Strength, muscle mass increase proportionately with training frequency regardless of experience
One page on PainSci cites Wirth 2007: Strength Training Frequency
PainSci commentary on Wirth 2007: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
This study shows that strength and muscle mass increase with training regardless of experience. The increases are described as proportionate to training frequency, and this is a notable exception: most such studies show that increased training frequency does not deliver proportionately greater results. However, in this experiment “all groups showed significant gains in muscle mass with a tendency of better training results when doing two or three training sessions a week. No difference could be found between the groups (beginners/advanced) with the same training frequency.”
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
The major goal of this study was to find a training frequency that promises optimum success in the proliferation of muscle mass by measu- ring muscle size before and 2 weeks after an 8-week training cycle. 30 men with at least half a year (beginner = A) and 30 with at least 2 years (advanced = F) of strength training experience participated in this study. The subjects were divided into six groups of 10 individuals each, who had to go through a hypertrophy training program for arm bends with a frequency of one (A1 / F1), two (A2 / F2) and three (A3 / F3) training sessions per week up to 8 weeks altogether. The size of the elbow flexors was determined by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). 96 transversal images with a thickness of 1.67 mm were collected per subject. Thus a region 16.03 cm of the upper arm was examined. The statistical handling of the data consisted of an analysis of variance (with a repetition of the measurements) and the Scheffé-test (p < 0.05) as a post-hoc test. Except for the group of advanced athletes and a training frequency of once a week, all groups showed significant gains in muscle mass with a tendency of better training results when doing two or three training sessions a week. No difference could be found between the groups (beginners/advanced) with the same training frequency.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Common interventional procedures for chronic non-cancer spine pain: a systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised trials. Wang 2025 BMJ.
- Gabapentinoids and Risk of Hip Fracture. Leung 2024 JAMA Netw Open.
- Classical Conditioning Fails to Elicit Allodynia in an Experimental Study with Healthy Humans. Madden 2017 Pain Med.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan 2024 Br J Sports Med.
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