It is very easy to over-exercise in the hope of achieving a health and fitness goal. One common mistake is to exercise multiple times per day and thus exercise too often. This can shoot stress hormones through the roof and inhibit your ability to break down fat tissue, build muscle and enhance your fitness.
If your sole goal is to build muscle, then by no means should you exercise twice in the day. Gaining muscle is hard enough without shooting stress hormone levels (ie. cortisol) through the roof, inhibiting protein synthesis! You should aim for a maximum of 1 workout per day and plenty of recovery to stimulate muscle gain!
If your goal is a combination of muscle gain/maintenance and fat loss/maintenance, then you may opt to perform two workouts per day. In this case, one would be weights and the other would be cardio. Ideally, you should avoid two weight training sessions in the single day. You should also avoid performing each workout within 8 hours of each other. Performing the workouts too close to one another will interfere with your recovery.
If your goal is to lose fat tissue exclusively, you may reach a point in your training whereby you opt to exercise twice a day to increase your caloric expenditure. Again, keep to a maximum of 1 weights workout a day. It’s often a good idea to incorporate some lower intensity exercise to avoid doing “too much”, inhibiting recovery and thus “over-training”.
If your goal is to improve your fitness, performing multiple workouts a day may be beneficial, but you do need to ensure that you are obtaining adequate recovery so your body can repair itself. Fitness covers a broad range of definitions, so you should consult your personal trainer for specific advice.
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