Look, I used to believe the whole “you grow outside the gym” thing too until I stopped listening to people who train three times a week and look exactly the same year after year. The human body adapts way faster than most give it credit for. If you hit a muscle once, sure, it’ll recover in a few days. But if you hit it every day, it stops fighting you and starts building the recovery pathways to handle it. That’s literally what adaptation is.
I’ve been lifting daily for the past six months, sometimes even running two shorter sessions in one day instead of a single long one. The results? Faster progress, no more crippling soreness (because your body gets used to it), and way better mind-muscle connection. The whole “overtraining” scare is massively overstated, most people never get close to real overtraining. They’re just under-eating, under-sleeping, or doing garbage programming.
Here’s the trick: keep the sessions focused and don’t annihilate yourself every time. Frequency beats occasional destruction. Olympic lifters train multiple times per day and they’re some of the most jacked, explosive athletes on the planet. Why? Because constant practice builds skill and size.
So yeah, you could keep clinging to your precious rest days or you could actually teach your body to handle real work and stop leaving gains on the table.