Considering you are just starting weight training and already know what your end goals are, you should also have some idea of how much you should train per week and how much volume and intensity should be put into the workout sessions.
How many times per week should a beginner train for muscle gain?
Gaining muscles for beginner lifters is as easy as taking a walk outside. But a beginner should keep in mind that doing more sessions per week is not always beneficial to them, and they can even downgrade from the progress they were making.
Now a good indicator of too many or too few workout sessions is your session fatigue and soreness. This means that if you are not fatigued at all after your workout session, then you have done too little.
But if you are so exhausted that even your next session is suffering from your fatigue, then you have overdone it.
How many days per week are good enough for beginners?
I would suggest you start working out for as little as three sessions per week. With three sessions, yes, you aren’t able to hit every muscle twice per week, but you can gradually add more and more working sessions to your week.
When going for hypertrophy, you have to keep the intensity and volume relatively high. Beginners can benefit the most from this type of exercise style while resting as much as possible.
When do I add more sessions to my program?
Well, it can be difficult to predict when you should add more working sessions to your program, but there are ways to make some accurate predictions when you will need to start working out more.
A great indicator for adding more workdays is if you see a lack of muscle gain or a lack of strength gain. Now let me explain.
This doesn’t mean that this is the solution to every plateau you encounter in your fitness journey, but it can be an accurate way of knowing when you should add more sessions.
Now, for example, if you haven’t seen progress in a couple of months and you have been training properly all your sessions and you stop feeling fatigue and soreness after your sessions, that means you have hit a plateau.
Now we can counteract this plateau by adding more working sessions to your program. My suggestion to you is to add one more working day to your program. And if even that is not satisfying you, then you should add one more.
But keep in mind that if you don’t have enough rest days, you will also stop seeing progress. So keep a balance between how many rest days you have and how many work days you have in your program.