An Australian study has found that a bit of exercise each day may be better for building stronger muscles than a few longer sessions every week.
The research, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, suggests that frequency, not volume, is what produces the best results when exercising.
“People think they have to do a lengthy session of resistance training in the gym, but that’s not the case,” Ken Nosaka, exercise and sports science professor at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, who was involved in the study, said in a press release.
“Just lowering a heavy dumbbell slowly once or six times a day is enough.”
The study, done in collaboration with Niigata University and Nishi Kyushu University in Japan, looked at changes in muscle strength and thickness — the latter used as an indicator of muscle size — in three groups of participants over four weeks.
The participants performed an eccentric bicep contraction on a machine that measures muscle strength. The exercise is similar to lowering a heavy dumbbell in a bicep curl, the researchers said.
Two groups did 30 contractions per week, with one performing six contractions a day for five days and the other doing all 30 in one day once a week. A third group did six contractions one day a week.
After four weeks, the researchers said the group doing six contractions five days a week saw a “significant” increase in muscle strength of more than 10 per cent, as well as an increase in muscle thickness.
The group that performed 30 contractions in a single day showed no increase in muscle strength, but the researchers say muscle thickness rose 5.8 per cent, which was similar to the first group.
The third group doing six contractions once a week, meanwhile, showed no changes in muscle strength or thickness.
“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,” Nosaka said.
He said the results may be due to how often the brain is being asked to make a muscle perform in a particular way.
At the same time, he stressed the importance of rest in an exercise regimen.
“Muscles need rest to improve their strength and their muscle mass, but muscles appear to like to be stimulated more frequently,” Nosaka said.
He concluded by saying going to the gym once a week is not as effective as doing a bit of exercise every day at home.
“We need to know that every muscle contraction counts, and it’s how regularly you perform them that counts,” Nosaka said.