How often should women lift weights to build muscle

When it comes to starting a fitness routine, it’s difficult to know the correct workout frequency to achieve your goals.

This is especially true for weightlifters, or anyone trying to gain muscle.

Muscle building requires you to work out often enough and intensely enough in order to actually achieve your goals.

However, if you over do it on your strength training frequency, you can actually begin harming your results.

But what is that frequency sweet spot to stimulate just enough growth without over doing things?

In this post, I want to cover exactly how to determine how often you should do strength training workouts so you can achieve your fitness goals.

In this post you’ll find:

Why muscle building for women is so important

Building muscle is one of the best things you can do for yourself as a women.

Although I could be a little biased, since weight training is my favorite form of exercise.

But trust me, the reasons for this are valid.

One of the main reasons I love weight lifting so much is because strength training has so many benefits for women. Both physically and mentally.

From body recomping and to fat loss, to increased bone strength, metabolism, and confidence, decreased anxiety, the list goes on and on.

Not to mention, the more you lift weights, the more benefits you’ll start to see and the better they’ll become.

That’s one of the reasons why weightlifting gets better the more you do it.

Start a weightlifting routine to start seeing the benefits

The only thing is, you can’t actually see these benefits unless you start implementing muscle building workouts into your routine.

To do this, you would want to learn how to start a weightlifting routine.

However, as good as weightlifting is for us, so many of us women shy away from lifting because of stereotypes and gym anxiety.

That’s why I wrote a post on overcoming challenges women face in the weight room.

It’s time us women put an end to being afraid of such a healthy, beneficial activity for us!

What do women need more of, strength training or cardio?

Now, the big arises. Should women be lifting weights more often, or sticking to their old cardio routine?

I already wrote a post on how to find the perfect balance of weight lifting and cardio. So if you want more details, I really recommend you check that post out to.

Generally, the stereotype is that women stick to cardio to avoid getting “bulky”.

However, this is only a stereotype. Plenty of women lift weights and don’t get bulky from it.

In fact, it’s actually very hard to get bulky from weightlifting.

On top of that, there are many different styles and techniques of weightlifting so that you can see the exact results you want to see.

So really, weightlifting vs cardio depends entirely on you and what your goals are.

Goals require you to be doing more cardio

If your goals are to increase your speed, endurance, or your cardiovascular health, then you should prioritize cardio over weightlifting.

Versus goals that require you to be doing more weightlifting

Whereas if your goals are to build muscle, gain strength, and tone out, then you should prioritize strength training over cardio.

What if your goal is fat loss?

If you’re goal is to loss fat, you’ll want to consider the benefits of weightlifting vs cardio.

Generally, I think most people believe that cardio is the key to fat loss.

But this isn’t necessarily true.

First off, to lose fat, you need to be in a calorie deficit. Exercising is one of the best strategies to help put yourself in a deficit.

Cardio for fat loss:

Cardio can help you do this by helping you burn more calories in a day. However, with cardio, you only burn the calories during your workout.

Weightlifting for fat loss:

Whereas with weightlifting, as you weightlift more, and your body puts on more muscle, your metabolism increases.

As a result, weightlifting allows you to continue burning more calories and increase your basal metabolic rate, even when you aren’t working out.

Making weight lifting key for anyone trying to simultaneously build muscle and loose stubborn fat.

So yes, both help with fat loss, but each in a different way.

Your best bet for successful fat loss is to create a routine with a combination of the two. While also being in a slight calorie deficit.

The optimal frequency for women to lift weights and build muscle

When deciding how often to lift weights, you want to choose a frequency between over training and under training.

But how do you know what’s over training and what’s not training enough?

Over training would mean you’re lifting weight too many days, and you’re not allowing yourself enough time to rest each week.

Whereas under training would mean you’re not working out often enough to actually stimulate muscle growth.

However, all of this can be difficult to determine for anyone, but especially for beginners.

That’s why there’s a general guide for weightlifting frequency.

If you’re trying to build muscle, body recomp, or lose fat, it’s recommended to lift weights 3 to 5 times per week.

Although I’d say you can still get away with 2 or 6 times a week and see results.

Everything you need to know when determining how often to strength train

There are a lot of factors that go into successful weight training and muscle building. Here are the best things to know when creating your muscle building plan.

Allow yourself enough rest days to grow and build muscle

Rest days are extremely important women who weight train. As well as anyone who works out, really.

As a result, when you’re determining how often to workout, one factor you should take into great consideration is rest.

You want to be sure you implement enough rest days into your routine to allow your body time to recover.

If you don’t allow for enough rest in your routine, then your body and results could start to suffer.

What happens if you don’t take enough rest days

Without allowing for proper rest in your routine, your body could become over worked and burned out.

Since you’d never give your body the chance to fully repair itself and recover.

With this, you risk increasing your chance of injury and decreasing your performance.

As well as decreasing your gym results and muscle growth, since rest is when you’re muscle grow.

So if you’re someone who’s trying to gain strength and build muscle, rest is nothing to play around about.

You definitely don’t want to with hold rest from your body causing yourself to miss out on precious gains that you’re working so hard for.

Determine how many rest days you’ll take and how many days are left over

Knowing how important rest is for your results, you can determine how many rest days you want to take each week.

Then, you can use this to determine how many days are left over to potentially lift weights.

For example, if you were to create a routine lifting seven days a week, you’d allow yourself zero rest days.

Which would not be a good idea.

So right off the bat, we know you shouldn’t be lifting more than 6 days a week, max.

One to three full rest days is the sweet spot for growth, leaving 6 to 4 days remaining for weight training.

Using this information, let’s say you decide you want to have two rest days a week. Which is a good, recommended amount.

With this, you could only be strength training the remaining five days.

See what I did? First, choose a reasonable amount of rest days you want to take. Next, use that to determine how many days are left over to potentially strength train.

Not only are rest days important, so is rest between training sessions

After accounting for your full rest days, you’ll then need to consider allowing for enough rest between training each muscle group.

Because not only does your full body need rest, each muscle group needs rest before you can train it again.

In order to allow your muscles enough time to recover, you should wait at least 48 hours before training the same muscle group again.

Additionally, you should never train a muscle group if it’s still sore from the previous workout.

Because of this, you may need to tweak your original lifting frequency plan. Adding in another rest day or two to account for enough rest between training the same muscle group.

How you might tweak your routine and add in more rest days

Let’s consider how we can implement this into the 5 days routine we decided on before.

You would be able to train each muscle group two of the five days. In order to allow for enough time between each muscle’s training session.

So you create a split to bias lower body growth, where you train upper body twice, and lower body the remaining days.

That would look something like:

Monday – legs

Tuesday – upper

Wednesday – rest

Thursday – legs

Friday – upper

Saturday – legs

This might seem like it would work, but the only problem is, you’d never have enough time for your legs to recover.

Notice how there’s only one day between each leg day session.

This means you wouldn’t be able to give yourself that 48 hours rest, because there aren’t enough hours in the week!

As a result, you might want to consider adding another rest day into this routine, and taking away one lifting day.

Consider your goals to guide your muscle building plan

One of the biggest factors in determining how often you should lift weights is your fitness goals.

That is, what it is that you want to achieve from your workouts. What results, changes, or improvements, do you want to see in yourself?

Your routine will always directly reflect your goals, since the purpose of your routine is to achieve your goals.

As a result, as your goals change, so will your routine.

It’s important to consider things like how much muscle you want to grow and if you want to focus solely on muscle growth. Or maybe a combination of muscle growth and fat loss?

Additionally, decide if you want to focus on growing your upper body or lower body.

All of these are important things to consider to determine how often you should weight train.

As well as how often and how intensely you should be training each muscle group.

Use these factors to create the best muscle-building split

Once you’ve considered your goals, how many rest days you want, and how many rest days you need, you can use this to create your perfect workout split.

Determining how often you will strength train is what will help you determine how you should structure your workouts.

This will help you determine things like what muscle groups you train (and how intensely you train them) each session.

Let’s look at an example if you were to strength train less frequently each week.

In this case, you would need to two two things. First, combine more muscle groups on each day so you train them once or twice a week.

For example, if you were to strength train three times a week, you could do two full leg days and one full upper body day.

Instead of dividing your leg muscles into different days and your upper body muscles into different days.

And second, train a lot more intensely than you might otherwise would have.

Doing both of these will allow you to workout intensely enough and train each muscle frequently enough to stimulate muscle growth.

Takeaways

Strength training is extremely beneficial for women and a great way to keep yourself healthy.

However, determining how often and how much you should weight train can be difficult.

Especially if you’re a beginner and just getting the hang of things.

By defining your goals and implementing enough rest in your routine, you can determine what the best weight training frequency is for you.

Then, you can create a goal centered split and be making progress before you know it!

More posts on women’s fitness and health:

The benefits of practicing yoga for your mind and body

How to stay motivated in the gym

Five tips you need to transform your confidence in the gym