Five Days a Week of Weight Training

Weight training not only builds strength and lean muscle mass but can help you lose body fat. too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a minimum of two strength training sessions each week, but there's no reason why you can't lift weights more often. In fact, lifting five days a week can be extremely beneficial, especially if you're looking specifically to bulk up, improve your athletic performance or wish to compete in a strength sport.

  1. Muscle Groups

    • Muscles take time to recover after a session. When you lift weights, you create microscopic tears on the muscle fibers. The repair of these muscles is an essential part of getting bigger and stronger, but it takes two to three days to recover. After you train one body part, give it at least one full day of rest to allow the damage to repair. A sample five-day training routine could be chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, shoulders on Thursday, quads and hamstrings on Friday and arms on Saturday. Alternatively you could perform upper-body sessions on Monday and Thursday, lower-body sessions on Tuesday and Friday and add one extra session for your weaker body parts at the weekend.

    Rep Ranges

    • For optimal growth and strength gains, use both heavy weights for lower reps and lighter weights for higher reps, advises bodybuilder and nutritionist Dr. Layne Norton. Start each session with a heavy multi-joint exercise for five sets of three to six repetitions, then do the rest of your exercises with a lighter weight for three sets of eight to 15 reps. Another option is to perform all your sessions one week in the lower-strength rep ranges, and then all the next week's with higher-strength rep ranges.

    Choosing Exercises

    • Free-weights, body-weight moves and machines all have their place in your five-day routine. Your priority should be free-weights though, writes trainer Eric Cressey in "Maximum Strength." Lifting barbells and dumbbells uses more muscle groups and builds strength and size faster than machines do. At least half your exercises in each session should be free weight-based; as you start to tire toward the end, switch to body-weight exercises and resistance machines.

    Progression and Variation

    • To progress efficiently, aim to use more weight on each exercise than the previous session or increase the total number of sets and reps performed. Perform four to six exercises each workout and keep these the same for six, or until you plateau. If you always perform barbell bench presses first in your chest session for instance and one week can't increase the weight, sets or reps from the previous week, switch to incline dumbbell presses, dips, or weighted pushups instead. Training five days each week can be demanding, so plan a rest week once every eight to 10 weeks where you take time off from the gym, or simply lift at around 50 percent of your usual intensity to allow your body to recover. Perform 30 to 45 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio such as swimming, jogging or cycling on your non-weight days.