Muscle growth requires a lot of hard work. Muscles grow when they are used, pushed, exerted, and forced to work hard. One often overlooked aspect of muscle growth, however, is rest. Muscles must have a certain amount of rest between workouts to recover. The rest and recovery stage is one of the most important stages of muscle growth. This actually seems counter-intuative. More is better, right?
One of the mistakes that I see people making in the gym is performing the same workout every time they work out. This is not a good thing. Typically, each muscle group needs at least a day or two or more in between workouts. If you are doing the same circuit or free weight workout several days a week, the muscles will not have enough time to recuperate. Overworking the muscles creates the opposite effect that we desire. We will find ourselves getting weaker and not building the muscle that we want to create.
The solution to overworking our muscles lies in becoming more specific in how we exercise the different bodyparts. If you are accustomed to doing a circuit workout, you could shift to doing an upper body and a lower body workout. If you did the upper body workout twice a week and the lower body workout twice a week, you would create the proper time for the muscles of each group to recuperate.
This could be broken down even farther. Many weight lifters only train body parts once or twice a week. However you decide to do it, give your muscles time to rest so that they can grow! For further reading check out this informative link.
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