11.6 Physical Activity Guidelines: Recommendations for Muscular Strength and Endurance Activities

Recommended Frequency and Duration of Muscular Strength and Endurance Activities

A full body resistance workout can be achieved in about 30 minutes. The American College of Sports Medicine—or ACSM—recommends waiting at least 48 hours between resistance training sessions (Swain et al., 2014). It’s OK to strength train on consecutive days as long as you don’t train the same muscle groups two days in a row. For example, if you want to train on consecutive days, you could do shoulders, chest, upper back, and arms on Monday and Wednesday and abdominals, lower back, and legs on Tuesday and Thursday. A day of rest in between allows the muscles optimal time to repair (Garber et al., 2011). Resistance training can be performed on days when aerobic exercise is not, on the same day, or combined into the same workout.

Recommended Number of Sets and Repetitions for Dynamic Exercises

Regardless of which equipment you use, you will want to perform two to four sets of each exercise with a goal of fatiguing the muscle or overloading it to near exhaustion—the point at which a muscle can no longer perform a repetition. If the training goal is primarily to build strength or muscle mass, then the weight should be heavy enough or the resistance difficult enough to reach fatigue in 8 to 12 repetitions, or perhaps fewer, per set. If the primary goal is muscular endurance, then it’s appropriate to do 15 to 20 repetitions of lighter weight. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging, and it should be hard to lift the last one or two repetitions. If it’s too easy, then you’re not likely to see improvement in muscular strength or endurance (Garber et al., 2011).