Episode 33: My Favorite Split

Transcript

In my head, a lot of times I still associate myself as being a swimmer.
I swam growing up, probably from the time I was seven-ish, until I quit essentially sophomore year of high school, which I would have been, you know, 15, 16, something like that.
So, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that long.
It was eight or nine years.
But, and if you're not a swimmer, swimming is an all-encompassing activity.
If you're doing it truly competitively, which I was, it takes up your entire life.
Particularly as you get into the older age groups, you're swimming before school, starting at about six in the morning.
You go to school, you come back from school, then you swim from something like 5 p.m. until 9 at night.
Not all swimming, like you're doing some running and a little bit of dry land and stuff too.
But, if you talk about it end-to-end, you're spending five, six hours a day on swimming-related activities.
And that's Monday through Friday, plus a Saturday practice, plus swim meets that often occur on weekends.
So, it is an all-enveloping competitive sport from a very young age.
With that said, I've actually, so I still, I still in my head, I still think of myself that way.
Because it was, I was young, it was early years for me, and it was so all-encompassing.
But, in truth, I have spent more years doing weightlifting.
And, specifically, weightlifting in a style that would be considered bodybuilding style weightlifting.
Now, just to level set, I'm not, I've never done a bodybuilding competition.
I've never tried to train for a bodybuilding show.
I have many things these days working against me.
If I even wanted to go down that path, you know, I'm much older than I used to be.
I'm hard to build muscle these days.
My body type, in general, is fairly slender.
And I don't just pack on loads of mass very easily.
I've never touched a steroid.
Anyway, but, with that said, I very much engage in bodybuilding style activities.
So, the way I eat is built mostly around trying to gain muscle.
The way that I lift weights is built primarily around trying to add muscle, hypertrophy.
One big thing that bodybuilders always talk about, it's always a point of conversation, is your split.
So, the reason I'm saying all this is because perhaps there are listeners who are interested in going to the gym.
Maybe you don't know where to start.
Or maybe you've done some weightlifting.
Or maybe you're in a similar boat to me where, like, you do this quite a bit.
But you're just looking for, you know, some conversation around it.
When you go to do weightlifting, it is good to have what's called a split.
And that is how do you break up your muscle groups and lift with them in a sequence where it both maximizes your potential for growing muscle while also allowing your muscles to rest adequately so that you don't wear them out and essentially can't use them very well.
For instance, you don't want to go to the gym and do bench press every single day of the week.
By the time you get to your second or third day, those muscles have been used.
They are tired.
You will never get as good of a workout on the third day of something in a row as you did in the first.
So, you break things up and you, you know.
So, anyway, there's typically, you know, I should have counted this ahead of time, what, six major groups of muscles that people tend to focus on.
You have back, shoulders, legs, chest, and then either arms or you could break it into biceps and triceps because they're really pretty fundamentally different.
So, most people will develop a split.
A very common split is the push-pull-legs split.
So, the idea is that some of your muscles are designed to push things and some of your muscles are designed to pull things.
And if this is very basic to you and you've heard all this before, it's might, you just might not be the audience for this particular episode.
But I do have kind of a takeaway out of this.
So, the idea is if you talk about your upper body, you have your chest, your shoulders, and your triceps all are involved in pushing movements.
If you think about, like, pushing a big rock or something.
I don't know, that's my go-to example, but whatever.
Then you have things that are pulling muscles, which is mostly your biceps and your back.
So, that would be like picking up an object is a pulling movement.
And then you have your lower body, your legs, which, yes, there are pushing and pulling muscles, but when you work your legs in this particular split, they're worked together.
So, you have your kind of quads in the front of your legs and your hamstrings in the back.
Hamstrings are largely a pulling muscle and quads are largely a pushing muscle, but typically they're just kind of all worked in the same day.
So, you have then the push-pull legs split, right?
So, on day one, you would work your chest, your shoulders, and your triceps.
So, you might do bench presses, overheads, push overhead presses, flies, and some, you know, tricep push-down kind of things.
And then maybe on a pull day, you might do lat pull-downs or pull-ups or something.
You might do a row, some kind of, you know, row with a dumbbell or a barbell or a machine or whatever.
You might do some bicep exercises, you know, some curls, and then maybe feeling extra motivated, you might do some shrugs or something for your traps.
And then you have a leg day where you do some combination of squats and leg extensions and leg curls and maybe some Romanian deadlift kind of things.
Maybe you'd throw in some calves.
And that'd be kind of your three-day thing.
You'd do those three days in a row, maybe take a day off, then do three days in a row, take a day off.
If you're less advanced of a lifter, you might put more rest days in there.
Maybe when you're just getting started, you would just hit each thing once in a week.
So, you might do a push day, a rest day, a pull day, a rest day, a leg day, and then two rest days.
And that'd be your seven-day week, something like that.
But either way, the point is you're breaking into push, pull, and legs.
I really dislike this split.
Now, there are many, many, many splits out there.
But I think push-pull legs gets extra attention because it's really easy to grok.
It's really easy to be like, oh, yeah, I kind of get that.
Like, we're going to do a bunch of push stuff, we're going to pull a bunch of stuff, and then we're going to do some leg stuff, and then we're going to rest.
Like, it's kind of easy to put together.
The reason I don't like it is that I feel that a couple muscle groups get short shrift.
I like to have some extra arm volume, for instance.
And in a push-pull leg world, I find that by the time I get around to the arm components of things, my arms are tired, I'm tired, and I don't put enough emphasis on them.
Now, I have done push-pull leg splits where I move the biceps in particular to the front of the workout.
So I might do biceps followed by back as opposed to back followed by biceps.
But I find that even then, like, I'm trying to get through biceps as quick as possible so I can get to the bigger muscle group, which is the back.
And on the push days, I wouldn't ever really want to do triceps at the top of the workout because I really want to be fresh walking into, like, those big bench-pressing exercises.
You know, whether it's free weights or, I mean, whether it's dumbbells or barbells or whatever.
You need extra energy for that, I find.
So it's not really my favorite split.
I tend to like to do something a little less popular, or a little more frowned upon, I guess.
There's a lot of thought out there that arms don't belong on their own day, that it's kind of a waste.
And I disagree.
I find, for me, putting arms on its own day lets me really concentrate and focus in on that activity.
So the split that I have developed over time that I really, really like, and I don't always do it.
It's good to vary your split up and do different things throughout the year, I find.
But I often go back to the following split.
Day one is back and chest.
Day two is legs and shoulders.
And day three is arms.
And then you repeat.
The reason I like this split.
Number one, having a back-chest day is an excellent upper body workout.
You walk away from that feeling like you really worked a lot of muscle.
And I find that back and chest are in direct opposition with one another enough where I have plenty energy to do both.
You also, during that course, get a little bit of stimulation to your triceps, your shoulders, and your biceps.
A little.
Not a ton.
But something to keep them active.
Day two.
And it's in that order, by the way.
I like to do back followed by chest.
I find that then, by the time I get to chest, I'm really good and warmed up and ready to hit that hard.
Day two.
Doing legs and shoulders.
Starting with legs.
You know, put three exercises or so in.
You know, you do a squat.
Some kind of hamstring leg curl thing.
And then maybe an extension or a leg press.
Something like that.
Good pump in the legs.
Followed by, like, a couple shoulder things.
You know, you do maybe an overhead press and a lateral raise.
And then day three being arms, where I get to really drill in on a combination of triceps and biceps.
And I find that I get best results when I hit triceps first.
So, if I do, say, two or three exercises worth of triceps, followed by two or three exercises worth of biceps, that works really well for me.
Now, there's some negatives to this split, too.
I find that legs in this split get a little bit short shrift, especially if I'm trying to rush that day a little bit.
And sometimes shoulders don't get the most...
I find that the leg shoulder day is the weakest of the days.
Because by the time I get to shoulders, I'm usually pretty exhausted from whatever I've been doing in legs.
And so, it's really hard for me to go and do a super heavy shoulder press after I've been doing squats and leg presses and whatever else, which is all very taxing.
I also find that the leg part of things, I often will give it a little bit not enough attention or not enough time because I'm then trying to get to the shoulder part to get through that.
I have tried reversing them where I do shoulder first, followed by legs.
I found that was worse because by the time I got to legs, I was just exhausted.
Or I just didn't have enough left in me to, like, you know, really give it the full attention.
So, I think there's some weakness there, but I do find it adequate.
I find that the shoulder work and the leg work in this split, while not as optimal as days one or three, still gives me enough to stimulate some amount of growth.
So, anyway, all this is really just to say, at the end of the day, it's good to rotate splits anyway.
If you haven't tried a split like this and you are a weightlifter, a bodybuilder, whatever, give it a shot.
I really like it.
It's the one that I often come back to.
It's more my old standby or my standby routine, much more than a post-pull legs or kind of a bro split one group a day.
Like, I like this better.
So, if you haven't tried it, try it out.
Day one, back followed by chest.
Day two, legs followed by shoulders.
Day three, triceps followed by biceps.
Give it a shot.
Let me know how it goes.
Day three, triceps.
Day three, triceps.
You'll get a shot.
Day three, triceps.
Day three, triceps.
Day two, triceps.
Day one, back one, back five.
Day three, triceps would be back to chest with a small lid on top, until thatamous face.
Day four, take a shot.
Night three, triceps.