March 2, 2017

Ten HAMMER STRONG killer split programs

Zehn HAMMER STARKE Killer Splitprogramme

Training splits: changes you can believe in

Has your muscle building come to a standstill? Are you bored to death with your current training program?

Then you need a change and a challenge!

Here are four effective changes you can make in the gym to solve these problems:

Change your exercises.
Change your set/repetition pattern. Have you been doing three sets of 10 reps since tenth grade? Try 5 x 5, 2 x 15 or 8 x 3.
Follow the 3rd law of muscle and optimize your nutrition around your workouts.
Use a new training split.

Let's take a closer look at number 4.

Some people train their whole body - every major muscle group - during a single training session. Others split their muscle groups into different training days.

If you talk to the most experienced trainers, they will all tell you the same thing: there is no best training split! This can be summarized as follows:

"There is no universal training split that is ideal for all purposes. The potential effectiveness of a mode of training organization will depend heavily on goals, schedule, experience and individual body composition."

And I would like to add the following: Sometimes the best training split for you is simply the one you haven't used in a while. Change - at least the kind that stimulates new adaptations - is a good thing.

Let's look at some basic training splits and talk about the benefits of each. Whether you're a beginner who needs a plan to get you started or you're a workout veteran who needs a new challenge, you can consider the following a quick and dirty introduction to different workout splits.

Full body workout

Strictly speaking, the first training split is not a training split. Basically, you train the entire body during a training session. Typically, this is followed by a day off before you perform the next full-body training session. The whole thing looks like this:

Monday: Full-body training
Tuesday: No training
Wednesday: Full-body training
Thursday: No training
Friday: Full-body training

You can continue the sequence with a training-free Saturday and a full-body workout on Sunday or take the weekend off.

With a full body workout, you obviously can't do 5 chest-only exercises. You'd spend three hours in the gym working your way up to your calves... or you'd die of exhaustion first. And the latter will cause atrophy. You therefore only train the chest with a heavy basic exercise and then move on to the next muscle group.

The cool thing, however, is that you will be training your chest again very soon. The volume for the chest per training session is therefore low, but the frequency is high. This means that you will train the chest three times a week instead of once every three to five days as with some split programs. In addition, you can use a different exercise for the chest in each training session.

Good for: Athletes, beginners, those who can only work out a couple days a week and those who are primarily concerned with fat loss. The Velocity Diet program, for example, works very well with a full body workout, with dieters reporting maintenance of muscle mass and even muscle gains.

A full body workout is a good plan that has been proven to work in practice, but most exercisers who focus on muscle hypertrophy sooner or later move on to one of the following workout splits.

The upper body/lower body split

Even fans of a full body workout like Alwyn Cosgrove like the upper body/lower body split. Cosgrove noted, "90 to 95% of the population will probably respond best to either a full body workout or an upper body/lower body split 90 to 95% of the time."

A standard upper body/lower body split should look something like this:

Day 1: Upper body workout only (chest, back, shoulders, arms)
Day 2: Lower body workout only (legs and sometimes abs)
Day 3: Workout-free or cardio
Day 4: Upper body workout
Day 5: Lower body workout

One nice thing about the upper body/lower body split is that, unlike a full body workout, the legs get their own training day. A lower body workout is challenging and - if you do it right - pretty damn brutal. Train your legs hard and you won't have much energy left for upper body training. The upper body/lower body split solves this problem for many.

The other two-way split

You can also split your body other ways without using the old upper body/lower body program. Here is an alternative:

Day 1: Chest, shoulders and triceps
Day 2: Legs, back and biceps
Day 3: Workout-free
Day 4: Repeat the program

The opposite muscle group split

In this split, you pair muscles on the opposite side of the body. For example, you train your chest and back on the same day. This allows you to use antagonistic training, where you train chest and back in the form of supersets, instead of performing several straight sets for the chest followed by several straight sets for the back. This has the following benefits:

Antagonistic training allows you to recover faster between sets. When you maximally activate one muscle group, the nervous system inhibits the opposite muscle group for greater movement efficiency. This phenomenon reduces the time needed for recovery and helps to restore strength.

You can use this loop within the structure of the nervous system to your advantage. If you alternate exercises for opposite muscle groups, then the nervous system will inhibit the muscles that are not being trained and you can recover your strength faster.

Having said that, it's worth mentioning that this is a good split even if you're not using antagonistic training. Here is a typical split:

Day 1: Chest/back
Day 2: Quadriceps/leg curls
Day 3: Biceps/triceps
Day 4: Workout free
Day 5: Repeat program.

The calves can be inserted on the leg day and the abdominal muscles can be trained on the less demanding biceps/triceps day. Or you can do both on your workout-free day... which of course means this is no longer a workout-free day, you gym junkie.

The shoulders are a little tricky with this setup. Some prefer to train shoulders on chest/back day, while others prefer biceps/triceps day. And a few believe that not much direct shoulder training is necessary, as the shoulders are already trained quite intensely when training the other muscle groups. Guys from this camp often perform a few sets of side raises and leave it at that as far as shoulder training is concerned.

Primary/secondary muscle splits

Primary and secondary muscles are old-school terms that are useful when it comes to describing these splits. If you are training the chest, then your pecs are the primary muscle group. They should be doing most of the work. The triceps support the pecs, making them secondary muscles.

In back training, the different muscles of the back do the work as primary muscles, while the biceps act as a secondary muscle group.

So far so good, but why is this important when it comes to your training split? Well, as noted in the example, the arms are secondary muscles when training for chest and back. This gives you 2 options:

Option #1:

Day 1: Back/Triceps
Day 2: Chest/Biceps
Day 3: Legs, Shoulders, Abs
Day 4: Workout Free or Repeat Program

The idea here is to keep your biceps and triceps "fresh" and rested. On day 1, for example, the triceps will be fresh and rested because back training uses the biceps and not the triceps as secondary muscles. You will find that you feel very strong when you train your arms with this split and can use more weight in your arm workout than if you pair chest with triceps and back with biceps.

Option #2

Day 1: Back/biceps
Day 2: Chest/triceps
Day 3: Legs, shoulders, abs
Day 4: No training or repeat the program

With this option, you intentionally pair the secondary muscles with the primary muscles. If you're already exhausting your arms by training your chest and back, then you might as well give them the rest with direct training.

As with most of these splits, we wouldn't say one is better than the other, just that it's different. So choose the one that best suits your needs, or choose the option you've used the least if you need something to break out of your usual workout routine.

The shock week split

Listen to how many successful bodybuilders describe their workouts:

"Man, I totally destroyed my legs today!"
"I'm going to destroy my biceps!"
"I couldn't brush my teeth for three days. That was an awesome training session!"

This is not really surprising. Ultimately, hypertrophy is all about damaging muscles so that they can be rebuilt a little bigger. This next split takes that idea to an extreme and splits the body into seven workouts. Why? Because this allows you to completely annihilate each muscle group and force you to grow muscle.

Here's one way to do it:

Monday: quadriceps
Tuesday: back
Wednesday: chest
Thursday: hamstrings (posterior chain)
Friday: biceps and calves
Saturday: triceps and abs
Sunday: shoulders

On each day, your plan is to completely obliterate the target muscle group. You perform every exercise you know for that muscle group, training from all angles and using intensity techniques such as descending sets and forced negative reps.

There are no rules. Your mission is to destroy - plain and simple - and then you then give that muscle group a full week before you train it again.

Crazy? Yes, of course. So don't do this too often. Rather, use this split as an occasional secret weapon to break through a plateau.

The "legs suck" split

Think leg workouts suck? Hate the nausea and lactic acid burn that effective leg training always seems to cause?

Well, then there's a good chance the joke "Hey, are those your legs or are you riding a stork?" applies to you, because if you hate leg day, your lower body will probably reflect it.

Don't worry about this one. Here's a split that will not only make leg training a little more bearable, but also more muscular, as you can focus on quadriceps and hamstrings during separate workouts.

Day 1: Leg curls and calves
Day 2: Back and shoulders
Day 3: Workout-free
Day 4: Quadriceps and calves
Day 5: Chest and arms
Day 6: Workout-free

Not only is the leg training split up, but the calves are also trained twice a week. And admit it: you need this.

Note: This idea has also been described as a hip-dominant day and a quadriceps-dominant day. This is pretty much the same thing: one day for deadlifts and the like and one day for squats and their diabolical cousins.

The push/pull split

Some trainers prefer to think in terms of movements rather than muscles. When this is incorporated into a weekly program, it falls somewhere between a full body workout and a standard split program.

Such a split could look like this:

Day 1: Push
Day 2: Pull
Day 3: Workout-free
Day 4: Push
Day 5: Pull

The "push" (pressure) muscle groups are chest, quadriceps, shoulders, triceps and calves.

In turn, the back, hamstrings, biceps and forearms are the "pull" muscle groups

Example exercises for the "push" training day include bench presses, squats, overhead presses, side raises and tricep presses.

Example exercises for the "pull" training day include deadlifts, pull-ups, shoulder raises and rowing.

The "Ol' Standby" Split

This is a very popular bodybuilding split and probably one of the first most of us ever used. It's an effective plan that keeps the theme of primary and secondary muscle groups in mind.

The only problem? This split further contributes to Monday being International Chest Day.

You can, of course, start the week with back if you can't find a free bench!

Day 1: Chest
Day 2: Back
Day 3: Legs
Day 4: Arms and shoulders
Day 5: No training