Anyone lift only 2 days a week? I’ve been doing a bench day with chest, delts, and triceps work, and another day working back and biceps. And I feel strong when I’m in the gym
I’m paralyzed so my shoulders and arms take a beating pushing myself around in the chair and doing transfers. So my body doesn’t feel like it needs more than the 2 days.
Just wondering if anyone else does 2 days a week
Well my 2 days a week was from a completely different circumstance than yours. About 4 years ago my wife had a very intensive knee surgery, so she was in a wheelchair for a while to recover. Even after she got out she was in crutches for quite some and was doing physio ect. So during this time, i was working fulltime, prepping meals for her and taking care of all the house work. The only time i could squeeze in to train was 2 days a week, full body and it worked great honestly.
If you feel like 2 days is all you need, and your getting results than thats great, keep doing what your doing
Considering you use your arms everyday, I’m sure 2 days a week is fine.
I’ve doing 2x a week before when work and life demanded more from me that usual and I still progressed fairly well. I actually felt stronger, although I started to develop some weaknesses, specifically my biceps & delts etc, as I didn’t have the time for a lot of assistance after the big 3.
Only thing I might recommend (especially if you are natty) is doing full upper body work both days, rather than dividing into push/pull. I think there is some decent literature suggesting that same volume divided over more frequency can be beneficial for muscle-protein synthesis (someone please correct me if this has been disproven, I’m no expert). Since you use your upper body on daily basis, this might also have the benefit of not accumulating so much volume on one day that you are wrecked then next day or two. Again, my understanding with the literature is that although muscle soreness is correlated with muscle growth (if you are sore, you did enough to stimulate hypertrophy) it is not a prerequisite. So if you feel that doing full upper on a single day doesn’t allow you to get enough volume in to be really sore the next day, that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to grow and get stronger.
Out of curiosity (not trying to police where you are posting) do you train for bench press? I’ve always been super impressed by what the paralympic bench guys can do.
Yes I’m training to compete in the bench press. I was a full meet lifter before I got injured
I was actually thinking of maybe trying to do 3 days a week focusing on bench(heavy, light, medium) and upper accessory
I followed a program inspired by Dan Johns “twice a week for twice the gains” during my shoulder rehab period. I had to do my rehab exercises every day and I also wanted to keep my shoulder fresh and give it time to recover, so twice a week was very convenient for me at the time. I didn’t do any overhead work because of the shoulder injury so I benched in both workouts. It worked pretty well for me.