Does the way you split up your training week have an impact on the outcome of your plan and your ability to achieve your goals? You bet it does. There are a few different ways to split up your training week and today I’m going to chat through the two most popular ways people split their training and why one may be more beneficial than the other, depending on your own goals of course.
The two main splits seen in general training are the ‘Bro Split’ and ‘Total Body’. Both have their place in training, which one you choose should be dictated by your goal.
When it comes to strength training, or conditioning for that matter, it all boils down to one key element, stress. I’m not talking about the term stress in the sense you may know it though. Stress gets a bad rap and every week I see another article about workers being too stressed or people saying the kids have them stressed out or the job is stressful. Stress is key to human survival; without stress we don’t adapt. Learning how to apply the right amount stress is crucial to the art of strength and conditioning. Too little and you won’t adapt. Too much and you’ll get injured.
That is why the training split you choose can be crucial to your results. Look at the total volume of stress being applied to a movement on a weekly basis. Stress will be applied through sets, reps and total volume load. After you apply stress to a muscle it goes through something called the General Adaptation Syndrome first proposed by Dr. Selye. This is one of the first things you learn about when studying the field. Dr. Selye had absolutely nothing to do with sports science, he was an endocrinologist doing experiments on rats but later realized that humans have the same chemical and physiological response to stressors. Anyway, GAS is essential to growth, it first starts directly after training when the body goes into an alarm stage, after that the body goes into supercompensation, it basically recovers past it’s pervious baseline so if that stress comes again it’s going to be ready and able to deal with the alarm stage better. However, timing means a lot here. Re-stress too soon and supercompensation doesn’t happen, re-stress too late and the body has returned to pre-stress baseline. Keep this in mind now while we go on to discuss our two most popular splits.
The Bro Split
The bro split basically refers to splitting your week up into training different body parts over the course of 4-5 sessions a week. One day you might do legs, then arms, then chest, then back and finally shoulders. It uses a lot of isolation exercises in it’s programme and focuses on specific muscles instead of movements. It is my least favorite way to split up training because in my eyes it’s inefficient. It’s probably the most common form of split you’ll find in general commercial gyms and on the likes of Facebook and Instagram.
Think about this, Monday is your leg day, you go and train legs on Monday and then you mightn’t do legs again for a full week? No wonder you don’t really progress. The body has been through the alarm stage, supercompensation phase and returned back to base because you failed to apply another stress for 7 days. Whether your goal is just to be healthier or if your training for something in particular we’ve discussed how important it is the be strong. To me, nearly any goal can be better achieved by doing the total body split. The only times isolated splits are more beneficial, in my eyes, are for someone like a power lifter or body builder, the type of person who needs to focus on one particular body part or exercise for their sport. However, the majority of us aren’t body builders and power lifters. That’s why for the general population and majority of athletes I prefer the total body split.
Total Body
The great thing about understanding muscle function is that you realize it’s not the specific exercise that works the muscle, it’s the movement of the joints and the angle they move through. Joint angle dictates muscle function.
A total body training split is where you maybe train 3-4 times a week, but your sessions include body upper and lower body exercises paired together. Usually you’d use compound exercises here too. Compound exercises are major moves that use a number of muscle groups. For example, instead of doing a bicep curl you’d do a chin up. It still works the bicep the same way but now you’re getting more bang for your buck.
Understanding muscle and joint function means you can train 3-4 times a week, do different compound exercises and still work the muscle in the way it needs to in order to progress. Look, this is all my own opinion, and in my opinion, this is a much more efficient way to train and a more enjoyable way too. You get to mix up your exercise selection a lot more because you’re not worried about working muscles in isolation, which in turn keeps the monotony of training pretty low.
Total body splits allow you to accumulate a lot more volume for each muscle group in the training week. Day 1 you might do an upper push and lower knee dominant pair in block A and upper pull with a hip dominant movement in block B. Day 2 you might swap vertical emphasis for a horizontal emphasis and maybe do unilateral instead of bilateral exercises. The main thing here though is by the time day 3 comes around, you’ve more than likely training each muscle group 2-3 times and in different ways too which is a bonus.
We’ve had great success with our programmes that use total body splits and some people have seen major improvements in certain exercises even though they may only be training that exercise once a week. Variation, repetition, muscle function and joint action, volume and frequency are always accounted for. So, just because you might only squat once a week doesn’t mean the muscles aren’t getting stronger when you do other stuff. If your goal is to purely improve your squat then yeah, maybe do it more than once. If your goal is to get stronger and heathier and move better, then we can mix it up a bit.
Do I think everything has to be total body splits and compound exercises? No. Isolation stuff can play a fantastic role in your programme. We tend to keep it for later in the week and use it as filler type stuff. Personally, I enjoy finishing the week off with some extra arm work or something like that, others prefer to do a lower body combo. It’s really personal preference but the point I’m making is that it can play a vital role in progression and even increase other factors like satisfaction and confidence. Look good, feel good, right?
Over and out,
Rory.