2965: Should You Work Out Every Day? | Why 7 Days a Week Is Hurting Your Results

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded health and fitness and entertainment podcast in history. This is approaching over half a billion downloads. You've just found Mind Pump. Today's episode we talk about why you should not work out seven days a week. I don't care what your goal is. Working out seven days a week, actual workouts, will be counterproductive. And we make the case in today's episode. By the way, for the first time ever, we've never done this before, we will make a customized MAPS workout program for you. So normally, we have lots of different MAPS programs that we wrote and designed for different avatars. But for the first time ever, we have the software and we also have the trainers. If you go to MyMAPSProgram.com, within seven days, you'll get on a call with a trainer with a custom, customized MAPS workout program for your goals, your fitness level, the exercise equipment you have access to, how many days a week you want to work out, your own customized workout program. Go to MyMAPSProgram.com. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Rho Nutrition. So Rho Nutrition makes supplements for muscle building, fat loss, and longevity. But what's different about Rho Nutrition versus other supplement companies? Well, namely, it's their delivery system. So they use liposomal technology. They use vitamin C to deliver the nutrients to your body. What is that? Well, this is a pharmaceutical-grade technology that was designed to increase, dramatically increase, bioavailability. To give you an example, when you take vitamin C, you absorb it pretty well. It's actually a nutrient that doesn't have poor bioavailability. 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Get 20% off. All right, real quick. If you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com. I'm talking right now. Hit pause. Head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. The more you work out, the better the results, right? Wrong. We're going to talk about why you should not work out seven days a week. In fact, if that's what you do, you're not getting near to the best results you can get. We're going to talk about it right now. Let's go. Do you think there's an example of where this does make sense, really? Good question. But I think what we need to do first, kind of set the context. Define the difference between a workout and activity. Okay, well, that's different. Yes, because whenever I say something like this, you only need to work out a couple days a week or three days a week, people sometimes will send studies that show the benefits of frequent activity. Yeah. And there are tons of benefits. And so you'll see studies like this. It's like people who are active every day live longer, have better health, better health, better longevity markers, less chronic health issues, like all the good stuff, versus people who aren't active every single day. And so people believe that to mean that they should work out every single day. But there's a big difference. So here's one of the main ways you can kind of break this down. A workout is aiming for a specific type of adaptation. So when I'm doing a workout, I'm either trying to get stronger or I'm trying to improve my stamina or my endurance. My endurance or my mobility, like I'm aiming towards some kind of a physical pursuit. Activity is just activity. Walking is activity. So when you look at the studies on people that are active every single day, what you're looking at are people who aren't sitting down all day long. Yeah. People who are walking daily, who are simply moving. And that's very, very different. So what we're not saying here is don't be active every single day. You should. You should move every single day. In fact, if you sit down a lot. Even if you work out three days a week and the rest of the week, you're just sitting down, you would have lots of benefit from moving every single day. That's totally different than a workout. So I think that sets the context well. And from that context, where does it make sense or does it ever make sense for anybody really to train, set, work out seven days a week? When you, what you typically will see is with really, really high level athletes and we need to be. Crazy skill specific. Yeah, exactly. So you got to be careful. With that, right? First off, these are high level athletes, highly trained, great genetics. This is what they do. Micromanaged intensity. Yes. And all of their, their whole life is kind of geared towards this. So they're already in a different category than most people in terms of their ability or capacity to handle lots of workouts. Also, they don't work out every single day. What they manage intensity very carefully. And a lot of it is just skill practice. Yeah. So you'll often see like figure skaters. Skaters, divers, gymnasts, gymnasts, and really what they're doing every day is getting really good at their skill, that the practice, the skills, not just about being fit or being strong or having stamina. It's really about maximizing and perfecting a particular skill. So it'd be like, um, if you wanted to get really good at throwing a fastball, what you would not do is throw hard fastball seven days a week. I think, I think I could say that. I think a lot of people would identify with that. Enough people play baseball to know that's a terrible idea. Yeah. You'd hurt your arm. You have a limited number of pitches even. Yes. For your arm. Yeah. But you could practice biomechanics and technique on a daily basis. There's some days you would throw hard, but most of the days you wouldn't. Okay. Well, let me reframe that for probably what 95 or 98% of all listeners that are listening then. Okay. Does it ever make sense for somebody who is working out for body composition change, who is trying to lose body fat? Build muscle, change their, their physique in the fastest, most effective way. Does it ever make sense for that person to be working out seven days a week? No. Uh, no, it doesn't. Not even, um, pro bodybuilders or high level bodybuilders who are on anabolic steroids, lift weights or really work out hard every single day. So those are both adaptations, right? Body fat is an, uh, fat loss and adaptation to being in a calorie deficit, building muscles and adaptation to. To trying to build strength. Essentially, it's the closest physical pursuit connected to it. And no, uh, you can't because, uh, one of the main points is that workouts are a stress on the body. Like actual workouts are a stress on the body. Um, and this is why the body, uh, adapts, uh, because the S your body's goal with a stress with any stress is as your body perceives a stress, it says, okay, that was not good. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to try to strengthen ourselves. We're going to try to strengthen ourselves or bolster ourselves. So the same insult is no longer a stress, right? So a good example is this, like if I handle rough objects with my hands and my skin gets a little torn up a little bit, not too much, but enough to where my body perceives it as a stress, my skin will eventually toughen and I'll develop calluses so that that no longer is a stress. Uh, and the same thing is true, uh, with exercise. And the thing is, uh, that we have a limited capacity for stress. And by the way, it is a stress. Like if you took, I love this example. Cause it's funny. We know exercise is good for us, but if we took, uh, you know, if we took medical devices and we measured blood pressure, inflammatory markers, we measured, you know, what was happening to the body, you'd rush them to the hospital. Yeah. And we didn't tell people you're working out. Yeah. Like nobody knew they would just saw all the markers. They'd be like, what's going on right now? This is not good. This person's undergoing a lot of stress, but they're actually training really hard. Yeah. Uh, it is a stress and you have a limited capacity for stress. Um, and it's important to understand all the things. I contribute to that. Well, there's a, you have a limited capacity of stress and then you also have a limited capacity at which will elicit the change that you want and desire from it. Cause there's, there's, there's a, there's a, a, a limit to what you can, um, handle. And then there's an appropriate or optimal amount too, which those are also different. Yeah. A hundred percent, which we'll get to. So to use the skin example, if I try to, if I'm trying to build a callus on the top of my hand, what would happen if I rub the skin too hard? I would just keep tearing. I would just tear my hand. I would just start over and I would just bleed. Uh, and if I kept doing that, that's all that would happen. I would never give my body the, uh, the, um, the, the chance, um, to adapt. And we do have a limited capacity. By the way, here's the things that contribute to this. Okay. So exercise is a stress. It's a physical stress on the body. Arguments with people is a stress. Stress at work is a stress. Lack of sleep is a stress. A poor diet is a stress. Inactivity can be a stress. Too much activity is a lot of stress. Um, uh, lots of things can. Contribute to this. And so why this is why it's real important to understand what you're working with. Cause you know, if you're a nutritionist. a 22 year old kid and you don't have a job all you do is go to school it's kind of easy uh you can sleep as long as you want your mom makes your meals for you you don't got to really pay any bills that's very different and you're young it's very different than you're 42 years old you got bills you got a job you got kids yeah you got pat sleep because you know little timmy woke up last night twice or whatever um and your diet sometimes isn't as good plus you're 42 years old it's very very different very very different we also need to understand the difference between recovery and adaptation so two different things although there's a lot of overlap so you hear a lot of talk about you need to recover how the results you get are in the recovery kind of time uh where you're resting but recovery is healing adaptation is above and beyond healing okay so people uh this is important to understand because although there's overlap i can get to a place where um i'm giving my body time to recover but i don't give it enough time to adapt and what that can look like is in the example of exercise is i get sore i recover i go to the gym i get sore i recover but with no no real improvements i'm using the same 30 pound dumbbells uh you know today as i used six months ago everything looks the same when i go to the gym no there's no improvements well what's what but i'm recovering but i'm really not adapting well this is a this is a classic example what i was alluding to right this is that you have you have the ability to tolerate this workout but it's not optimal for building muscle or burning body fat so what happens is because you can tolerate it and you're able to keep going and doing it monday tuesday wednesday and you're like i'm fine i'm i'm able to work out and do the things in my life you assume that it must be okay or better but the reality is you're stuck in this hard plateau and your body isn't changing yet you're putting all this work in every single day and that's because it's not the optimal amount you're not allowing the body to adapt yeah it's really crazy too we would see this in gyms where um you know managing gyms over the years uh i would see these members in my gym that would get on like cardio machines and just work off like they come in and they'd sweat and i mean they were really trying hard or they'd come and do the group classes group x classes and intense and they work out they go real hard and you know i'd manage these gyms for years and so i got really familiar with my regular members and you would see these people come in and out and the same person showing up you know four days a week there he is you know four days a week there she is doing her thing and nothing ever changed nothing ever changed they look the same now they were able to tolerate the workout they were able to do it but they weren't getting any lean her their bodies weren't changing they were really frustrated uh that they weren't changing and they would come talk to me and even as a young trainer i'd get perplexed like oh what's going on why is this not working with this for this person yeah it's different when you start looking at the exercise more as the stimulus it's it's the one that's like presenting uh this environment that you're trying to overcome and and then you know you're actually building in the rest periods and you're you're building you know when you're recovering when you're eating when you're moving forward so that's why i like playing with intensity matters so much it's like where does that threshold lie where can i fully recover and maximize and then get past that healing phase where i can actually adapt well and because of all the other stresses you're talking about with sleep and it's it's so easy to tip the other way that's right because it's kind of a moving target it's not like this fix like oh this is the right amount for me i can do this many days per week at this intensity this many this much volume it's like maybe that week and then you know like use your timmy example and fight with the spouse sleep is less and you know demotion at work all back-to-back weeks and it's just like that now changed and so you know this is why and i mean obviously we're discussing why seven days a week is uh not a good idea but i mean this is why i think going the other direction so much further you're better off doing almost too little than doing too much and building on that than you are thinking like oh do more get better results earlier you talked about the perfect dose versus the max tolerable dose i think a good way to illustrate this would be like you know what's the perfect dose for you to have energy from caffeine and then what's the most you could possibly tolerate before you know you got to go to the hospital what does that feel like like one of them gives you energy the other one makes you feel horrible and you're shaky and you're like right yeah and so when it comes to exercise stress the perfect dose gets you the results this is what this is the challenge that people have is they think that well if i get this many results at this dose then if i double the dose or triple the dose i'll get faster results but that's actually false uh it looks like a a bell curve of results more than what is perfect uh now requires more recovery and allows for less adaptation yeah okay so doing more than what is ideal for your body i'll say that again doing more than is ideal for your body requires more recovery and allows for less adaptation and what tends to happen with us is we push ourselves because we think the more we do the better you try to find that line and we find that line and we end up doing the max tolerable dose which is what we can recover from right but there's no adaptations that are happening and so we're kind of feeling burnt we're working hard we're in between why am i not progressing how many times have you guys had a client where you cut their the workouts down and they got better results yeah i mean how often does that happen it's strange but i don't think it's going to be the case with a lot of people that have that kind of mentality and i think the two biggest metrics with that it's the strength and the energy and so like you know is your strength like similar or moving forward you know that's always something i'm paying attention to if i don't feel like i have it some days i might be over doing it i might be overwhelming myself a bit i might not be recovering you know to the fullest degree but then also you know am i charged after my workouts people don't really consider that ever they want to crush the energy they want to recover you know to the fullest degree but then also you know am i charged after really you know put it all in exert full full born into their uh workouts when in fact a lot of times like you know maintaining it so you actually charge yourself up and have energy is the way to go well i mean using your your bell curve analogy this is why i mean it's you're better off erring on the you know not enough or a little less side than you are on the other side of the bell i'd write let's let's say uh you know based off my stress and levels whatever and stuff that um you and intensity of workouts and training is um on the lighter side for me three is perfect and optimal four i'm on the other side of the bell curve i would argue i'm better being under at two than going at four you got margin right yeah which is so it's like so think about it that way like that's if it looks like that where it's this bell curve and three is like the just the right amount that's right amount my body will get the most results and i that my body can tolerate to reach the max benefits and i'm better off being under at two than going at four than going at four than going at better airing on the side of two than i am going i'm gonna do even more at four yeah because you'll get even set you back well yes so it's like i'm doing twice as much work to get less less results than i would airing on the more cross side which is hard for people to wrap their brain around it is but here's there's two reasons for that right one is uh the two days a week gives you some margin for stress so do do things happen in life yeah that you can't uh plan for necessarily account for that you can't predict that cause stress yes everybody listening right now knows that like you have your week you know what's gonna happen stuff pops up uh-oh extra stress uh that i gotta deal with or the bad night of sleep or uh whatever so number one it gives you more margin number two when you overdo it you got to give your body time to heal so you can go back in that perfect place when i underdo it uh i can push a little harder if i need to so you're absolutely right there's also the other argument that you can make is that you you're not that you definitely aren't going to go backwards because that's right you're still because that's that's still enough volume to maintain whatever you have accomplished in the previous building so it's not it's not like you're regressing well you know we talk about the studies that show that you know you need one-seventh the amount of volume to maintain what you've already built so a week where i'm airing on the cautious side of like ah you know bad sleep a couple nights in a row it's been a rough week just like this ah this is this is the week well maybe i'll i just i mean i just went through this and i let me tell you it is hard when you're in when you're in a training good like i'm actually i told you the other day like i'm like i'm back to like thinking about my workouts before i go to bed like i love that feeling it's a good it's a good place to be but also a lot of discipline to go man we just play two and a half hours of pickleball i trained early in that morning i've had multiple days where i'm burning 500 to a thousand more calories than what i'm used to burning i'm just i was super active way more than usual and i can feel how taxed my body i can feel it is taxed but man but oh man tomorrow is that day i was going to hit this and i'm going to do that it's perfect because i don't have to go to work and i can to not train is hard it is and so what's what this these are the factors that you need to consider with your workouts that you can manipulate to help you achieve the right dose right so and i'm going to list them in order of impact meaning if i'm trying to reduce stress on my body i'm going to name three things and i'm going to list them in order by which one of them has the biggest impact on my body's ability to handle stress so here they are intensity duration otherwise known as volume and frequency okay so intensity is how hard you train that has the biggest impact on stress on your body to the point where you could train seven days a week if you really knew how to modify this intensity oh then it turns into just activity for example or i could take someone off the street and in 10 minutes i could send them to the hospital if i train them hard enough right so intensity has the biggest impact uh on your body's ability to recover and adapt next is duration or volume. The length of time, the sets that you're doing, all the exercises that you're doing in your workout. And the last one is frequency, the amount of days that you work out. You can play with those. So to your example, Adam, you're like, oh, I got two nights of bad sleep. Boy, I'm really in the rhythm. I want to go work out. Can you go work out and dramatically reduce the intensity? Probably can. Could. And you'll be fine. Yeah, it would look more like a mobility or 50% of the load I would normally take in. And that's what it looks like. Something like that, right? That's right. And so those are the things you manipulate in order. In other words, when I need to cut something down, let me cut the intensity down first. And then after that, all right, let me cut the length of my workout down next. And then, okay, let me skip a whole workout and get rid of that frequency. But it's in that order. And all three of those impact your body's ability to recover and adapt. But it's intensity. Intensity is the one. And this is the one that people hammer the most. People actually, they're much more apt when they're really dedicated, like really like, man, I really want to get in shape. Like, I'm going to go beat the crap out of myself. Well, there's this misconception that intensity is really the only thing that's going to like build muscle. Like it's going to break down your muscles. And when in fact, yeah, like all these other factors matter and the amount of volume matters, the amount of frequency matters. All that stuff is going to contribute to building muscle. This is another reason why I think the three day a week full body routine hits so well for most people is it really kind of controls a lot of this really well. It's hard to do a full body workout and go really intense on all the muscle. You know what I'm saying? And it's, you're obviously keeping the frequency down, down to three like that. And then your only total volume is a 50 minute to an hour type of workout. So it controls a lot of those. I think that's why generally speaking, it does why it does so well because it's, there is an art to training seven days a week. Like that's why when you gave the first example was like super high level athletes. And guess what? They're not programming that shit. They've got, and most of those super high level have got HRVs hooked up to them. They got multiple coaches that are tracking. The whole year is already planned. Yes, they are like, they are meticulous about how much they are pulling those, pushing and pulling those levers. The average person to try and gauge that. And like I told you guys, even myself, like, you know, I had a couple of these, these days where I, my sleep score, I got good sleep, but my readiness score was still really low. And it was because I had just overtaxed my body multiple days in a row. And so even myself, my gauge would be like, Oh, I got a good night's rest. I should be good to go again. Let me go. Let me get after it real hard to, to gauge that and be on, on a day-to-day basis enough to where you could actually go to the gym. And we're saying seven right now, but I'm going to make the case five to seven, like five to seven days a week in the gym of workouts, hard, not necessary. And it's counterproductive for most people, especially if you're doing it for more than just a few weeks. Yes. Especially hard, hard to know how to do that appropriately. Now, when it comes to fitness, these are the adaptations that you're going to chase. Uh, with your workouts. Okay. So we, we talked earlier about a high level athlete. You know, when you're playing a sport technique plays a huge role, right? You can't just be fit. Like you can take a fit gym guy, put them on the basketball court. He's not gonna play basketball nearly as well as somebody who has a skill, right? So aside from skill, forget that we're talking about fitness. You're looking at strength and there's, there's a range of strength, right? There's maximal strength of strength, you know, strength, endurance, there's, you know, isometric strength, but we're talking about strength. Then there's stamina. This is endurance. And there's different kinds of endurance, right? There's the steady state endurance, uh, which is like, I'm running long distance. There's the endurance that you get, or you need to repeatedly exert yourself. Uh, something like you would see at a soccer, uh, soccer game or even football, you know, requires a level of stamina. Cause I gotta go hard and then break in the harder than break type of deal. And then you have something called mobility, which is your ability, uh, to move, uh, stabilize your joints, not hurt yourself, essentially how you move, uh, in space. Those are the three. Kind of adaptations that you chase with your workouts. So when you're thinking to yourself, work out, not just activity, activity, just moving. But when you're thinking to yourself, work out, think to yourself, what am I going after? Now, if you think to yourself, build muscle, well, strength is going to be the main thing. If you're thinking fat loss, that's mostly dietary. Although I'll make the argument all day long that chasing strength with a calorie deficit or diet for fat loss preserves the most muscle. But when it comes to the adaptations, strength, stamina, and mobility. And here's what we're going to do, uh, for the first time ever, we've never done this before. You can get your own customized maps workout program. So we have many, many different maps workout programs, but all of them, we wrote ourselves for a specific avatar, whether you're a bodybuilder, whether you want mobility, you want stamina, you want to work out at home, whatever. We have all these different programs that we created. We've never individualized a maps program until now. So now what you can do is you can go to my maps program.com. You fill out a questionnaire, then we're going to put together an individualized maps program for you that a trainer is going to overview and talk with you about. So in seven days, you have your own individualized maps workout program. So John, if you're watching, it's maps, John, Susan, it's maps, Susan. It is a program designed specifically for you. We've never done this before. This is the first time ever. We finally have the software and the trainers to be able to put this together. So if you're interested in an individualized math program, a program designed specifically for you. Your goals, your lifestyle, the exercise equipment you have access to go to my maps program.com. We'll see you there. Thank you for listening to mind pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance. 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