I do this for 1 1/2 year now, and still like it very much.

In some info I picked up that training a muscle should be followed by day's of rest. Maybe up to ten day's maybe even more!

Has anybody experience with these large in-between periods?

watcher16,

It has been 15-20 years since I was weightraining seriously but I have never heard of resting a muscle that long.

Yes, i am just ending a long rest period (about a week). The absolute and only reason i did this is because my knee started to hurt every time i did a squat, even when i did non-exercise squats, like picking something up off the floor...I needed more recovery time to heal, cuz it was a definite problem. Longer rest periods once in a while (! once in a while!!!!) can be good because they give your body time to adjust (and of course, repair, if your hurt.) My workout partner was telling me that strength gains can improve after a long rest..(hmmm, i think that's what he said. if you're interested i can ask him about this.)
But generally, 10 days is way more rest than i would ever take, and is not necessary.
1 day in between lifting sessions is sufficient. Sometimes i don't even take a day, i just do slightly different exercises the next day (ex. a speed squat monday, then a front squat tuesday, coupled with 2 less intense exercises each day.)
I have learned that rest times depend on what you are doing, and how you are doing it. Basically, tailor your rests to your specific purposes.

As for what i think of longer rest periods; my knee feels a lot better, but the rest of me feels like a lazy beast.

Hey Watcher, true SuperSlow die-hards, like Ken Hutchins, advocate training your body only once per 10 days, sometimes up to once every 2 weeks. (Once you've completed your intial 2 weeks or so of the program). Maybe it works........ for me, once I am involved in a training program, I am too fired up to rest THAT long.

That is the mind set among today's bodybuilding circles.

In lieu of a very lengthy discussion, let me just say that IMO, it is neither true nor false, but rather contingent on the type of training you are doing. Also IMO, the kind of training that necessitates these long rest periods is not the best way to train in a functional since.

I believe that a person would experience better gains by training with heavier percentages of their 1RM (75%+), avoid training to failure, doing forced reps, supersets etc. and instead train more often. The idea behind this is neural training rather than neural breakdown/damage. As Pavel Tsatsouline puts it, ‘Grease the Groove.” He has a great book on this subject called ‘Power to the People.’

I train myself this way (used to train the other way ) and everyone else that solicits my help, rather it be my friends, people in the gym, or other. To date, I have not heard a single person complain about the progress they have made or the method of training. The only naysayers are the ones that are to close-minded to even give it an honest run.

Some will tell you that is kind of training is only good for strength gains and while that is true, that is not all. It is the only way, or at the very least, the best way to train to increase myofibril hypertrophy (increased muscle density by increased number of fibers), which is the true definition of muscle tone. If increased size is what you are after, it can be achieved by higher volume (e.g. 10-20 sets/exercise) training.

I’m no doctor or scientist, but this is what I know to be true.

Siff, Staley, Zatsiorsky and Verkoshansky, to name a few, may be able to offer you more proof on this, for lack of a better term, theory.

This sounds good.......... how often is "more often"?

Well, you can do it several different ways. I'll give you a couple of examples.

I am about to start a training cycle that will include bench pressing, deadlifting and squatting 3 times per week. Two of these training sessions will include sets of up to 95% of my 1RM. The other session will be a back-off day and will limit out somewhere around 75-80%. I will do every set with at least one and maybe two reps in reserve. No supersets, negatives, super slow or any other 'high intensity' tricks. There are some other variables, but these are the basics.

European countries have been using more frequent type training for many decades and maybe even a century or more. Sometimes, training a particular exercise twice in one day. They have dominated the world when it comes to strength and their muscle development has lacked any either.

Pavel Tsatsouline (www.dragondoor.com) talks about his Power to the People training, which is popular in Russia, in a book he wrote with the same title. It basically includes training a push movement like side or bent presses, and a pull movement like deadlift, up to 5x/week. Two sets of 5 reps for each exercise each day. He also talks about Russian Bear training which modified some from PTP. Includes doing higher volume sessions. Sometimes up to 20 sets per exercise. You will hear him say Grease the Groove a lot, which refers to training more frequently.... neural training. He speaks of using his father-in-law for Grease the Groove pull-up training. He speaks of another comrade who put a bench press in his kitchen and performed a set every time he went in there. The guy eventually succeeded at a world-class level total.