One area I see massive room for improvement in the gym is, the average person's workout split. Workout splits are, how people divide up their body parts into workouts over the course of the week. Young people gravitate towards doing individual muscles each day of the week. Like chest one day, then back the next, followed up with legs. They might repeat that sequence again and go 6x to the gym each week. Others will do upper/lower body splits 4 -6x per week. If you peaked into a athletic setting you might see splits based on movement patterns, like push, pull, legs or anterior/posterior driven workouts. What I'm trying to emphasize in this blog, is how wrong people get it in the gym and what 90% of people should be doing for their splits.

Purpose of Strength Training

Before we get to the best split to do, I want to bring the focus to the workouts themselves. What are most people trying accomplish? The top answers I see are, to build strength, look better aesthetically, build muscle mass, reverse osteoporosis, improve balance, & coordination, be healthy in general. Those are the most popular answers I get to why people go to the gym. With that, we have to keep in mind what the goals aren't. The goals aren't centered around beating the crap out of yourself every workout. They aren't there to punish yourself either. The workouts aren't individual punishment sessions for what unhealthy thing you did that day. The goals in the gym are exactly what we listed and we need to keep a focus on those when it comes to your split as well.

The Superior Split

For 90 -95% of people going to the gym and trying to improve and progress, Full Body routines are ideal. I know it doesn't sound sexy and the answer most people probably don't want to hear, but here is why this is optimal. First, from a time perspective. Most people don't have 6 hours a week to workout and do individual muscle splits. That just isn't reasonable. So if we do full body splits, you can condense everything you need to into 2 or 3 workouts a week max. In the course of a week you could get in everything you need to in 2 hours.

Next, from the perspective of volume in workouts. More volume and work load doesn't always equate to better workouts or faster progress. There is an upper and lower limit as to how much volume you should being doing in the gym. Full body routines make it a whole hell of a lot easier to keep the volume where it should be. That range is anywhere from 5-15 sets per body part per week. Doing a single body part in a hour long workout makes it easier to do way to much and kill that body part. That isn't the goal and purpose again of going to the gym. The goal is to get stronger every time you go to the gym or improve from a performance perspective.

Finally, full body routines make it way easier to design routines for. You simply pick one exercise per body part or per movement pattern and call it good. This leads to workouts only having 6-10 exercise at most to do per session. And for the average person not knowing where to stick turkish get-ups, hang cleans, burpees, deadlift this eliminates the confusion. Eliminating confusion will also make it easier to stack workouts week after week for years to come. Full Body split help you leave the gym feeling better than when you came and it makes building a relationship to exercise that much easier too.

Homework

If you've never tried a full body routine, try doing 2 or 3 workouts a week. And within those workouts, do one exercise per movement pattern. The six I focus on with clients are squat, hinge, push vertical, pull vertical, push horizontal, pull horizontal. That's it. Try this for a month and track your strength, energy, time in the gym and just wait to see the difference. My experience with people is you will never go back to doing the shitty splits you were using before.