Intermediate Training Tips

Part 2

SPLIT ROUTINES

It should become obvious to you that your workouts will eventually become so long and involved when training your whole body in one session that it becomes impossible to work every muscle group with the highest possible degree of intensity. The body parts early in a full-body training session are bombed very intensely, while those toward the end of your workout receive less intensity than they could handle.

Once your full-body training sessions are hours long, you should begin to follow a split routine in which you divide your body parts into two relatively equal groups and work out four or more days per week, doing only part of your body each workout day.
The most fundamental split routine involves four workouts per week, two for each major muscle group. There are several ways in which you can divide your body parts up into two equal groups. Since you are still allowing a minimum of two full rest days between sessions for each muscle group, you can safely train more than three days per week when following a split routine. Several examples of four-day split routines can be found on page 127.

After you have been following a four-day split routine for 4-6 months, you might wish to step up intensity by following a five-day split. With a five-day split routine, you still divide your body parts up into two relatively equal groups. The first week, you do one group on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the other on Tuesdays and Thursdays, resting over the weekend. And the next week, you reverse the body part groupings. An example of a five-day split routine (designating parts of your body either "A" or "B") is on page 127.

A few more months down the road, you may wish to switch to the more intense three-on, one-off program used by a majority of top bodybuilders during the off-season. In this case, you divide up your body parts into three groups. Day one you do Group "A"; day two, Group "B"; and day three, Group "C." Day four is a rest day, and on day five you begin to repeat the cycle. This type of split routine will screw up a lot of your weekends, but it fosters much better recovery than any of the six-day split routines once used by top bodybuilders. An example of the three-on, one-off split rou­tine can be found on page 127.

EXAMPLE OF A THREE-ON, ONE-OFF SPLIT ROUTINE

EXAMPLE OF A FOUR-DAY SPLIT ROUTINE

ALTERNATIVE 1

ALTERNATIVE 2

ALTERNATIVE 3

EXAMPLE OF A FIVE-DAY SPLIT ROUTINE

Note: "A" and "B" designate rival halves of the body.

EXAMPLE OF A SIX-DAY SPLIT ROUTINE

Each Major Muscle Group Trained Twice per Week

EXAMPLE OF A SIX-DAY SPLIT ROUTINE 

Each Major Muscle Group Trained Three Times per

The most intense type of split routine in­volves six workouts per week and one day of rest. The six-day split comes in two variations. The less intense of the two involves two work­outs per week for each major muscle group. An example of this type of six-day split routine can be found on page 126-128. The more intense form of six-day split routine involves three workouts per week for each major muscle group. You can find an example of this type of six-day split routine on page 127.

Six-day split routines are highly intense, so only the most advanced bodybuilders should train six days per week. And the better athletes tend to follow the less intense form of six-day split in the off-season and the more intense type for only 6-8 weeks prior to a competition when attempting to bring out optimum muscularity.

BELTS AND WRAPS

"The heavier you train, the more you will need to rely on a lifting belt and joint wraps," says massive Mike Christian. "Most bodybuilders, myself included, use a weightlifting belt buckled firmly around their waists whenever they are doing squats, overhead pressing move­ments, and heavy back exercises such as dead-lifts, barbell rows, and T-bar rows. The belt adds stability to the middle of your body, pro­tecting your lower back and abdomen from injury.

"You tan purchase weightlifting belts in many sporting goods stores, or through adver­tisements in Flex, Muscle ir Fitness, and other bodybuilding magazines. They come in two types, one with a back four inches wide and the other with a back six or more inches wide. The narrow-backed belt is only for weightlifting and powerlifting competitions, so be sure to purchase the wide-backed training belt. You should expect to pay $25 for a low-quality belt and about $60 for one with a quality suede backing."

There's quite a bit of debate about the value of joint wraps. Tom Platz (Mr. Universe) feels they are a detriment to proper training: "Whenever I've worn knee wraps when squat­ting, I began to rob the working muscles of much of the stress they should be feeling in a heavy set. With wraps on my knees, the legs tend to become very efficient levers for moving the weight upward. So in my seminars, I al­ways recommend not using joint wraps."

Other bodybuilders feel that joint wraps can protect a joint weakened by previous injuries. Typical of this group is Rich Gaspari, who says, "Wraps can protect an old injury site, or prevent you from getting injuries in the first place. The wraps come in two types, neoprene rubber tubes, which can be fitted over a joint, or elastic fabric strips, which can be wrapped around a joint. Expect to pay something in the range of $5-$15 for the rubber wraps and about $6-$10 for good-quality fabric wraps.

"Rubber wraps are excellent for keeping damp heat around the injured joint. They can be used around the knee or elbow, as well as around the waist when a back injury is acting up. But rubber wraps provide very little actual support to an injured joint.

"If you need to add support to a previously injured knee, or some other joint, you should use fabric wraps. The best type is called a Su-perwrap. It's the same type of elastic fabric wrap used by powerlifters who are squatting hundreds of pounds more than most body­builders. Superwrap has elastic which will bounce back from full stretch literally hun­dreds of times without losing elasticity.

"When wrapping a joint, first take a couple of turns around the limb 4-6 inches above or below the joint, wrapping over the first turn of fabric to anchor one end of the wrap. Then wrap upward or downward in spirals, being sure that the wrap overlaps itself enough so you always have two layers of fabric over the joint. When you finish the wrap, tuck the loose end of the fabric under one or two of the coils to anchor it securely."

When a knee has been injured repeatedly— particularly in violent contact sports like foot­ball—osteoarthritis can occur. In this case, the joint will always be at least slightly sore. You can still do relatively heavy squats with this condition, however. What you should do to protect the joint from pain or further injury is first slip a rubber tube wrap over the joint. Over the tube, you can slide your warm-up pants. And then over the tube and pants, wrap the joint conventially with a Superwrap.

The combination of rubber and fabric wraps is  very  therapeutic,  because  the heat kept around the joint will sooth any long-term in­jury. And the additional support given by a fabric wrap will allow you to continue squat­ting or doing heavy leg presses without further injuring your knee.

PERSONALIZED TRAINING PROGRAMS

When a bodybuilder becomes involved in the sport, he invariably starts training on routines suggested by the author(s) of books and/or magazine articles on proper training proce­dures. For a few months, a novice bodybuilder can continue to follow progressively more in­tense training programs outlined by such au­thors. But eventually he must learn to formu­late routines perfectly tailored for his unique physical structure and physiological abilities. This occurs because he will both outgrow set routines and will respond better to personal­ized programs.

It's possible to learn this process simply by reading every available champion's training schedules. Within a few years, you will proba­bly become adept at recognizing most of the patterns that the top men in the sport use in making up their own personalized training programs. However, you can much more easily learn to make up your own routines by follow­ing the simple rules outlined in this chapter.

 Body Part Sequencing

One of the first rules you must accept is that body parts should be trained in a particular sequence. They should be worked in order from the largest in mass down to the smallest. Large muscle groups require a much greater energy expenditure to train with optimum intensity than do smaller muscle groups. And you prob­ably already know it is much easier to face a short biceps workout when your energy reserves have been nearly depleted than a leg training session consisting of the same number of sets. Whether you are working your entire body in one session, or following a split routine in which you train only a part of your body each workout, this is the hierarchy of body parts from largest to smallest:

•    Legs (including buttocks)
•    Back
•    Chest
•    Shoulders
•    Calves
•    Upper arms
•    Forearms
•    Abdominals

Notice that I haven't included the neck in this body part hierarchy. The reason for this seem­ing oversight is the fact that very few top body­builders ever need to train their necks directly. The neck muscles invariably grow by leaps and bounds simply as a by-product of hard training for the upper chest, shoulders, and upper back.

Within the foregoing hierarchy, there are three subrules. The first of these is that upper-arm work should always be scheduled after exercises for the torso muscle groups (chest, shoulders, and back). Why?

The torso muscle groups are much larger and stronger than either biceps or triceps. As a result, the arm muscles are relative weak links when you perform such basic torso exercises as bench presses, overhead presses, upright rows, chins, pulldowns, and various types of bent-over rows. Since the weaker arm muscles fa­tigue and fail before the corresponding torso groups, it just stands to reason that you should strictly avoid training biceps or triceps first, making them even weaker and thereby aggra­vating the problem.

The second subrule is that you should always train calves after thighs. Shane DiMora, who had an unbelievably sensational competitive year in 1986 while still a teenager (he won the Teenage National, Junior National, and Na­tional Championships at the age of 19), com­ments on this rule: "Like all bodybuilders, I've tried working my calves prior to doing a heavy squat workout, and I found that my legs vi­brated so badly as a result that I couldn't do either squats or leg presses with anything higher than mid-range poundages. So, I didn't get a very good leg workout. But by avoiding early calf work—by scheduling calves on either a different day altogether, or during a different half of a double-split—I no longer have a prob­lem training either thighs or calves."

Despite the body part hierarchy presented earlier in this chapter, many bodybuilders seem to prefer doing calves first in their routines, as either a warm-up for the rest of a training schedule, or because calves are a muscle group which needs specialized training to bring it up to the level of the remainder of the body. Due to the leg vibration problem, you must make a point of training calves first only on non-leg days, or at a time separate from the rest of your workout.

Third, many bodybuilders prefer to train abdominals at the start of a workout as either a warm-up for the rest of the body parts, or be­cause the abdominals might also require spe­cialized training to bring them up to the rest of your body parts. In either case, you should feel free to violate the rule which says to do the midsection work last in your program.

PRIORITY BODY PART SCHEDULING

You've already learned about the Weider Muscle Priority Training Principle, and you must ad­here to it when you are making up a new train­ing program. That's the only way you can hope to become a superstar in the sport. Whenever you are giving priority to a weaker body part, you must schedule it either first in your pro­gram each workout day, or on a completely separate day.

RELATIVE WORK LOAD

I keep coming back to relative work load, be­cause scheduling too many total sets for each body part into your program will cause you to overtrain. And that, in turn, will prevent you from making good gains from your workouts. The number of sets you can safely perform for each muscle group depends solely on your rela­tive level of experience in the sport, and the efficiency of between-workout recovery ability generated by such experience.

One general rule for work load which I keep coming back to is always do less total sets than you think your body needs for each muscle group. It's much better to consistently under-train than consistently ovmrain when it comes to building huge, highly detailed muscles.

Contest-level bodybuilders should attempt to stay within the guidelines I have set for ad­vanced bodybuilders whenever they are train­ing in an off-season building cycle. But when a competition approaches—particularly if a bodybuilder is using anabolic steroids to help him peak out—up to 15-20 total sets can be done for each body part for a time limit of no more than 6-8 weeks each peak.