Mentallic said:
Unless of course your daily life requires you to be in fit shape and not fatigued for days at a time, then I understand. Otherwise, why do you say that?
I'm pretty much sitting all day due to school and study so my life doesn't ask much in terms of being physically prepared, thus the training routine I've chosen works quite well for me.
I exercise to be as fit as possible (on the long term). Different people may respond differently to the same training regime, so you need to experiment to find out what works best for you. In my case, I found out that I need to train very vigorously almost every day of the week.
If you just started to exercise, then the maximum fitness level you will be at a few weeks later will be determined by the maximum amount of recovery your body can manage at the present moment, because within a period of a few weeks you won't be able to change much about how efficient the body repairs itself.
So, you exercise, which causes damage and then your body repairs itself, but it does extra repairs, so you get stronger. The optimum amount of training is then determined by the maximum repair capability of your body, but you won't be able to change that in a few weeks time.
If you take a longer term perspective, you should focus on expanding your body's self repair capacity. To train that, you need to exercise for some time at a level which would cause your body to become overtrained on the long term. So, you're presenting your body with a problem that it cannot deal with on the long term with its current level of self repair capacity.
Then what will happen is that you'll notice that your resting heart rate will increase, you may feel a little more tired. If you train at this unsustainable level for, say, two weeks and then take a rest for half a week, your body will catch up during that half a week of rest. Then you repeat this, i.e. you train again for two weeks and take half a week rest. What you then notice is that at the end of the second two weeks of training your resting heart rate was less increased. So, this means that your maximum recovery rate must have increased.
After repeating this a few times, you switch to some lower intensity training that you think you can now easily tolerate on the long term. That intensity will be higher than what you could easily tolerate before you did the intensive two week trainings.
You may notice that you need to sleep a little longer and eat a lot more. If you then keep training for a long time, say half a year at your new training level with your increased repair capacity, you'll make huge progress.
