Study Says A Little Exercise Each Day Improves Muscles More Than One Big Weekly Workout

If you want to love what you see after working out for a month, apparently the answer is a little bit every day instead of a lot all at once. Researchers from Australia and Japan have found that just doing a handful of bicep curls each day, five days a week actually improves muscle strength more than continuously doing dozens of curls in a longer exercise routine once a week. Moreover, they found people don’t even have to work out at full intensity to achieve these results.

During their study, the team had three groups of volunteers helping them out. The groups performed “maximal voluntary eccentric bicep contractions” for four weeks while they measured each person’s muscle strength and muscle thickness. An eccentric contraction is when the muscle lengthens. In the case of a bicep curl, a person lengthens the muscle by lowering a heavy dumbbell.

One group did this six times a day for five days a week (6×5). Another group completed all thirty contractions in a single day once a week (30×1). The third group do six contractions once a week as a control. Results showed that the 30×1 group did not see any increase in their muscle strength over the four weeks. However, they did see their muscle thickness (an indicator of muscle size) grow by 5.8 percent. The control group doing six contractions a week did not see any change in muscle strength or muscle thickness. The 6×5 group, on the other hand, saw their muscle strength increase by more than 10 percent, as well as experiencing similar growth in muscle thickness as the 30×1 group.

This led to the conclusion that a light workout multiple times a week would provide a greater benefit than a heavy workout once a week. Interestingly, the team found that the 6×5 group saw similar results to a previous study where participants increased their muscle strength through a single three-second bicep curl each day.

Edith Cowan University’s Professor Ken Nosaka says these studies show that it only takes a very manageable amount of exercise on a regular basis to produce noticeable improvements in strength. “People think they have to do a lengthy session of resistance training in the gym, but that’s not the case,” Nosaka says in a university release. “Just lowering a heavy dumbbell slowly once or six times a day is enough.”

Additionally, Nosaka reports that the latest study finds it doesn’t take people working out at maximum effort to achieve these results. “We only used the bicep curl exercise in this study, but we believe this would be the case for other muscles also, at least to some extent,” the researcher adds. “Muscle strength is important to our health. This could help prevent a decrease in muscle mass and strength with aging. A decrease in muscle mass is a cause of many chronic disease such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, dementia, plus musculoskeletal problems such as osteoporosis.”

Basically, take a kind of heavy dumbbell, and slowly lower it a handful of times a day and that quick workout will get you gains.

Source: https://bit.ly/3AnYqQR