The Truth About Muscle Recovery Time

That is one of the most important questions for any lifter – whether a newbie or a competitor. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the hardest to answer.

You’ve probably heard 48 hrs. Or maybe you’ve heard 72 hours. Some people even advocate a full week of rest between working each muscle group.

For this article, we are talking about resting particular muscle groups, not about rest between workouts (unless those workouts hit all your muscles).

In general, you probably need more recovery time than you think.

But all of the recommendations I make interact with each other – you can’t look at just one factor and say “ok, the ideal recovery time is X”. Some guidelines may trump others, so the key is to take this knowledge and start applying the ones that you believe will have the biggest impact on your particular situation. And then test.

One final note: don’t equate soreness with recovery. Whether you are sore or not, is secondary.

There are tons of factors that influence how long you should rest your muscles between workouts.

Things You Don’t Control

• Your genetics

• Your age

• Which muscles we are talking about

Things Related To Your Workouts Themselves

• Your experience lifting

• What program/routine you are on

• How intense your workouts are

• What non-lifting exercise you also do

• What you are doing on your “rest days”

Things You Control, But Outside The Weight Room

• Your diet

• Whether you are taking steroids or not (hopefully not)

• Your sleeping

• Your stress levels

• Your mental strength

With all these factors, there’s no way to have a universal rule! But I’ll go into a little more detail on some of these.

Fiber Types – Genetics

You may have heard about Type I, Type IIa, and Type IIb muscle fibers. Well, we’ll skip the physiology class for now and let’s just call them “fast” and “slow” muscles. Fast muscle fibers are designed for explosive movements. Sprinting. Jumping. Powerlifting heavy weights. Generally, these muscles require more time to recover between workouts (and between sets, but that’s a different topic). The slower muscle fibers are designed for endurance activities – jogging, for example. And they take less time to recover.

We’re all born with a mixture of types. But some people are skewed towards one end of the spectrum or the other. The split can be anywhere from 40% to 60%, vs 60% to 40%. But that 20% swing makes a big difference between whether you’ll be a champion marathoner or an Olympic shotputter.

Age

The older you are, the longer it takes to recover. It can be more complicated, but let’s leave it at that. How much longer? Well, that depends on your workout. But it’s not like a 50 yr old takes twice as long to recover as a 25 yr old. It’s more like 50% longer.

Muscle Groups

Arnold used to talk about how his calves and biceps recovered faster than his back and chest. I’ve found this to be true as well but it is related to whether you are doing compound or isolation movements (see next section). And it is related to the fiber type issues above. It appears, in general, that larger muscle groups take longer to recover. But that’s not an absolute rule. Anecdotally, some guys will say that their smaller muscles take longer to recover. Those are the same guys who try to do bench press 3 days a week…

When you are just starting out, full-body workouts every other day are perfect. You hit every muscle group in every workout, or 3x/wk per muscle. That also means each muscle (in fact, your whole body) rests only about 48 hrs.

But the more experienced you are, the more you’ll need extra recovery days. That’s mainly because (presumably) you are learning to be more intense with each workout as you get more experienced.

Pro bodybuilders (especially the few that are all-natural) end up often resting each muscle 6 or 7 days before working it again. That’s why 3-way split routines, with lots of isolation movements, are ok for bodybuilders. But for the mid-experienced lifter, 72 to 96 hrs is usually perfect.

Your Program/Routine

In line with your experience level, you will likely modify your routines over the years. The worst thing any newbie or beginner can do is jump into split routines. You really need a full-body lifting program. That said, I’ll try to step off the soapbox and simply describe the effect that different routines have on recovery time….

If your routine calls for you to isolate particular muscles, then you can lift more frequently. As long as you use different muscles in each workout. For example, if you did legs one day, you could do chest the next day, then back the day after that, then shoulders, then arms, etc. and workout 6 days a week. In practice, that’s very hard to do in a pure isolated fashion. For example, deadlifts use a heck of a lot of your muscle groups! In fact, all of The Big 7 exercises hit multiple muscle groups.

The workaround is to do 2-way or 3-way splits. A 2-way split is usually upper body/lower body. A 3-way split example is legs/upper pushing/upper pulling. Or legs/chest/back. And some people do 4-way splits by adding in either shoulders or arms. (I recommend only 2-way or 3-way splits.)

So, if you are doing a lot of compound movements, or hitting multiple muscle groups in a single workout, then you need more days off for recovery. If you are doing more isolation movements, then your “recovery days” are actually spent working different muscles. Those really aren’t days off, so to speak. The distinction is less about how much time each muscle needs to recover – it’s more about whether those recovery days should be “days off” or not. Make sense?