Is training each muscle once a week worth it?

If you want to gain as much muscle mass as possible as quickly as possible, training each muscle once a week isn't the best option for most people, in most cases.

Assuming you're doing things right in terms of diet and recovery, and that your gym training volume isn't excessive, your muscles don't need a full seven days of rest to be trained again.

However, some people may not be able to train each muscle more than once a week due to lack of time or prefer to train less frequently. In this case, are these people simply wasting their time?

In this text, we will take a clearer look at the issue of training each muscle group only once a week and whether the practice is worth it.

Training each muscle only once a week can be less effective for several reasons.

First, training frequency is a crucial factor in muscle development. Muscles respond to stress applied during training through a process known as muscle protein synthesis, which is stimulated by physical activity.

When you train a muscle only once a week, you limit the frequency with which this growth and repair process is initiated. In comparison, training a muscle twice a week increases the opportunities to initiate protein synthesis, leading to more effective muscle growth.

Second, muscle recovery doesn't necessarily require a full week. Most individuals recover from an intense workout in a few days, depending on their diet and general rest.

By waiting a full week before training the same muscle again, you may be missing a window of time where your muscle is already recovered and ready to be trained again. This less frequent training approach can result in prolonged periods of inactivity for the muscle, which is not ideal for muscle growth.

Finally, training muscles more frequently allows for a better distribution of training volume throughout the week.

Rather than overloading a muscle with a high training volume in a single session, breaking up your training into more frequent, manageable sessions can be more beneficial. This allows you to maintain a high training intensity in each session while still allowing sufficient time for recovery.

Because dichotomous thinking (all or nothing, 8 or 80) is common in bodybuilding, many people, upon reading the news that training each muscle per week isn't ideal, may think the strategy is a waste of time.

No one said that. Just because a once-a-week training frequency isn't ideal doesn't mean it's ineffective or should never be used by anyone. Being suboptimal and being ineffective are two entirely different things.

Training each muscle just once a week will still serve as a valid training frequency and will produce results for most people. This frequency is just not ideal if you want faster results.

To make this point even clearer: you can compare two sports cars and one of them may be worse for a number of reasons, but the worse one is still a sports car and does not mean it is a bad car.

For some exercisers, going to the gym and focusing on just one muscle group per session is simply a more enjoyable way to train and something they can get into the habit of.

You may have heard the saying, "The best diet is the one you can stick to." The same can be said for training.

If you really enjoy training each muscle group once a week, then even though that's ideal for building muscle as quickly as possible, there's still a better chance you'll stick with it.

Just look at the situation the other way around: if training each muscle twice a week is unpleasant for you and makes you miss workouts, even if this frequency is ideal, it's no use if you don't feel like showing up at the gym and miss workouts.

Maybe you want to make changes to your body, but gaining as much muscle mass as possible isn't your priority right now.

At some points in your life, you may just want to maintain regularity in a physical activity you enjoy (in this case, weight training) and get someresults.

In this case, the fight between training each muscle once or twice a week loses a lot of meaning.

Sometimes we simply don't have the luxury of choice and training each muscle once a week is what we have available at the moment.

Imagine, for example, that you only have three days a week available to train. You can easily fit an ABC workout (which will train each muscle once a week) into those three days.

If you're dealing with an injury or joint problem, you may need to reduce your overall training load to reduce stress.

Along with reducing total training volume, decreasing training frequency can also be helpful.

For example, if your shoulder joint is experiencing problems, training your shoulders twice a week may be putting too much unwanted strain on the area. In this case, giving your shoulder a full week of rest between sessions may help.

Injury prevention should always be taken very seriously, as your entire ability to train and build muscle depends on your joints and connective tissues being healthy enough to do so.

The last situation where training your muscles once a week might make sense is if you're an advanced trainee who's doing a specialization cycle to improve a particular muscle group that might be lagging.

In this case, you would increase the frequency for the body part you want to focus on (usually to about 3-4 times per week) and then reduce the workload for your other muscles to once per week to keep the total weekly volume in check.