Working out with weights twice each day can help you build muscle more quickly than less frequent workouts but can also backfire on you, depending on how you do your workouts. Too much lifting and too little recovery can decrease your results and inhibit maximal muscle growth.
Muscle Building
Lifting weights doesn’t build muscles. Lifting heavy weights or using significant resistance against your muscles, such as exercising with resistance bands or performing body-weight exercises, damages muscles by creating small tears in the muscle fibers. What builds muscles is the repair process that takes place after you perform resistance exercises.
How Much Recovery?
After you lift weights, your body begins a chemical process of repairing your muscles that take place primarily during the first 24 hours after you train, with most of this process completed within 48 hours. Don’t perform a second weight-training workout until you’ve given your muscles at least 24 hours to recover or you’ll defeat your purpose of building larger muscles. To help this repair process take place more efficiently, eat some lean protein within two hours of your workout to provide the nutrients that help with muscle repair.
Two-A-Day Workouts
If you’re going to weight train twice each day, perform an upper-body session in the morning and a lower-body routine in the afternoon, or vice versa. This will give your upper body 24 hours to recover, even though a few hours after your workout, you’re weight training your lower body. Split workouts will also let you concentrate more effort on one area of your body than if you try to work your entire body in one session.
Overtraining
At some point, too much weight, too many reps and too many workouts with too little recovery in between will diminish your results. Even though you will continue to see strength increases, they will not be as great as if you did not overtrain. Overtraining can lead to a lack of glycogen to fuel your workouts, poor technique because of muscle fatigue and a traumatic injury to your muscles. Consider working on your upper body one day and your lower body the next instead of two-a-day workouts, or taking every third day off to give you sufficient recovery time to prevent overtraining.
