A lot of people train twice a day and it sounds ‘hardcore’…

But in reality they are just TRYING to be hardcore…they want to be able to SAY they trained twice… either that or they THINK they are actually going to benefit from it.

With the exception of elite level athletes, or highly experienced gym goers, training twice a day is a load of nonsense… Athletes may have to perform a technical or team based session and a conditioning or strength session in one day but the certainly don’t train maximally twice per day. But for someone to perform a training session before work, say legs or ‘quads’ and then go and training hamstrings in the evening or likewise training back in the morning and benching in the evening… I call BS.

Let me explain…

Any big compound exercise i.e. bench press, squat, deadlift…anything that more than one joint is moving. Utilises a lot more muscle than the primary one.

I.e. whether you like it or not you are going to be even a little fatigued from the first session and the second session will suffer. Or even better you may ‘save yourself’ for the evening session and train submaximally in session the first one.

Ive also heard… ‘ill just do a little metabolic work this morning’

The little metabolic work would consist of max effort jumps, bodyweight exercises and sprints… or even steady state cardio…

The problem with this is two fold.

If you even devote half your effort to the session in the AM then the PM session is going to be effected…

The result: Two half arsed sessions…and over training… over train and you will get nowhere…

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One max effort session will always beat two half arsed ones.

If it were the other way around it wouldn’t be as bad, but it is still nowhere near optimal.

Truth is, the calories you burn during your training session are negligible.

It’s the calories that are burned after the training session while you are sitting on your arse on the couch that make all the difference.

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Likewise, nobody ever got bigger or put on muscle inside the gym. You damage the muscle and get weaker in the gym. You grow and develop when you are eating, sitting and recovering!

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Get it out of your head that in order to achieve any fat loss/ muscle building goals you need to spend an eternity in the gym.

You don’t…

You need to recover adequately, eat smart and in recovery periods you will either grow or lose fat… depending on you food intake…

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I repeat… training twice is stupid… eat less and leave the metabolic work out or…

End each training session with a specific workouts finisher that will burn fat for hours after you are finished training like in ‘Athletic Body System’.

Or add in a muscle building ‘gunshow’ or lagging bodypart pairing like in or the more advanced muscle building programme ‘Athlete Physique’

Thanks for reading…

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Bryan Kavanagh BSc CSCS

Co-author of

Athletic Body System and

Athlete Physique training systems.

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