How Often Should I Lift Weights?

There’s a few different ways of doing it, but the most common example of all is to just gradually increase the amount of weight you lift on each exercise. If you’re not doing this (or something similar) over time, then chances are you’re not getting anything close to positive results from your workouts. It’s seriously THAT important.

Now, when you understand this importance and realize that progression is the key to the success of your workout routine, a common question that comes up is how often should this progression take place? Exactly how often should you increase the weight you lift? How Often Should I Increase The Weight I’m Lifting?

Some pre-designed weight training programs have very specific guidelines for how and when progression should take place on each exercise. You know… like increase this way on this exercise in this workout at this time. If you’re using a program like that, then that’s how often you should increase the weight you’re lifting.

But if you’re not using a pre-designed program whose progression is built into the program itself, then you should increase the weight you lift as often as you possibly can. My Muscle Building Workout Routine specifies the method of progression and how and when to make it happen, but there’s no built in time frame for it. In that case (and the case of any other routine fitting the second description above), your goal is to increase the weight you lift on each exercise as often as humanly possible.

The more you progress and the faster you progress, the more your body will improve and the faster your body will improve. While the really common sense answer here is that you should be increasing your weights as fast and as often as you can, I feel like I always need to add “within the realm of safety and sanity” to that answer to prevent certain people from doing something stupid. What I mean is, you should actually be fairly capable of increasing the weight before you increase the weight.

Progressing often is the goal, but you can’t just haphazardly add more weight to each exercise for the sake of adding more weight and unrealistically “creating” progress. Your form will go to shit, the target muscle(s) will no longer be used properly, reps will fall well below where they should be, and injuries will likely occur. So if you’re currently lifting a weight on some exercise that’s still a bit heavy for you, then you’re not ready to increase.

If you’re supposed to be doing 4 sets of 8 reps on an exercise and you’re getting reps of 7, 6, 5, 4, then you’re not ready to increase. These are cases where you need to spend a little more time with a weight and focus on increasing reps first and getting them into the range they should be in.