Twice a days

reaper76

New member
So I know this has been a big question that I've always asked myself if I should do but I'd like to get anyones personal opinion and any facts. Is doing twice a day workouts worth it? Im talking going first thing in the morning then again in the evening. Either doing maybe the same workout each time or changing it up a little bit.
 
Eh I think everyone is different in what works for their body. I love the gym but not enough to go twice a day. I know people who look amazing and go twice a day and then I know people who look just as good but go once a day.

I go once a day and look better than my twice a day female friends but it could also be how they workout/diet. I haven't asked them the details of their regime
 
The only time I do this is during the summer. I only do it then because I am a teacher and I am more sedentary during the time off. I will lift in the morning and go back and do light cardio, 30 minutes or so of LISS, in the evening. Or I will walk down to the beach in the evening and walk the boardwalk.
 
Yeah I kinda wondered if its something I should do as a comp prep thing.

If contest prepping it could definitely help. I might do a comp this summer and I still plan on doing just once a day.
 
When I would run a blast, I would do two a days because:
a) I had so much pent up energy that I had to burn it off
b) recovery was so fast that I could handle it with no issue for multiple weeks

I think there is benefit to them if you are in a condensed amount of time for a goal or if you just have time to kill and love the gym.

On the weekends I still do a morning workout and in the late afternoon will go do some HIIT outdoors. But I happen to be one of those people that starts itching for something active after a few hours.
 
I remember reading an interesting two-a-day routine from Ben Pakulski (I ran his MI-40 program, and still incorporate several of his techniques into my workouts). I haven't used the following method much, but here it is (I may try it sometime):

A good way to simplify the two workouts a day for the same body part is:

AM: 80-90% of your 1RM, longer rest periods. Explosive reps. NOTE: this workout IS NOT aimed at muscular failure. Its primary goal is speed, explosiveness, and strength development. As well as CNS recruitment. Once the rep speed start to slow down, you stop the set. NO forced reps here.

PM(4-5hrs later): 40-60% of your 1RM hypertrophy based workout with MAX 60seconds rest between sets(usually 40seconds). (This would be the IDEAL time to implement your MI40 workouts!) Supersets, NOS sets, Giant sets etc..

The goal here is to exhaust the muscle and fatigue as many muscle fibres as you can. This is a good time to incorporate more single joint isolation exercises as well. (flyes, machines, cables etc).

Strength is not a concern, as you have already trained the fast twitch fibres and trained for strength.

The second workout of the day is going to now force the nervous system to recruit many more dormant muscle fibres. Most of which you may otherwise not be recruiting during typical workouts.Think of workout one as a massive pre-exhaust/fire up/warm up.
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Note that this is not intended to be something you do consistently for a long period of time, but it's something different than your typical "x, y, and z muscles in the AM, cardio/abs in the PM" or "x and y muscles in the AM, and z in the PM" double-splits that you normally hear about.

You definitely don't have to train twice a day, but sometimes it may make sense. For example, if you don't have many days in the week to train, but have a lot of time on a few days, you could go twice a day a few days instead of one super long workout on those days.
 
Definitely takes supplements and a calorie surplus but it can be done easily if those areas are all good! Stim free preworkout that you can take morning and night and a good bcca & protein supplement that digest well. Doing this without all this is also possible
 
It's possible if you manage training volume and intensity. The Bulgarians used this system, where they'd train multiple times per day, but they were doing singles and doubles of their competition lifts (working up to a daily training max, which is NOT a true max...think like RPE 9.5 where it's still smooth with minimal grinding), with very little assistance work. The problem for most of us, of course, is that we aren't professional athletes, and we have jobs and responsibilities. And training multiple times per day is time consuming, plus it'll be harder for us to recover since we don't have the luxury of training being our biggest responsibility. So you'll have to be very good with autoregulation and managing volume and intensity, but yeah, it's possible.
 
If youre serious about trying this, research dual factor training and the concept of over reaching (nb not overtraining).

Further to the mention above, it has been a tactic utilised prior to competition for lifters to train with such frequency that their lift(s) actually get weaker. At which point the trainee ceases training and, if they have timed it right, will experience a dramatic strength rebound at the meet.

The basic idea being

accumulated fatigue----->rest/deload---->strength rebound
 
I use 2 a days for 1 week every so often to over reach then take a week off. Compound lifts in the morning and isolated lifts 7 or 8 hours later
 
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