Skip the Body Part Splits in Favor of Total Body Workouts
In the 90’s there was a cultural explosion in the bodybuilding world crossing over into mainstream fitness. Weight-lifting programs became heavily influenced by bodybuilders and ghost writers for Muscle & Fitness, Flex Magazine, Ironman, and Muscular Development. They emphasized body part “splits,” commonly used by elite-level competitors, where you would train isolated body parts over the course of a week. It looked like this:
Monday – Chest
Tuesday – Back
Wednesday – Shoulders
Thursday – Legs
Friday – Arms & Abs
Saturday/Sunday – Off
These workouts were designed to ensure you could barely walk out of the gym or lift your arms after 90 minutes of training. Most of us were a bit naïve, not recognizing the only way a program like this could be survived over months and years, would be under the guise of heavy supplement use, both legal and illegal. Moreover, we didn’t have access to sufficient research on effective training methods and program organization to confidently state that one method was superior or inferior to another.
That’s no longer the case. We now have the research, are no longer naïve about the practices of bodybuilders, and it’s time to get people informed, and put an end to the era of bad practices.
Exercise science research informs us that the most important factor for the average person (not someone under the influence of significant amounts of supplements, illegal or legal) is not how you split up the amount of work done by each body part. Instead, it’s simply the total amount of work done by each body part over the course of the week. That’s right, spreading out the work done for a particular muscle group over a week has been shown to be equally or more effective than training a muscle intensively once every 7 days.
Simply put, you can look at “work” as the total number of sets completed. If you’re a professional, it refers to the total number of sets, number of repetitions completed, multiplied by the amount of weight used across each set.
In addition, the research tells us that if you want to optimize the results of your training on a particular body part, you need to perform somewhere between 12 and 20 sets of work, or exercises that involve that specific muscle group, weekly. Ideally you would perform 12-20 sets for each of the muscle groups identified above for a balanced physical appearance and function.
Again, it’s NOT actually important how you split it up for the majority of people who exercise. You can do 4 sets a day, 3 days per week (=12), 6 sets over 2 days (=12), or all 12 sets on 1 day (=12). We tend to advocate for the former two, because of the uncontrollables; for example, how much protein you consume, how much stress you’re under, how much quality sleep you’re getting nightly, how many total calories you’re eating, etc. Your workouts could be more effective if they were arranged like this:
Moreover, it’s important to understand that more work also means a greater likelihood of post-exercise fatigue and excessive soreness, which is something we’ve found to be both limiting to function, performance, and overall satisfaction with a workout. Some people crave the feeling of being so sore that they can’t walk down a flight of steps. Then you realize you’re not 25 years old anymore and life doesn’t stop because your workout debilitated you!
How do you decide whether its appropriate to do 12 or 20 sets over the course of the week? It depends on a variety of factors, include chronological age (how old you are), training age (how many years you’ve been training), hormones (which can be altered due to age, stress, sleep, nutrition, etc.), how much intensity you put into each set (whether you use special sets to get closer to muscular failure), or generally how well you recover between workouts.
Total amount of work over the course of the week is another important variable to consider, for the same reasons as mentioned above. Although broad, goal dependent, and specific to each individual, a general objective is 60-120 total sets per week. We aim to keep an equal number of sets for each muscle group over the course of the week, except in short-term situations where the individual’s goal is to focus on a particular area.
In such cases, it’s okay to increase the work on one area of your body for a short-period, as long as you simultaneously reduce the focus on other areas, so you don’t create an excessive amount of physical stress. You might add 3-6 sets per week on your glutes to firm up your appearance in a bathing suit for an upcoming trip. To keep your program in balance, you might just reduce the amount of sets for shoulders by 3-6 per week for that same period.
It might take a little experimentation to determine what will produce the best result for each unique individual. We do, however, now have a guideline that is based on science and not science fiction that will not only increase your likelihood of success, but also reduce the likelihood that you’ll experience unnecessary suffering, and possibly injury as a result of ill-informed practices.
Spread the word and spread out your exercises!
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