How often can, or more importantly, should I train per week? Optimum recovery time between training sessions is essential if one is going to continue to make progress. Training frequency, which is determined by ones recovery ability, is often a forgotten part of most training protocols. It never ceases to amaze me how many people train for months and years experiencing little or no success, and never consider the fact they may be doing too much.

Don’t be so concerned with how many training sessions you can handle per week. Be more concerned about the optimal amount. More is not always better. In fact, when somebody comes to me for advice because they’ve stopped making progress, usually I either reduce the workout volume or add days off. There is no reason in going to the gym if you’re not going to make progress. In every workout, if you have fully recovered, and you come ready to work, you should make progress, which is gauged by your strength.

How can anyone get stronger every workout? One can only bench press so much. Eventually, you have to hit a plateau. This is true. If one stays with the same exercises, the same number of reps and the same number of sets, progress may eventually stop. If the proper changes aren’t made at the right time, eventually the body adapts to the stimulus. And this is where the “art” of program design comes to play.

It’s easy to follow a workout. The real challenge is assuring the stimulus is sufficient and more importantly, you recovery from workout to workout so that progress continues over a long period of time. Sometimes this entails having the discipline to deviate from something that is not working. If you’re not making progrss, and you’re training with all out intensity, try taking an extra day off.

Men?s Fitness.com has three tips to how you can shed pounds in a quicker amount of time:

1.) TRY CARDIO BETWEEN SETS
Go about your weight workout as normal but instead of resting between sets, perform light cardio such as jumping rope, doing jumping jacks, or hitting a heavy bag for between 60 and 90 seconds.

2.) ALTERNATE INTERVALS
Perform a set and then do some highly intense activity for 15 seconds, followed by a 45-second easy bout for recovery. Then go back to the weights for another set. You can pair your lifting with any kind of cardio ? a treadmill sprint, intervals on an exercise bike, or with a jump rope, etc.

3.) TRY A CIRCUIT
Start with compound movements, followed by isolation lifts. For instance, do a squat, followed by a lunge, hamstring curl, and leg extension. Do not rest until after the last exercise and then rest two to three minutes. You’ll get an awesome pump while burning lots of calories.

To read the entire article, click here.

The most important thing to remember is that your diet must be sound. You can run 100 stairs in between every set on the bench, but if all you?re consuming outside of the gym is fatty, processesed foods, you?re not going to drop the weight.

That said, the article does highlight a couple of nice techniques to try if you?re getting tired of your current routine and can?t seem to lose that stubborn weight. I would warn, however, that if you?re trying to pack on size, continuously doing cardio between sets will zap your strength and therefore gaining muscle will be a challenge. For hard-gainers, resting between sets is the better way to go if you?re trying to bulk up.

1. Running will give you a heart attack or other heart problems. It is true that exercise temporarily raises the odds of a heart attack while you’re mid-workout, but doing it consistently reduces that risk over the long haul, leading to a net benefit. Some researchers have questioned whether marathon running, especially in people who haven’t trained a lot, might cause heart damage, at least temporarily. But there’s no evidence that it causes long-term harm or actually leads to heart attacks. Even athletes with enlarged hearts—if they’re healthy hearts—aren’t, as once feared, at risk of early death. The bottom line: Simply going for a run most days of the week is doing far more good than bad for your heart.

2. Running will ruin your bones and joints. A study in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found no evidence of accelerated rates of osteoarthritis among long-distance runners when compared with healthy nonrunners. “We used to say that osteoarthritis came from wear and tear. That’s now revised to say that is can result from tear but not wear,” says James Fries, emeritus professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and senior author of the study. Moreover, weight-bearing exercise like running helps stave off osteoporosis by maintaining bone mineral density.

3. Running will kill you before your time. According to a study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, running and other vigorous exercise in middle age is associated with a longer life. Not only that, it will make your later years more pleasant by reducing disability. After tracking runners and healthy nonrunners for 21 years, starting when they were at least 50 years old, a research team led by Stanford’s Fries found that the ability to perform activities of daily life like getting out of a chair and walking was better among runners than nonrunners. And 19 years into the study, 15 percent of the runners had died, compared with 34 percent of the nonrunners.
USNews.com

In his latest Q&A session, Bullz-Eye.com Fitness Editor Mike Furci discusses high protein diets, weight training vs. cardio, and chest workouts.

Q: Mike,
I just finished reading your article on Fitness Myth Busters. Although I agree with pretty much everything you said I do have a couple of comments on some things you wrote.

1. “Screw cardio!”

Are you serious? I think it’s a known AND proven fact that a good mix of cardio and weight training will provide a better fat loss program than just weight or cardio training alone. ESPECIALLY if we consider HIT cardio training.

A: It is true, HIT cardio (I assume you’re referring to interval training) is the best way to go if you’re going to put the time in. However, sorry to inform you, it is not a “proven fact” that a mix of cardio and weight training is the best way to go. Show me the evidence of long term success. There is NONE. Visit any gym and you’ll see what I mean. The majority of people who perform cardio regularly don’t make permanent gains. Cardio is vastly overrated as a means of losing body fat. In fact, if a person who is overweight embarks on a cardio program and doesn’t change their eating habits, they are doomed to failure. Adding muscle is the key, combined with a diet lower in refined foods, especially carbs.

A correspondent from Men’s Journal recently experimented with a high-altitude simulator to gage its effectiveness. For those unaware, a high-altitude simulator is a tent that engulfs your bed to help increase red blood cell production while you sleep. Why the hell would you want to do that? Well, red blood cells fuel endurance for when we run, swim, bike or do any other fast-paced exercise. Athletes like cyclist Lance Armstrong use it while training for a race because it helps simulate the altitude at which your red blood cells need to increase. Coupled with regular training, it’s like gaining all the benefits from weekly cardio…but while you sleep.

The product is intriguing, because according to the Men’s Journal correspondent, the tent works:

After three weeks, I felt as if I had a third lung. I blazed through a three-mile time trial 5 percent faster than I ever had, and I finished top-15 in my category in a hill climb. During the race I quickly caught my breath on the flat spots, then felt ready to pound away again. The tent worked — but I still had to train hard.

Two questions:

1) Is it worth $1,000-plus and sleeping in a bubble nightly to improve endurance?

For millionaire athletes, a thousand dollars for one of these puppies seems like a bargain, but what about for the common triathlon athlete or endurance enthusiast? Before dismissing the theory, how much do you spend yearly on food, supplements and training equipment to enhance your physique?

2) Are athletes like Armstrong cheating?

We as a society hate the fact that Barry Bonds could break a home run record he unfairly achieved, but are we being hypocritical? If these tents do work, did Armstrong have an unfair advantage? Steroids help testosterone growth, which therefore aids strength and muscle development through exercise. These tents are designed to increase red blood cell production, which therefore aids in endurance through exercise. The connection between these simulators and steroids might be on a different level, but it does raise an interesting debate.