How often to exercise??

When I was a newbie, though, I was searching for any type of sign that I could ever have a chance of becoming one these "active/healthy people" on MFP. Someone telling me 6 days a week (at the beginning, not the way that others have told us that they worked up from 2-3 days,) would have made me feel totally inferior and hopeless. Or, it would have challenged me to go 6 days a week for the first 2 weeks and then feel dejected/frustrated when I felt tired/sore/unmotivated and didn't see the scale move the way that the Special K commercial told me that it would.

*Have you seen all the "why am I not skinny after 3 weeks of working out like a dog" threads lately??!*

I think it's better to help newbies set realistic early goals like what we all started doing. 3-4 times a week is a great goal and totally doable for most people, versus the zero that they (and most of the population) were doing before. As you get more fit, 5 days a week is average for most "active" people and I would consider 6 days (as long as you're not doing "f-ingarounditis and leisurely walking/pedaling while watching "The Kardashians") to be elite/superdedicated. However, I stand by that 6 days a week for someone starting off is unrealistic, unsustainable and setting that person up for injury and quitting.

OP, don't forget that 3 days of elevated heartrate, DOMS-inducing *work* is far superior to 6 days of half-hearted "showing up" where you barely break a sweat!

DOMS isn't an indication of a good workout. Higher frequency training has also been shown to be more optimal for natural muscle growth.

You are correct in saying that in fitness MORE isn't BETTER and that adequate rest needs to be emphasized to continue to progress, but 6-day a week training splits do work/produce if done properly as they do provide enough time for each muscle group to fully recover before the next workout (only problem you would run into is fatiguing your CNS, which is why lower volume/non-failure training is something I would highly recommend if you plan on following a 6-day split).

I'm not sure what you mean by failure training, but I am an advocate of "rep to failure" and "one rep max" as a good indicators of progress as well. If you never "try" incremental increases or push your muscles to the point of failure, you will never hit PRs or increase your reps. I think that's why a lot of people, (especially women,) find that their workouts "don't work," because they don't push their thresholds often and strategically enough.
OP, if you ever do get into lifting, I highly recommend the 5/3/1 model, which does incorporate both of the techniques I talked about above.

I'm not sure what you mean by failure training, but I am an advocate of "rep to failure" and "one rep max" as a good indicators of progress as well. If you never "try" incremental increases or push your muscles to the point of failure, you will never hit PRs or increase your reps. I think that's why a lot of people, (especially women,) find that their workouts "don't work," because they don't push their thresholds often and strategically enough.
OP, if you ever do get into lifting, I highly recommend the 5/3/1 model, which does incorporate both of the techniques I talked about above.

Thank you for clarifying. I always start with my warmup set, do a mod weight set, then my (3) rep max followed by another mod set and then my warmup weight rep to fail. If I'm correct, that follows the 5/3/1 set up except that I pushed my max to the middle. Not sure if that means that I am doing something detrimental according to your logic, but I really do like his/that program's progression. Either way, it worked for me, until my pregnancy caused me to drop my max weight so that I'm not straining but I look forward to resuming it.

Okay, so that officially derailed the thread. Sorry, OP.