Can You Lift Weights Every Day? (Plan For The Fastest Gains)

Everyday weightlifting has many pros, but I’ll focus only on the three most important ones below.

Bigger And Stronger Muscles

While other types of workouts can help you build your lean muscle mass, weight training is the most efficient. That’s because it quickly causes micro-tears on your muscles, which are necessary for muscle development [1].

Daily training with heavy weights should cause micro-tears even faster. So, your muscles will become stronger.

That might mean that you’ll build them more quickly, too, but not necessarily. As we’ll see below, some studies indicate otherwise.

Stronger Bones

According to Wolff’s Law, bones naturally adapt to the stress under which they’re placed [2].

So, if you increase the load you’re lifting, you force your bones to reconstruct themselves so that they can handle more stress. They’ll become stronger and more endurant.

Since lifting weights every day is bound to put extra pressure on your bones, the bone density should naturally improve.

Lifting weights daily has many cons, too. Again, I’ll outline only the three most important ones here.

Slower Muscle Development

When you lift weights every day, your muscles don’t have enough time to recover.

Here’s how an expert explains why rest days are so crucial [4]:

“In the scenario where the muscle does not have time to recover, a catabolic process occurs where the muscles degrade and continually break down. This process is referred to as ‘overtraining.’”

- Austin Martinez, MS, CSCS, ATC, Director of Education for StretchLab 

When you overtrain a muscle, your cortisol levels increase. And cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, inhibits protein synthesis [5] and sabotages muscle development. A great way of lowering its levels is with the help of natural supplements that reduce cortisol levels.

What’s more, your body doesn’t have enough time to repair damaged muscle fibers if you lift weights every day. As a result, the muscle fibers won’t increase in thickness or number.

Again, this means that your muscles won’t grow [6]. Well, at least not as fast as they could.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends strength training at least twice a week [9]. But that’s a minimum recommendation that you probably want to surpass. So, let me give you my advice as a personal trainer.

You can lift weights every day, but your body needs rest in between workouts. That’s why you should have at least one rest day per week.

That way, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of frequent strength training while giving your muscles adequate recovery time.

But you can also determine how often you should lift weights based on your fitness goals. First, establish how often you need to rest to achieve your desired outcome [10]:

• If you’re training for muscular endurance, rest for at least 24 hours between workouts.
• If you’re training for hypertrophy (growth), rest between 24 and 72 hours between workouts.
• If you’re training for strength and power, rest between 48 and 72 hours between workouts.

Next, plan your weekly workout routine according to these recommendations. For example, if you’re training for endurance, you could lift four days a week and still have 24-hour rest periods in between workouts.

Of course, you don’t have to follow these recommendations to a T. If you want to lift more often, you can. In that case, just make sure you adopt a split workout routine.

Whether or not you’ll lift every day is up to you. Either way, you need to ensure you’re staying safe while lifting. Here are a few fitness tips that will help you do so:

• Pay attention to the technique. If you have improper form while exercising, you risk injury. For example, you could injure your back while doing a bench press [13] if you don’t keep it slightly bent.
• Don’t (always) power through soreness. Feeling a little sore after a tough workout is normal. But extreme soreness indicates that you haven’t given yourself enough recovery time. So, instead of powering through soreness in the weight room, take a day or two to rest and recuperate.
• Add weight progressively. If you’re lifting weights every day, make sure you’re constantly challenging your body with more weight. Lifting more weight every week or month can help prevent hitting plateaus [14].
• Alternate between different muscle groups. You should always train several muscles groups instead of just one. But this is even more important if you’re lifting weights daily. Alternations between muscle groups allow the muscles you’ve previously trained to recover. You’ll also avoid symptoms of overtraining, like sleep disturbances, excessive fatigue, and nagging injuries [15].
• Do more reps. A higher number of reps can improve the aerobic capacity of your muscles [16]. A high aerobic capacity, or VO2 max, will increase your muscles’ flexibility, speed up recovery, and help you shed pounds [17].

If you find yourself struggling to follow these tips — or just want a helping hand — consider hiring a certified trainer to help you reach your fitness goals faster.

Instead of splitting your workouts into two muscle groups, you can split them into three [12]:

• Upper-body pushing muscles: chest, triceps, shoulders
• Upper-body pulling muscles: back, biceps, rear delts
• Lower body muscles (“legs”): calves, quads, hamstrings

Here’s how you could organize your weekly workout routine based on this split:

So, we’ve learned that lifting every day won’t necessarily result in the fitness and health benefits you’re hoping for. More workouts don’t always yield better results.

So, instead of working out more, try working out smarter. Here’s how:

• Opt for shorter, higher intensity workouts instead of going to the gym daily: To increase the intensity of your workout, lift heavier weights or, better yet, perform slow-motion strength training. Slow, controlled movements put more pressure on the muscles because you can’t rely on momentum to lift [18].
• Rest only after you’ve completed the entire workout: Little to no rest time in between exercises builds muscle faster [19].
• Avoid full-body workouts if you plan to lift every day: Dedicate each workout to only a single muscle group so that your other muscles can recover in the meantime.