How to organize your strength training split

It is no news to anyone that, whatever your goals, strength training is practically unavoidable in the preparation for almost any sport. Yet putting together a strength training split for the weekly plan is often not that simple, and it can turn out to be rather confusing.

In practice, beginners usually start with whole-body (fullbody) splits. This kind of approach suits beginners well, because it teaches the whole body to adapt to training and to get used to working with weights, while a fair amount of work still gets done in the session through such splits. But you certainly can’t train with fullbody programs indefinitely. Ignore that, and you will soon face a plateau, which is the normal consequence of doing one thing for a very long time.

Fullbody splits work in themselves, but not all the time and not always, and a lot depends on the circumstances. This type of split also has several drawbacks. One downside of fullbody programs is that if you train the whole body in one session, you certainly won’t have equal energy and focus for every muscle group. With split routines this problem doesn’t exist. With programs where the training of the body is divided into parts across separate days, we can do more exercises and more sets for one body part and use heavier weights as well. Split programs also allow you to train more often, since on different days we train different muscles/body parts.

How do you set up a strength training split for the week?

In fact, there are quite a lot of ways to set up a training split. There are many options, and there are no right or wrong ones. That knowledge in itself is of course not very practical or informative, so to explain things I’ll lay out a few concrete principles. Note that the examples given here are not the only ones either; they are just a handful of the possible options.

• Divide your body into lower body and upper body. With this approach you automatically build flexibility into your program and can train 2, 3 or 4 times a week, depending on what you want.
• Base the organization of your training days on pushing/pulling exercises (push/pull). Pushing exercises mean training muscles such as the quadriceps, calves, chest muscles, shoulder muscles and triceps. On such a training day you can include exercises like squats, calf raises, standing and lying presses, presses on parallel bars, etc. Pulling exercises mean training the back, hamstrings, biceps, abs and some parts of the shoulders. On a pulling training day you do exercises like deadlifts, lat pulldowns, pull-ups, leg curls, horizontal and vertical rows, biceps curls, leg raises and back extensions.
• Divide your body into, for example, three days, splitting the program so that one day you do pulling exercises for the upper body, the next day pushing exercises for the upper body, and on the third day you train the lower body (both lower-body pulls and presses; squats, leg presses, leg extensions, leg curls, calf raises). A typical split would look like this:

Day I – pulls (back, biceps, abs)
Day II – presses (chest, shoulders, triceps)
Day III – lower body (legs, abs)

Translator’s note: here I took the liberty of changing the split recommended in the article slightly.

• If you want to approach training by working one body part (muscle) per day, the split might look like this:

Day I – chest muscles
Day II – back muscles
Day III – shoulders
Day IV – arms
Day V – legs
Day VI – rest
Day VII – rest

The general rule to keep in mind is that when you reduce the number of body parts trained per session, the number of exercises and sets per trained body part should go up. If you train one body part/muscle per day, plan on roughly 3 – 4 exercises per body part and 3 – 4 working sets per exercise.

Of course, don’t forget to factor aerobic training in when putting together your strength training program. If possible, keep aerobic and strength training on separate days, or, if you do them on the same day, do them at different times of the day. Of course, if that’s not possible, doing aerobic work right after a strength workout isn’t the end of the world either. Experiment with different splits and options!!!

Author: Janar Rückenberg (translation)

Source:Turg.Fitness.ee

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