It’s pretty rare that a week goes by where I don’t get an email from somebody with a question about adding muscle mass.
When you strip the email down it usually boils down to……. “I’m trying, but nothing is happening?”
There are generally two questions included in my response.
The first is the obligatory addressing of nutrition – are we getting in enough calories and protein overall and is our meal composition biased as much as possible towards building muscle tissue while minimizing fat gain??
Most of the time I see people not tracking intake at all (really inexcusable in 2019 with all the technology at our fingertips for logging nutritional intake) which means they have no idea how much protein or how many calories they are taking in. And if you are trying to gain weight and you aren’t….then it’s too low. Period.
“But I’m eating a ton!!!”
No you aren’t.
The other situation is the guy that is gaining weight but it’s in all the wrong places. Often this guy is just shoveling in all the food. Protein is usually too low, carbs and/or fat is usually too high. Again it comes down to tracking and a consistent small caloric surplus. While fun I admit, force feeding Little Debbies and Cheese Pizza generally isn’t the ticket to more muscle, except in the hardest of hardgainers. The rest of us need a finer tuned and more disciplined approach.
But I digress…….
The second question I ask relates to training, and is the subject of this particular article.
How often are your lifts going up?
i.e. Are you setting small but frequent PRs across a variety of exercises as often as possible?
If the answer is ‘No” then you probably aren’t going to put on much muscle mass.
I don’t care what your training split is, how much volume you do, how often you train, or even the quality of your diet……if you are squatting 315×5 today and 315×5 a year from now, your legs will not have grown.
You have not asked them to.
As I wrote about a few weeks ago in this article, we aren’t just talking about PRs in the Squat, Bench, and Deadlift.
Although those exercises certainly are NOT excluded from the conversation, they aren’t the only exercises that count when it comes to adding muscle mass.
The type of physique changes that many guys are after necessitate the need for increased strength across a broader spectrum of exercises than just the big 3 – although that is a helluva good starting point.
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As lifters progress over the months and years, the things that they wring their hands over have very little to do with the primary mechanisms that drive hypertrophy.
Your training split, alone in a vacuum, is usually not the causative factor in gaining or not gaining muscle mass – although it’s an important component of ensuring optimal progress.
Depending on where you are at in your level of advancement, some splits might be more optimal than others, but the reality is that guys grow and make progress on a myriad of different training splits.
What matters more than your split is (1) whether or not you are performing the right exercises for your goals and equally if not more important (2) are you making regular progress on those exercises!
So if the High Bar Back Squat is your primary exercise for your Quads – I don’t care if you do that as part of a full body routine, as part of an upper – lower split, as part of your leg day on a push-pull-leg split, or as part of a dedicated “quad day” on the Bro-est of Bro-Splits.
The body is going to respond to progress on that exercise, not how you choose to describe the day on which it is performed.
But people get really really really hung up on the semantics of this type of thing.
I often see guys hopping around from one training split to the next, constantly re-organizing their weekly plan, and forgetting the most important part of this whole thing – am I getting stronger on the lifts that matter?
Changing your training split is only going to help you grow if your current split is preventing you from progressing on the lifts that really matter.
For instance, one of the issues with a full body routine is that often times the lifts and exercises towards the end of the session get completely sandbagged when it comes to either intensity or volume due to the fatigue created by the exercises that preceded it.
In this case it makes more sense to split the body up into more focused sessions so that more volume, intensity, focus, and effort can potentially be applied to the body parts / exercises that are lagging and aren’t progressing.
On the flip side, some novice and intermediate trainees have a tendency to get carried away with per session volume and exercise selection far beyond what they need to grow when they split things up too much. They wind up doing A LOT of junk volume in these sessions that isn’t contributing towards growth because it never progresses. It’s just just exercises, sets, and reps for the sake of doing them, without any real progression.
For instance if you are training Quads every Wednesday with 3 sets of Squats, 3 sets Leg Presses, 3 sets of Hack Squats, and 3 sets of Leg Extensions it’s likely that you are overdoing the per session volume and under-doing the intensity and frequency.
Instead of cramming all that work into a single session, do Squats and Leg Presses on Monday and Leg Extensions and Hack Squats on Thursday and switch your training split from a pro-style body part split to an upper lower split that forces you to keep per session volume in check and allows you to push the relative and absolute intensity of all 4 exercises a bit harder.
This is a very general statement, but typically the earlier you are in your level of advancement, the more you are going to lean on frequency and a smaller menu of exercise selections.
If you can train a body part productively, and set new PRs 2-3 times per week vs 1 time per week, why not do so?
But 10 years into your training the likelihood of pushing new PRs multiple times per week on a given body part is low. But the need for increased stress on each individual body part is higher…..So this generally lends itself to a bit less frequency per body part, and a bit more volume per session. It’s just a natural evolution.
As a general rule, over the course of a training “career” I feel like I very natural progression for a physique / hypertrophy oriented trainee would be something like:
- Full Body Splits
- Upper – Lower Split
- Legs – Push – Pull
- Body Part Split
Basically over time trending towards a scenario where we are exchanging a bit of frequency for a bit of per session volume.
It basically comes down to practicality and recovery. We only have the time and energy to commit so many resources at any given training session. And for a trainee who is approaching their natural limits of strength and muscle mass, they’ll have to deliver a more robust stimulus to each body part in order to elicit new and continued growth. And the better you get at delivering mega doses of stress at a given session, the more recovery you’ll need between very intense sessions for that body part.
And when the trainee needs an across the board increase in training volume and intensity for each body part, it becomes a practical reality that sessions become more focused on just 1-2 main body parts per day unless you have the time and recuperative abilities to endure regular 2-3 hour marathon training sessions.
I understand that it might sound like I am contradicting myself thus far in the article. Earlier I hinted at the notion that perhaps your training split doesn’t really matter. Perhaps the more correct way of stating things is that your training split should be subservient to the progression on your key exercises rather than the other way around.
An arbitrary change of training split isn’t going to necessarily facilitate more growth. Progression on your key exercises will facilitate more growth, and your training split should be set up in a way that facilitates the most frequent progression on the key exercises!
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Let’s take a quick look at a practical “evolution” of the training split for a physique oriented athlete…..(this is just a quick example – not a prescription for any one individual!)
Novice
- Workout A: Squat, Bench Press, Deadlift
- Workout B: Squat, Shoulder Press, Chins
Alternate workouts A & B across a Mon/Wed/Fri training week, performing each exercise for 3 sets of 5 reps. Add small amount of load at every session
Early Intermediate (Heavy Light Medium)
- Monday: Low Bar Squat, Bench Press, Barbell Row, Bicep Curls
- Wednesday: Shoulder Press, Deadlift / RDL, Leg Press, Dips
- Friday: High Bar / Front Squat, Incline Bench Press, Chins, Tricep Extension
Still full body training for max frequency of PRs per body part, but with increased variation in movement and increase in volume for smaller body parts
Late Intermediate (Upper – Lower)
- Monday: Bench Press, T-Bar Rows, Shoulder Press, Lat Pulldowns, Triceps
- Tuesday: Squat, RDL, Leg Press, Leg Curl, Calf Raise
- Thursday: Incline Press, Chins, Dips, Cable Rows, Biceps
- Friday: Safety Bar Squat, Goodmornings, Hack Squat, Glute Ham Raise, Calf Raise
Allows for increase in training volume via increased exercise selection and body is divided upper-lower for practicality and recovery
Late Intermediate / Advanced (Legs, Push, Pull)
- Day 1: Safety Bar Squat, Goodmornings, Hack Squat, Leg Curl, Calves, Abs
- Day 2: Incline Bench Press, DB Flat Bench, Cable Fly, Seated DB Press, Side Delt Raises, Triceps
- Day 3: Barbell Rows, Cable Rows, Pulldowns, Rear Delt Raises, Shrugs, Biceps
- Day 4: Off
- Day 5: Repeat 3 day cycle with different exercise selections
Splits up the upper body sessions into “push” and “pull” (yes, I know that all muscles pull) to allow for more per session volume on overlapping exercises and better recovery between sessions. Frequency per body part is still twice per week but generally with more total volume per body part.
Advanced (Body Part Split)
- Monday – Chest / Biceps
- Tuesday – Legs (Hamstring emphasis)
- Wednesday – Off
- Thursday – Shoulders / Triceps
- Friday – Back, Traps
- Saturday – Legs (Quad emphasis)
- Sunday – Off
Allows for even greater per session volumes and intensities per body part while reducing frequency to 1.5 times per week
(1.5 times per week comes from the natural overlap of the sessions – quads and hams get hit to some extent in both leg sessions, back gets hit in the hamstring session via Deads/RDLs, etc, chest gets hit when we do dips or close grip benches for triceps, etc, etc).
Big changes would be the separation of dedicated quad and hamstring focused sessions, separating shoulders / triceps from the chest workout, and separating the biceps from the back workout.
Again, this amount of “split” may be unnecessary for the guy training for 6 months. But for an athlete training for 5-10 years, he may need 10-12 sets per week and 2-4 different exercises to bring up weaker and smaller shoulders, for instance. And he’ll need to use the heaviest weights possible for those volumes (at the right rep ranges) to bring up that body part. Good luck fitting in any quality high effort work in a session that also includes exercises for legs, chest, and back.
