Hey!
I'd like to know whether it's a good/bad idea to do multiple weight training sessions on one day?
Also I was asking myself why a lot of you guys train their different body regions on different days, and not the full body on just one day.
I'm content with my present muscle mass. I don't want to bulk up more, but maintain it and tone.
Generally I'm trying to lower my BF% in order to really be able to see what I got, but it's a paaain.. I just can't count calories all the time. I really wonder how you guys handle this.. there's a lot of things that don't have their calory count written on, and besides that- unless you're eating the same food each and every day it still would be terribly annoying to weigh, count etc. everything before you eat. How do you do it? I'm eating as healthy as I can without counting cals.. but I'm never sure if it's too much or too less for losing BF. At the moment I think I've hit a plateau. Thanks in advance everyone.

definetly not a good idea to do multiple training sessions in one day. You may have hit a plateau because you are overworking your muscles and you don't have enough variety of workouts for each muscle. Your muscles need a day or two off after every time you work them and working parts of your body day by day is just easier to manage. As for the calories i am in the same boat as you are i am toning now and i don't count my calories. I just try to make the smart choice by eating what I know is healthy and i watch to eat my protein in the morning or early afternoon to avoid storing it as fat. If you eat 5 or 6 small meals a day and do some cardio at 65-70% heart rate that fat will melt right off. I hope this helps you.....

A split or full body is up to you, just a personal preference, well I guess it also depends on time as well. With a split you can hit each group harder and groups have more time to recovery/heal. With a full body you can work groups more often, but cannot hit them as hard.

This goes into depth a little more..

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=933431

its not completely bad to weight train twice a day. waterbury talks about that here

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=960811

personally, i'm a big believer in training the body, not body parts. all the trainers I respect follow that way of training.

there are some people who dont count calories each day. what they do is prepare their meal plans ahead of time and get all the numbers figured out. then they just have to follow their meal plans each day as written and they know how much they're getting.

personally, i count each day. i've been doing it for so long it only takes about two minutes to do.

I don't actually work my muscles multiple times each day, I just wanted to know what you guys think of it.. I worked them before noon, but later in the evening I could've done some more I think. But yeah, it was merely interest.. I don't want to overtrain. I figure with me only wanting to maintain muscle full body every two to three days should be my choice. Actually I don't worry about losing muscle very much since I build them rather easily.. I just love the feeling of working them hard!
As for preparing meals.. that could be an option. The only problem is that I'm pretty spontanious about my meals.. and often enough I couldn't properly plan ahead because I simply don't know what the following day will bring.
Apart from that.. HOW do you count them, abear? Do you like read the labels or look everything up in a book, weigh your portion, count em up, double everything since you've probably already missed another meal, and finally eat it?
Thanks guys!

Depends on your work capacity, i've used 2 daily sessions quite alot over the last 6months.

Now that does not mean you should double the volume.

By the way... how important is rest? why should I rest? should I only rest if I can feel that I'm lacking strength at the moment? how important is weight lifting when trying to lose body fat without losing muscle? Not abandoning it completely of course.. but when I'm buzzing in the early evening should I rather go and lift some metal or chase some deer through the woods? What about a 70% cardio 30% lifting ratio? Or rather 60/40? Or even balance it?
Questions over questions, as always

if you dont rest, you can overtrain and your gains will slow down alot. You need to rest, give the body time to build itself up after training, its when it builds itself up that it ends up stronger than what it was before
42 hours between working the same muscle atleast. and you should get plenty of sleep

I have my meal plan figured out ahead of time, along with a plan B and a plan C just in case happens.

I have all the numbers from the foods i eat already written down, I got them off the labels and from nutritiondata.com. i use a food scale thats always on the counter.

then I'll break out my 4x6 mead notebook and figure out what I ate the day before. add up the totals and write them down. no more difficult than that. as I said, I've been doing it for so long I figure out my little way of doing it quick and easy.

But when my muscles and I feel ready to go again sooner.. I wouldn't overtrain then, no? Or do they mislead me.. and in truth they're longing for some rest

I noticed something else... I've calculated that I need to take in about 2000 cals per day in order to lose fat, and I've read that I'd do good with a 40/40/20 ratio or so. now that would be around 40 grams of protein per meal if I consumed 5 meals a day. What the heck, 40 grams in EVERY meal? That's impossible! First, I can't really have 5 real meals over the day, I rather eat small all the way and have only three bigger ones, and second.. how would I get 40g of protein into my meals if a can of tuna for example has only slightly above 20. Man, this ain't easy. It's not only about being eager to eat right- it's also, and that gives me much more of a headache, about planning it all being conscious at all times. Well I am conscious, but I don't know what I should be conscious of. Why can't I just work my ass off on the bike even harder and eat whatever I want to? Moo
Crisis. (a little one at least)

haha, crisis...

no worries... you should most definitely try really hard to be eating throughout the day and NOT three big meals. First, your body needs to be fed more often to be breaking down continuously and for energy as well. Second, youll be more likely to over eat if eating three times which only leads to fat being stored. 40 grams per meal is nothing, thats a piece of chicken. Get use to eating often, some days I easily eat 8 or 9 times a day, but keep in mind they arent HUGE meals.

Think of breaking down those three big meals into 6, just cut them all in half and add more protein.

I don't only eat three times a day.. in fact I eat every few hours if I can. But mostly not quite 40g of protein... hey come on, maybe it's just a piece of chicken, but I'd need to have that 5 times a day at least. I'd need it in every one of my meals (if they were official, I think it leads to about 5 to 6 a day... but as I mentioned- no proper prot/carb/fat split, rather stuff I think that's healthy and that's around). I just can't kill a chicken each and every day, can I? I only know tuna, chicken, turkey and eggs for protein. I could also have 10 (!) cans of tuna, what about that?
Crisis!

40/40/20-40% protein of all your calories, 40% of your calories is carbs, and 20% of your calories is fat. Multiply the percentage times your calories and that's the kcals of protein, carbs, fat you should have through the course of the day. After you've been counting kcals for awhile, it'll get really easy to the point where you can pretty much guess how many you're getting through the day and be pretty close...unless you just completely different stuff every day.

I don't think beginners need to worry about 2-a-days because then you run into all this over-thinking about things. But, as an example from my training-I'll do heavy intensity early strength stuff and then come back and do some isolation hypertrophy stuff later. I think, however, the majority of trainees just need some sound lifting on a good program for awhile before doing 2-a-days and other stuff.

I think I will start counting calories if I really notice a stop in progress. I -think- that I've stopped more or less by now, but on the other hand I like to watch myself in the mirror a lot.. so it could be that I just don't see any
I trust in my little accu-measure thingy, but it's probably too early to measure again.. I'll give myself til June. Maybe I can get away with "guessing", wouldn't that be nice?
As for training- I'll go on with full body train every two or three days for now.. I've really enjoyed it so far and I can definitely see some progress.