Rest For Muscle Gain

As well as nutrition and pounding the weights in the gym resting your muscles is extremely important, if you do not rest your body enough you can cause a negative impact on your training regime.

Why does rest make such a difference?

After training you will have caused tiny tears in your muscle fibres, to repair these and get your body to build your muscles stronger you need rest so your body can concentrate on the muscle building process.

How do I get my rest?

The main part of getting your rest is sleep, when you are sleeping your muscle building hormones start to party in your body. They normally start their party about one hour in to hitting your deep sleep.

The optimum number of hours sleep required in a night is eight hours, yes eight hours. I know many of you have busy lifestyles that mean eight hours is not achievable but not getting the required sleep can halt your muscle gains.

On top of your sleep patterns there are other ways to make sure your body is rested enough to get the biggest muscle gains possible.

Firstly you should only train each muscle group no more than one to two times a week with 24 to 48 hours rest in between training the same muscle group. This is important as over training can cause you to not gain any improvements at all!

Secondly only train up to five times a week, spending every day in the gym may feel like you are training well but the truth is your body just doesn't have time to recuperate.

Thirdly, and this is one that no one ever follows, have a one week rest every eight weeks or so. If you have this one week off you will be shocked at the gains you can make, I have a week off every 6 to 8 weeks and see a huge benefit from it.

Lastly don't spend every waking hour in the gym on training days, try to keep your session to about an hour. Your body will thank you with great gains if you max out your muscles within an hour when your in the gym.