 How do you determine what is or isn't appropriate for you in terms of how much and how often? Most importantly when you're exercising what you're doing is trying to stimulate a specific adaptive response an increase in muscular strength the size just comes along with that If you're exercising intensely enough that you're stimulating an adaptive response And if you're not over stressing the body by doing too much And if you're allowing the body adequate time to recover and produce the adaptation you should see a measurable increase in strength on a regular basis If you're not getting stronger if you are not either to able to perform more repetitions or able to use a little bit more resistance Every time you work out Either you're not training intensely enough to stimulate the adaptive response You're doing too much you're overwhelming your body's capability to tolerate the stress and adapt to it Or you're training too frequently and not giving your body enough time in between Now Doug had mentioned an average of people being around once a week With a pretty significant range as little as five days for some people up to ten days or longer for other people This is kind of middle of the bell curve You've got some people on the extreme end who can train a little bit more frequently than that You've got some people who actually require a lot more recovery time Most people though fit right about in that five to ten day time frame now For the average person starting out Most people are not going to train intensely enough at first that they need a lot of recovery This level of intensity what Doug is talking about requires A bit of building up to there is some resistance to it psychologically like Doug mentioned with you know that panic as you get Approach the really hard part of the exercise and a lot of people just are not accustomed to or are familiar with with how hard They're able to actually push themselves So I would recommend a person start out on the lower end of frequency Or the lower end of their recovery about once every four or five days about three or four workouts within two week time frame and From there keeping track of their workouts how much weight they use how many repetitions they're able to perform on all their exercises Make adjustments You'll find over time as your intensity of training increases That you might start to see a slowdown in progress if you're somebody that requires Say seven ten or whatever amount to a number of days When you start to get up to a point where you're training hard enough You're going to see that you're not making those strength gains on a regular basis anymore And this would be an indication that hey, it's time to cut back a little bit Either on the amount you're doing or the frequency over a course of you know, however many workouts you're doing per week