Picking the Perfect Training Split for Body Recomposition | Ep. 113

Real quick, before we jump into the episode, I have an announcement that I'm pretty pumped about. So one of the most frustrating things is when you've been lifting consistently, but you still don't feel like you look like you lift. And this is hardly ever from a lack of effort. It's usually where that effort is going. And that's exactly why we just launched the Recomp project where we're going to be selecting two people to work with us one-on-one for 12 weeks completely free. So they'll get a training program built around their goals with the right exercise selection and volume for them, plus blood work to tailor nutrition, supplementation, lifestyle, etc. to exactly what your body needs from the inside out so we can optimize not only your physique but your health and hormone markers too. And all this is bundled into a long-term plan with ongoing adjustments and one-on-one accountability to make a solid transformation over the next three months, which is red and time for summer. So if you're hearing this, we still have the applications open and you can apply in like two, three minutes in the description below and I'll personally review your application and reach out if I feel like you're a strong candidate. So with that said, let's jump into the episode. Welcome to the Beyond Fitness Podcast. This is your host, Kade Howell and I just want to say thank you for tuning in and I hope you enjoy the show. All right, today we are talking about the one of the most popular topics I feel like and honestly one of the most overrated, so kind of ironic of making a whole whole podcast episode about it. This is all about picking the best training split for body recomposition or for muscle growth. I do think it is important because you can do things wrong in the sense where you're losing out on some gains you could say, but I do think people over-hype it and think that it's the most important thing in the world and it's the secret to all the gains. So we're going to break down really a bunch of examples of how you could set up your training split. What you really need to consider when it comes to choosing a training split, things you kind of got to check off the list to make sure this is going to work for me. And yeah, it should be a good episode. It is a little bit longer than anticipated. I thought I was going to keep it to 20 to 30 minutes or so, but you know, your boy rants a little bit. So you'll have to enjoy the ranting. I just, I like to nerd out a little bit. So I hope you enjoy this one. One little kind of housekeeping thing, I guess you could say, I think that's what people call it when they say they got things to talk about. I had an idea of starting a new podcast series where it's essentially, if you know Dave Ramsey, he brings people on his podcast, radio show, whatever. And he kind of like, coaches him, gives him advice on finances. I want to do a similar thing on the podcast for people in fitness. So I want to bring somebody on, you know, I'm not going to commit to this as a long term thing. I want to test it out, see how it goes, but I have a good feeling about it. I think it would be a ton of fun. And I think it would help all of the listeners a lot to see these kind of real life examples of like, okay, this person was here. There's a lot of people that will probably resonate with that. And this is kind of the direction that Cade recommended. And you know, obviously I'll give reasoning behind it and I just pull things out of my butt. So it will, you know, I'm going to say it'll probably be up to an hour for that episode because I really want to provide a ton of value on it and like actually give you the details of like, hey, this is what I think would be the best training split because we were talking about that on this episode. No, that's probably not the most important thing. But you know, that, hey, here's what I think a good, you know, calorie intake would be to start out at least and how to know when to adjust your calorie intake. Here's probably a good kind of macro breakdown. If you're tracking macros, if you're not tracking macros, here's some methods that you can use to, you know, at least make sure you're eating the appropriate amount of calories and protein. Really just walk you through step by step what I think would be the best approach and as much detail as much as we can cram into about an hour as possible. So if that's something that you are interested in, you can hit the little, I'll have like a little application in the description. Just answer a few questions on there so we can see if it's something that would be a good fit to have you on the podcast. And there's no pressure. Don't, you know, I know it can be nerve wracking coming on a podcast. But if it doesn't work out and it's like you don't feel comfortable with the episode being uploaded, just let me know, you know, there's no obligation. I'm not going to like take it and you know, spam it on the entire, you know, world of the internet. Just, you know, it's a little trial run. So if that's something you're interested in, hit the little link in the description, fill out the application. You should only take a minute or two. Or if you want to shoot me an email, cater beyond fitness dot coach or message me on Instagram, that's linked in the description as well. If you have any more questions about it, feel free to do that. And I would love for you listener to be a part of that. But without further ado, let's jump into the episode talking about training splits. All right. So when it comes to picking a training split, really the foundation of all of this is how many days a week you can train. And how many days a week you can realistically train because if I had a penny for how many times people said that could train five or six days a week and it doesn't quite work out as planned. I have quite a few pennies at this point. So be conservative. When in doubt, if you think that you can do five days a week and you really believe that, I would recommend starting it for and you can always add more. The thing you don't want to do is commit to five, six days a week going from nothing to a hundred percent and over commit and then end up getting discouraged because it's like, I didn't follow through with my commitment. So I'm not cut out to do this. So always start small. You can always add more. And then that's more on the opposite side where it's an encouraging thing of, oh, I only committed to doing three workouts a week, but all of a sudden I'm up to four or five and it's like, I'm an overachiever. Look at me. So start small. You can always add more to it. I promise I've seen it time and time again. The best thing to do is to be very conservative with your commitment and you can always add more to it. I want to cover really, you know, the most common training splits, some of my go-to's as far as programming for clients. And we're going to keep this to training splits from two days a week all the way up to six days a week. I will say I very rarely program just two days a week of lifting, not to say that there isn't value in that. You could train one day a week if you're a beginner, especially, and see great results from that. And you could train six days a week, but again, I hesitate doing that with a lot of people because for one, 95, 99% of people, it just isn't necessary. And I've seen it again where people over commit and then it becomes a discouraging thing. So we're going to cover kind of the in between of two to six days. So we'll just start with two days a week and I'll give you an overview of when this would be a good option, some examples, some things to consider. So really when it comes down to it two days a week, even somebody that is, you know, more in that intermediate stage, if you structure things the right way with those two workouts per week. And you really train hard, you focus on, you know, pushing relatively close to failure. Your split is set up correctly. You're doing enough volume overall, which is actually a lot less than a lot of people think. You can see great results from that even as an intermediate. Once you get into the more advanced phase, that's where you can absolutely maintain progress, training two days a week. You're just kind of on coast mode, making progress. You know, again, it can happen. It's just it's going to be challenging to get in enough overall volume for the week to really create the adaptations that you're going for. So two days a week is generally going to be best for people that are either very busy. They're not really, you know, like building muscle is not their number one goal. They just want to at least retain the muscle they have, get the health benefits from training. Or their beginners, they're just kind of easing into things. I think two days a week is a great place to start for those people, especially if they haven't trained much. And it's kind of overwhelming thinking about getting to the gym and going even three days a week is that's a big shift from zero to all of a sudden three days a week of making this commitment. It's usually best for very busy people and or beginners and the general, if I had to pick one. training split for this, it depends on a lot of things, but the one that I would most commonly program would be some type of full body split. So this could be just a very equal full body, so you're not really biasing one muscle group or movement pattern in one session or the other, it could be very split as far as volume. That would be something that you would really only want to do if you do have adequate rest days in between, I would say ideally two rest days in between, so it's like a Monday and then a Thursday or something like that. You could get away with Monday, Wednesday, but again, for some people you're going to have to be pushing these workouts with more volume overall, and it's just a lot more systemically fatiguing to be pushing higher volumes in a full body workout. That's usually take longer than a day of rest to recover from. So that would be my kind of go-to, would be a full body split. Now again, this really depends because some people, they're going to have to train back to back days. It's not going to be a Monday and Thursday, it's not going to work out. Maybe they have to, their work week is crazy, they are apparent, they don't have time to squeeze it in Monday through Friday, and they have to train Saturday and Sunday. That's when something like an upper body day, followed by a lower body day, would be great because you can train back to back without running into overlapping soreness recovery issues. You just got to be cautious with that if you do train back to back or even with only one rest day in between. That's where I would recommend you could still push a full body split, but you would want to really bias one muscle group or movement pattern in each of those sessions. For example, if you're doing a Friday and a Sunday workout, Saturday is your rest day in between, you could do full body both of those days, but say your Friday session is more of a push focused session. You're going to be doing upper body push and lower body push. You're focusing a little bit more on your chest, your triceps, quads, things like that. The next one, maybe you do have some hamstring exercises, a couple sets of back or arms in there, but then your next session on Sunday would be essentially the opposite where you're focusing a lot more on the pulling muscles. Basically your back, rear delts, hamstrings, glutes, that would be an example of two full body sessions that you could even get away with training those back to back if you didn't include the hamstring or back movements on your push day and vice versa. You could get away with that and not run into recovery issues. Again, it's just the systemic fatigue of if you're doing a full body session where you're training your chest, your shoulders, your triceps, your quads, that is just a lot of overall fatigue where you might not be running into specific muscular fatigue and overlapping soreness in that sense, but the systemic piece probably will carry over and affect that following session. It's the two days a week, again, not one of the more common ones that I would program. Three days a week is what we're jumping into. This is one that's a pretty common one. One will program especially for people that are either busy, beginner, you can get great results at three days a week. I think people really just they overestimate how much they need to do. You can get as long as you you've struck your thing. If you're going in and just doing three days a week, you're just half-ass and things for a lack of a better term, you're probably not going to see great results at three days a week. You don't want to do this, but you can offset the poor training by doing more volume. That's not again not something you want to do, but if you're combining the three days a week and lower volume and not really good execution or effort, probably not going to see great results. If you're training three days a week, especially if you're more intermediate to advanced, you definitely want to be pushing hard and getting good quality work out of those sessions. Especially if you're more advanced, there will probably be longer sessions just so you can squeeze in enough volume overall for the week. Now my go-to split for this would be again a full body split, but again it depends on a lot of things which we'll dig into. Generally, when I'm programming a three day a week full body splits, it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I like to bias one muscle group or movement pattern on each of those sessions. What works very well for that is you've heard of the push pull leg split. That's the new big thing and I think it's a great split. I think it's overhyped. I think your split in general for a lot of people, they think it's the magic key to getting jacked because you've got to have the perfect training split. At the end of the day, there is just a few foundational things that you got to kind of check off, like getting in enough volume, pushing close enough to failure. That effort there, your execution, recovery, as long as you're doing those things, the exact split you're doing doesn't really matter. With that said, I do think something like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, full body, but on your Monday session, you're biasing a little bit more upper body push. It would be more chest, tricep, shoulder focused on your Wednesday session. It's a little bit more pull focused. It's a little bit more focused towards your back, biceps, rear delts. You save the worst for last and you do legs on Friday. You can split that up if you want to do a push legs pull. It doesn't really matter. Another one that I'll often do with people that especially want to buy a upper body, which is a lot of us, bros out there. You're blessed with good leg genetics where you don't need to push kind of volume with legs. You can get away with doing like an upper lower upper lower upper. Again, I would still bias like that first upper session more towards pushing movements. The lower body would be pretty balanced because that's your only lower body training session for the week. Then that third one would be a little bit more pull focused. There's a million different ways you can do this. You could also do upper lower and then full body session. If you want again, a little bit more balance. If you're really crazy and you want to really push hard on the legs, you could do a lower body Monday, upper body, Wednesday, and then another lower body on Friday. That's where I would recommend doing the same thing that you would do with more of a push and a pull focus session, but for your lower body. Your Monday session would be a little bit more of a quad focused lower body session. Upper body would be pretty balanced between pushing, pulling. Your Friday session would be a little bit more glute, hamstring focused, or vice versa. Generally, if you're prioritizing glutes and hammies, if you're ladies out there, I know you guys like training the glutes and ham. I don't know how you do it. I cannot be doing that. For one, my hamstrings, I do one set of RDLs and they're just toasted. Then my lower back just feels like it's going to blow out. Props to you, ladies out there. That's where you could do if you're really prioritizing glutes and hammies. Put that earlier in the week after you've had Saturday and Sunday off. Really the main muscle group or muscle that you're prioritizing, you want to put it in the session that you're going to be most fresh for. In that case, after you've had the weekend off, you come back, hit it when you're most fresh. That's how I would structure those. I think I covered most of the examples. Again, there's a million different ways you could do things. If you're a real bro that doesn't care about legs, you could just do a push. Push, pull, and then upper body session. This is where it just comes down to your goals and what's going to work schedule wise. If you're doing back-to-back sessions, so let's say you have to do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You don't have any rest days in between. That's when you can do just a push, pull, legs. You're not going to run into recovery issues there. I think that's a great split too, especially if you had to consider enjoyment too. If you're somebody that you just hate doing full body sessions, which I can relate to that, it just feels like I'm doing a lot of things, but I'm not getting as much done. at the end of the day I know I'm still it still productive training. It just mentally, it's harder for me to get into it and do a set of dumbbell bench press and then do a set of bent over rows or pull-ups and then do a set of squats and then do a set of RDLs. It's like, it's a lot of generally more compound movements if you're doing a lot of full body stuff, especially with lower frequency like this. So if you like that style and you like having a lot of variety within each training session, lean more towards the full body. If you like getting the juicy pumps really prioritizing one muscle group, then push something that's a little bit more biased towards one muscle group in each session. You do need to be careful with that. We'll get to kind of the typical bros split here when we talk about five days a week. You can just run into issues with junk volume, which we'll dig into here in a second. So the next one, this is probably, if I were to pick one training split or one amount of days for people to train, this would probably be it. This is what I personally do. It's what I've been doing. I've trained pretty much every, tried every different split, every amount of days, maybe not two days, back in the day when I was like trying to do more, but I would just fall back to two. Then I guess if you want to count that inconsistency, then I guess I've done that. But this is a good, just sweet spot for a lot of people. You can make great progress as a beginner. It's not super time consuming. You can make great progress as an intermediate, as a more advanced lifter. This is four days a week. This is my favorite. The most balanced option of this would be doing something like upper body Monday, lower body, Tuesday, rest Wednesday, another upper body day, Thursday, and then another lower body day, Friday. This again, I generally like to bias a little bit more in one direction or the other. So the upper body for the first session for the week might be a little more push focused. The first lower body session after that one might be a little bit more quad focused. The next upper body on Thursday, a little bit more pull focused. Then the following the last lower body could be a little bit more glue and hamstring focus. This again, I mentioned it depends on your goals. You could make this something where maybe you really don't care a ton about your chest and back and you really want to focus on your arms and shoulders. You could on these upper body sessions instead of making it more of a push focused or a pull focused. You could do more of an upper body shoulders focus day and then the next one could be more of an upper body arm focus day. So there's a million ways you can go about this. This is why the push pull legs is not the best split. It depends on so many things, which is like if I had one answer for any question in fitness, I would just throw out it depends because it's probably the right answer. Another option you could do full body with this. This is when you kind of get into the territory where you got to be a little bit more careful because if you're just doing balanced full body sessions four days a week, you definitely could run into overlapping soreness recovery recovery issues. So you got to be kind of cautious with that. If you do the full body sessions, you probably want to really bias one muscle group more than the other and just hit the other muscle groups with like one or two sets. So they're still fresh going into the the next session. So the a few other options for for four days a week. I'm kind of just spitting these off the top of my head because there's I could probably throw out any any answer here and it could be a valid option. But again, if you're really wanting to push more upper body, you could do an upper body day followed by a lower body day and then a push pull kind of like the you know, where you could do it the other way around where it's a push pull lower and then upper and you're pushing you know, you're training your upper body each muscle group and your upper body twice a week, your lower body once a week. If you're crazy and you can set it up this way and you want to do really focused on upper body balance, you can do upper lower upper and then have a rest day before your next upper body session. And that could be maybe more of a a shoulder and arm focused day. So a lot of ways you can set that up. But just make sure that you have enough recovery between those sessions that you can you can progress because like soreness is a good general indicator. If you're super sore going into a workout, it's probably because you did something in the previous session that was just very novel. It was a new thing. So whether that was starting a new training program or just doing a bunch of random exercises, we're doing a lot more volume than you're used to, pushing a lot closer to failure than you're used to, you're probably going to get pretty sore from that. It doesn't necessarily mean that you will be running into recovery issues a few weeks or a month down the road because there's something called the repeated bout effect, which is essentially your body kind of gets used to your training over time and it's able to recover easier. This is why when you first start lifting your first leg day, if you remember, you probably couldn't sit down on the toilet very easy because you're struggling to get down and then standing up is just as bad. So and nowadays, if you've been training for a while, you probably don't do that. I know for me, I don't say don't get that sore. So another reason, we could have another episode on this, but another reason why you shouldn't just look at soreness is like, oh, this was a good workout. If anything, it can be a bad thing if you're constantly sore because it's showing that you're probably just doing a lot of random things. And if you're doing that, it's hard to really track your progressions and see if you really are progressively overloading over time. And then it doesn't give your body the chance to really adapt to these movements, get the technique down and really get the most out of them. You're making a lot of what are called neurological adaptations, which is basically your brain getting more efficient, you know, basically firing the target muscle and you build strength that way, but that's not, I don't want to say not true strength, but it's more of like a mind to muscle connection, not really the right term, but more of a mind to muscle, you know, efficiency, strength improvement, rather than the muscle itself actually getting stronger. So yeah, looks like this episode's going to be maybe a little bit longer than anticipated because I'm going on tangents. Who would have thought? So that's four days a week. Five days a week. This is one that I will program occasionally. I used to do five days. I really enjoy it. I think you can for this is probably more for somebody that is on the advanced side of things or some people just really thrive with having consistent weeks where say Monday through Friday, they enjoy having the structure of going to the gym every morning before work. If you're crazy and you wake up early and do that kind of thing or after work or at lunch or whatever it is, they just they thrive on that Monday through Friday type thing. Then it's great for that. A beginner can do that, but just going to have to be a little more cautious with how much volume you're doing overall that kind of thing, unless technique and intensity isn't quite there. Then sometimes beginners can get away with more volume because they're not really getting as much out of each individual set. So as far as five days a week, my probably go to split for this for a lot of people, which is just a pretty balanced split. I think of a very fun split personally is a push, pull, lower body session, and then an upper and lower. You can adjust that again. You could do a pull, push, lower, upper, lower. You could do an upper, lower, push, pull, lower. You just want to make sure you got those rest days in between. I think that's a great balance split. You get kind of the best of both worlds where when you're just doing a push focus session and you're really just hitting chest shoulders, triceps, like you can get you can feel like it was a good productive workout. You're probably going to get a little bit more sore because you're just pushing more volume in those specific muscles compared to upper body. You got to train your chest, your triceps, your shoulders, your back, your biceps. There's a lot of muscle groups in your upper body. If you're counting core in there, you got to do that lower body. They're not quite as much going on there. You got your hamstrings, quads, glutes, calves if you count those, or you can just skip those like most people, including myself occasionally, but I'm actually blessed with a decent calf genetic so I can kind of get away with it. At least that's my justification. If you're wanting to buy us a little bit more upper body, you can do an upper low split for five days a week and it would just be upper body, say Monday, lower body Tuesday, upper body Wednesday, lower body Thursday, and then another upper body Friday. You can have, you know, rest days in between if you'd like. And that would be something that you would probably want to do more of a bias in one direction or the other, just because if you're really blast in your entire upper body for three of those days and you're only getting a rest day maybe two between those, you're probably not allowing your body enough time to really recover from that volume to train your best and be able to progressively overload most efficiently. So again, doing a little bit more of a push focused upper body session on Monday, maybe a more pull focused upper body session on Wednesday and then on Friday, maybe it's more of like a shoulders and arms session focused session there, but you're still hitting your chest back, you know, that kind of thing. So that can also be a very fun training split. Again, if you're crazy, you can do it the other way around and do lower, upper, lower, upper, lower. And that one, a unique split would be something like your first session would be lower, but you hit all, you know, all lower body muscles, but you focus more on your quads. Then your second lower body session, you hit all lower body muscles, but you really focus more on your glutes. And then your third lower body session, all lower body, but more focused on hamstrings, because you kind of have those three main muscles in your legs that are going to be mostly different movement patterns. Some will kind of overlap, but that is another way of doing things, something that has been probably one of the more popular ones would be like a pro split where you're basically training each muscle group, like you're just focusing on one muscle group per session. And this can be fun. If you're just like chase and pumps, you want to get a lot of volume in each session for one muscle group, I, it's hard to say that, you know, you're not going to get as great of results doing this, because you can look at like the, you know, professional bodybuilders out there, and a lot of them follow pro splits, but I would argue the reason they follow pro splits is because of the, the fact that they have so much muscle and so much strength, each muscle just requires a longer time to recover. And so for them to do something like full body training, like they're they're going to be very fatigue. They're probably going to have a lot of overlapping soreness. And so I think, you know, if you are more advanced, this is where a pro split might make more sense, because you're giving your body more time to recover between those sessions, or each muscle group more time to recover. The one thing that, you know, you, you kind of want to be careful on when you're doing that is just making sure that on your, so if you're doing chest, back legs, shoulders, arms, for example, you just want to set it up the right way. So you don't want to do like chest shoulders, because if you train your chest, you're going to be getting some shoulders in there. And then, you know, when you train your shoulders the following day, it's going to be kind of overlapping a little bit. Same thing with chest back, you probably don't want to do like chest back arms back to back, because when you're training your chest with a bench press, you're hitting some triceps. When you're training your back with a row or pull down or pull up, you're hitting your biceps. Again, probably not the biggest deal, but just something to, uh, something to to keep in mind on that front. And this is where what I was mentioning earlier with junk volume, the biggest downside of doing a split like this is just think about, you know, if you're doing just say an hour workout, um, let's say within that hour, you do 10 sets total. Um, if you're doing all 10 of those sets for your chest, the first like three, four, maybe five sets are going to be pretty productive. You're going to be able to push hard, get a lot out of that. The last five session or last five sets, your, your chest is probably going to be pretty toasted and you're just not going to be able to push as hard. Your strength isn't going to be as high. You're going to be more fatigued locally in your chest compared to if you just split that out and you did your first five sets of chest on Monday and then your second five sets of chest on Thursday, you're going to get more quality work and probably more overall volume doing it that way because you split it up in your more fresh for for each of those sessions for that specific muscle group. So a few things to consider there. And you could, you know, on the other side of things, you could do the full body five times a week. Again, just bias one muscle group in each of those sessions. This is something that I think it's worth experimenting with a lot of people. Again, the enjoyment piece, you got to consider that, but if you do the full body five times a week, you know, it's hard because there's research that shows like high frequency training is better. There's research showing that, you know, as long as the total volume throughout the week is equivalent, it doesn't really matter how you split it up. So, I mean, you can find research proving any, you know, specific side of things. That's why like you, I think it's good to be evidence based, but also look at kind of the anecdotal evidence and your own personal experience because, yeah, someone you maybe respond a lot better to higher frequency training. You get more overall quality work, but somebody else might really grow better from a lower frequency training because they're either they can really push each muscle hard and they give you, you know, their body just requires a little bit more time for their muscle to kind of recover and adapt above baseline to where you've actually progressed from that and you're not just kind of hitting it. Once it's kind of recovered and then you're just kind of staying the same over time. So, that covers the five days last, but maybe least would be six days a week. And again, I have nothing against six days a week. I used to train six days a week. I was like when I, I first like really got into fitness and was very serious about it. I think like a lot of people, I thought more was better. So I trained six days a week and I saw progress from it for sure, but looking back, I definitely did not need the six days a week. I think I could have gotten better progress doing four days a week and really focusing on quality over quantity. That's a huge thing in this where I think a lot of us start out thinking quantity over quality and then over time as we get more experience, we kind of flip that and it's like, I definitely quantity over quality. And this is really a rarely program six days a week unless again, it's somebody that they just, they enjoy training. They need that structure of going and doing something every day. And I think there's something to that going out having some type of exercise being active every day or six days a week. There's something to that routine. It's not a bad thing. It just overboard for a lot of people and a lot of people would be better off taking that extra say hour and a half or something for the sixth day and putting that towards meal prepping or resting a little bit more or getting an extra hour of sleep that night. There's trade-offs with this. I'd really only recommend this for somebody that is more advanced. They do need more volume overall. But again, that can be offset by how hard they're actually training. There's a lot of ways you can go about that one. If I were to pick one split for six days a week, it would probably be probably be a push pull legs times two. So push pull legs, push pull legs. Just because you get kind of the the best of both worlds, you're hitting each muscle group twice a week. But you're allowing your each muscle to recover adequately between each of those sessions. A little higher frequency approach would be like an upper lower three times a week. And you another thing that I think is a good option for those people that they just need to do something each day or at least six days would be doing one of those five day a week splits or even a four day a week split and having the extra one or two days as like either cardio days or you know you go and do some mobility work or you go you know sit in the sauna go stretch like do do something go on a nice long walk you know. It doesn't have to be lifting every time for it to be productive towards muscle growth recovery is very important. Having the mobility to be able to get good you know range of motion not running to issues with little injuries and stuff all that helps with muscle growth too. It's not just about training hard and going home bro you gotta you gotta be able to recover and you know this is a long game. Muscle growth doesn't happen quickly. You need to be able to be in the game long enough to accumulate muscle, which is not going to happen in the matter of a couple months. And so you can train in an unsustainable way of pushing super hard, high volume, and you can see great growth growth from that. But six months down the road, your shoulders are going to be achy, your knees are going to be broken off your body. You're not going to be able to train hardly at all. And then it's like you got to take a month or a couple months. Or whatever it is, the actually fully recover to get back to it where you probably would have been better off doing four days a week and having a little bit more mobility. And another thing you could do, five days a week of one of the normal splits that we talked about. And then that sixth day is for kind of lagging muscle groups like the calves, the forearms, abs, just kind of like accessory work. So that kind of covers the main splits that I would program most often. And there's things way outside of this. I think, for example, let me pull up one of my recent programs that I program for a client or walk you through it. Because I think it's kind of a unique one and a great one if I do say so myself. This is one of my favorite things is programming. So this is a four day a week split. I haven't set up for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. It can be moved around. This one you don't, you could train back to back to back to back. But really, you know, I think if you have that rest day in between, that would be optimal, you could say. So it's a push, pull, push, pull. So we are training full body to some extent. So for each of the push sessions, it's full body pushing movements. And each of the pull sessions is full body pulling movement. So I'll just touch on like the first two workouts for the week. I won't walk you through the entire thing because, you know, we are, we're running a little bit long and you guys are probably getting sick of talking about, you know, different muscle groups. And hopefully shout out to my people out there that are, that are on for this type of type of nerd now getting into the weeds. So this first one is more of like a push. It's a push chest focused session, but we're hitting quads in there too. So this is like the first week of the mesocycle. So it's not going to be a ton of volume. I'm not going to be pushing super close to failure. So I got two sets of six to 10 reps on flat dumbbell bench press. That's the first movement for the day. The next one would be a Smith machine incline bench press again, six to 10 reps. I think that's a great sweet spot for a lot of compound movements. We're at two RAR, two to three RAR on these. So we're leaving a few reps in the tank here. And then we got dips for the third one. This is a little higher rep range, eight to 12 to RAR. So you can see we're pushing chest hard in the beginning of the session because that's the main focus for this session. And we got some delts in here. So we have a behind the back cable lateral raise doing some my reps on this one. So if you're a client, you probably know about my reps and you probably either love them or absolutely hate them. I think they're great for for saving time. And then we got the after that, a cable tricep extension mechanical drops it. So again, if you're a client, you might have have experience with that where really there's nothing magical about my reps or mechanical drops sets. It's just a good way to save time in training. And then we got a leg extension. That's really our only quad movement for this. You know, probably could get away with doing some type of squat pattern, but this one I was really pushing more towards the chest and tricep shoulders. And then got a cable crunch to finish it off. So that was the first one. The next day would be a pole focus and this one more of a lat focused. So it's pulled but more of a lat focused hamstrings in there. Starting out with a cable Y raise. So one thing I do for a lot of people is I like to buy a side delt movements because this is going to be hitting some like lower traps and stuff in here as well. But I think just side delts make a huge difference in people's physiques. And I think a lot of people just do side delt movements of dumbbell lateral raises and they're missing out a lot on the variety with that. We're doing cable variations. You can get different resistance profiles. You can have it harder in the length and position, which is generally, you know, a good idea to at least have some of that in there. And then our first kind of like, this is like an activation exercise essentially. It just one set of a cable lap pullover just to kind of get the lat stretched out, get some blood moving in them. And then the neutral grip pull up the big kind of, you know, the lat movement for the day eight to 12 reps, two sets again there, upper back machine row. So we're hitting a little bit up a little bit of upper back on that one. And then we're going into a Smith machine, RDL. So this is really our big hamstring movement for the day, two sets here. This one's three RAR just gets Smith machine RDL, especially if you haven't done them or any type of audio, they will toast you up if you're anything like me. So being a little bit conservative on those. And then we have a seated iliac lat pull around. So this is going to be similar to the pull up, but a little bit more isolated. Doing single arm and getting a little bit more of a stretch on your lats. And then last, but not least, is a seated facing away cable curl. So you can see for each of these, we're having mostly, you know, the target muscle or the focus muscle, which is lats in this case. And then we have one upper back movement and one hamstring and glute movement with the RDL. Same thing with that first push session. We really just have the leg extensions. The other two sessions for the week are more focused on the lower body side of things. So it's a good way to make sure that you're getting in a good amount of frequency, but you're able to recover like my quads, you know, if I was doing this split would be pretty fresh going into that second session because I only did two sets of leg extensions. So if you push those two sets of leg extensions hard on that first session, it's going to be productive. You're definitely going to stimulate some growth from that. So that should be it. Yeah, definitely a little over 20 minutes or whatever I said, but final kind of things to touch on is just don't don't chase the perfect split. There is no perfect split out there. If somebody on Instagram or TikTok or whatever saying like this is the best split, don't believe them because there's no best split, you know, there are ones that don't make sense in situations. There's ones that make great sense. So it all depends on the person pick first and foremost, whatever fits your schedule because if you you could have the best split in the world that's perfect for you, but if it doesn't fit your schedule, you're not going to stick to it long term and you're not going to see great results from that. And then yeah, I think just as far as like frequency, just be careful there. You want, you know, generally I think a good rule of thumb is training each muscle group about twice a week if you want a balanced approach, but you got to be cautious with how you set that up if it's back to back to back. You know, you got to be careful there. You know, buy a certain muscle groups over others as needed to allow certain muscle groups to recover before the following session and when in doubt, you know, if you're not recovering, go with a little lower frequency, like experiment a little bit, try, try a full, you know, don't experiment one week and then do something different the next week. Give it a good at least like two months, I would say of trying one approach, one split, whether it's a high frequency split and then you kind of switch it up and do, you know, a bro split to have like a vastly different approach. See what you prefer, see what, you know, changes you see, take progress photos, you track your track the data, track your body weight, measurements, things like that because that will pay off. If you do that, then you get an idea of like, okay, at least for right now, this is what's going to work best for me. I'm going to continue pushing this approach right now and then eventually something's probably going to change whether you get married or you have kids or something, you know, I have to pull back a little bit. So that will be it for this episode. Now I think in one of the future episodes, I would like to dig into more examples on this. We kind of touch briefly on an example, but I think an episode, I might get coach Dawson on the programming wizard to discuss this and we'll kind of break apart different, you know, maybe example programs that we've set up, you know, for ourselves or for clients and kind of walk through like why we set them up this way, just so you can see real life application. And again, if you want to be, if you want to get help like setting up your own training split and kind of be coached on the podcast, apply for that in the description. And I'm really excited to try out this little new kind of series, the old. kind of like a Dave Ramsey type thing where I'm gonna audit people's fitness rather than finances because I'm not that's not my area of expertise. I just spent way too much money on home gym equipment but it's a tax right off baby so we'll we'll justify it that way. So if you want to, you know, I promise you're you're gonna get all of this information out of it but more tailored to you and then it's a win-win because you get that information. Everyone else that's listening to the podcast is going to be able to take that information and kind of extrapolate what makes sense for them. Use it in their journey and it's just a cool way I think to, you know, show more real life examples. So and just to let you know like if you get on there and of course, you know, it can be nerve-racking doing a podcast. Just know like if we record the podcast and you're not comfortable with it, we, you know, we won't upload it. I'll need charge you like a thousand dollars for the for the time that you made me spend. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Just know that it doesn't have to be, you know, something we upload if you don't feel comfortable with it but I would love to have some people on do some live coaching sessions and you're gonna get a lot out of it. I promise you that. So if you want to check that out, you can apply in the description. It'll ask a few questions about kind of your goals and we're just kind of picking people though. It makes sense to to bring them on the podcast and feel like it would resonate with the listeners. Otherwise, if you want more information on that, you can shoot me a DM on Instagram. Just say something like podcast, coaching session, you know, and I'll get back to your email me. That might be easier to reach me, [email protected]. You can email me there and appreciate you guys listening and we'll be back for the next episode. Thank you for listening. I hope that episode was helpful and if you want some freebies, you can go down to the description. I have my full body recomposition guide that goes over everything you need to know about fat loss and muscle growth. You can also book a free strategy session with me where my entire goal is to help you figure out the best strategy to reach your goals. You can also find that in the description. My only request for you is if you don't mind taking a couple seconds out of your day to rate or review the podcast. That would be amazing. On Apple podcast, scroll to the bottom, to the rating and review section, Spotify. It's up at the top. That helps me a ton. I don't run any ads or anything so it just helps the podcast reach more people. And again, thank you for tuning in.