be a need for some experimentation, and a bit of trial and error. Don’t forget that sleep also plays a big part in recovery, and it’s recommended you get at least 7–8 hours a night. Of course, this isn’t realistic all the time, but the best you can.