Too Much?

[Truestar]

I know there is such thing as too much exercise when building muscle mass. To build you tear, but they must repair. (Rhyme not intended ).

I have a push up, dips, and chin up routine for real basic exercises. However I do these everyday. We have Whey protein and when there's eggs in the house, I always cook them for breakfast. Not to mention dinner usually sparks a milk interest.

Even with the protein intake, is doing the routine everyday too much?

Should I work hard every other day, and use the ones in between to rest my body. Or should I do a small workout every other day, and the other days work it hard? What's best for simple maintenance workouts?

[JusticeZero]

If you have a day when you really beat yourself up, rest that part till it stops hurting. If it's not so huge, every day is fine, imo.

[Kuma]

I would do it every other day. You'd be surprised how too little rest can affect your gains. I found out for myself that I actually thrive on just two full body workouts a week.

Dips and pushups work similar muscles, and chin ups also will affect your dips so doing all three, day in and day out, will hinder you. However, doing them every other day might in fact work better for you. If you want to keep doing them every day, then you don't want to work to the point of exhaustion but then that's getting into more technical aspects of training. The simplest way is to work hard, rest a day or so, then do it all over again.

[bushido_man96]

Rest time is when you get stronger, so I would agree with Kuma and work out every other day.

[the beast]

Your body needs the rest to repair itself so every other day would be better. Remember you tear your muscles down in the gym and build them up when you rest. Besides don't you get burnt out working the same thing every day?

[JusticeZero]

Not all strength building is about tearing up muscle; quite a bit is just about increasing the performance and responsivity of the muscle you already have. THAT does not need downtime.

If you're not doing anything hard enough to leave your muscles hurting and recovering, you can keep on doing it, and you can still expect gains from it.

[sperki]

I would have to agree with JusticeZero on this one. If your body is sore it's telling you it needs some recovery time. To just assume that one of recovery is enough isn't correct either; it depends on YOU, how hard you worked, how fit you are, how old you are, how quick you recover, etc. So again, it's based on how you feel as opposed to fixed time spans. But if you're not sore feel free to keep going like a madman! The beast might be on to something, variety is the spice of life.

[Kuma]

You can train just short of failure and do that consistently, it's true. Not a bad way of training. Personally however I don't agree with it. While the current "grease the groove" fad is going strong with weight training (and, in essence, bodyweight exercises), it's not quite as result producing as one might think.

Take, for example, the deadlift. A staple exercise in the "train almost to failure so you can train more often" philosophy. It's rare you see an individual who can even perform twice their bodyweight for a rep or two in that manner. Compare that with say a powerlifter who maybe deadlifts heavy every OTHER week, who is moving impressively heavy poundages and still getting strong yet staying at the same weight.

For bodyweight exercises, training more frequently is definitely okay, you just need to make the exercises much harder as you won't want to do high reps. You'd want to keep the rep range low, so to do that you'd need harder and harder exercises. That means for dips adding weight, for pushups elevating your feet, and chinups should become pullups and eventually weighted pullups.

IMO though, you will see much better gains with more rest.

[JusticeZero]

I didn't say that you can rely ONLY on exercizing to less than failure though, I said that if the exercizes you did that day did not reach failure, that there's no need to rest for a day afterward. Really, imo you should do a mix. Train sub-failure without stop sometimes, mixed with ripping your muscles to shreds other times. But that's more an opinion than anything, really.