Building out a training program is no easy task. It requires much more thought than people typically understand. You need to take into consideration your ability to recover from the work you’re doing, your goals, equipment, so on and so forth. This is part of the reason that people hire coaches, after all. The job of a coach is to do all of the thinking, and just deliver the goods.
And that’s exactly what I’m going to do today. Hand deliver the goods straight to you bros, with the 4 most effective training splits that will help you get huge.
- Total body training splits.
I’ve written about these before. For some reason so many people think that after a certain point they’ve gotten far too advanced to give total body training splits a try, which is a damn shame, because they can work wonders if done correctly.
A total body training split is exactly what it sounds like. You’re hitting every single muscle group with some form of exposure each training session. Unlike other splits, you’re not going to find yourself in the gym 6 days a week with these.
Instead, you’ll plan on being in the gym 3x a week, maybe 4x a week if you want to hit some lagging body parts to bring them up. Give yourself about 4-6 weeks of total body training, and watch the gains roll through.
- Agonist/Antagonist training splits.
This is one of the more common training splits, even if most people don’t even know they’re doing it. It also happens to be one of the most effective, and an old favorite of classic era bodybuilders such as Arnold.
A few examples of this split include:
Chest/back
Bi’s/Tri’s
Quads/Hamstrings
Front delts/rear delts
One of the biggest advantages to this style training is that it allows you to spend more overall time in the gym, as you won’t be exposing ever muscle group to some sort of stimulus every training session.
- Upper/lower split.
This is a personal favorite of mine, and one that I implement with quite a few of the clients that I work with. It’s great for those of you who may not be able to spend 6 days a week in the gym, but still want to get as much as possible out of each session.
Using this sort of split typically means that you’re training about 4 days a week, with 2 days being an upper body focused session, and 2 days being a lower body focused session.
You can then break the individual sessions up more to focus on various body parts that you want to hit. For example:
Day 1 upper body may be more chest work, where as day 2 may be more shoulder focused. Or day 1 lower body may focus more on quad development, where day 2 focuses more on glutes and hamstrings.
The possibilities are endless, but all in all, this is one of the most effective splits that busy working professionals can put into use.
- Prime mover and accessory split.
These splits are another bodybuilding staple and tend to consist of a training session consisting of something like chest and triceps paired together.
The magic of these lies in the fact that by the time you move on to tricep work, your triceps have already been so heavily fatigued that you’re now forcing them to recruit more muscle fibers, and subsequently grow more as a result.
And while I love this split, it’s one that I think far too many bros rely on for far too long. Spending too much time training the accessory muscles (think triceps) after they’ve already been annihilated limits your growth potential compared to training them on their own day.
The takeaway amongst all of these is that they all work from time to time, in the context of a well-designed program. Cycle through each split for 4-6 weeks, move on to the next, and keep growing.