Need some help.

F

Flek

New Member
Hi everyone I am going to start a 8-week cycle of HST next Monday. I am resting this week, RM were already determined (some guessing involved). I have been working 5-days-a-week doing 1/2 muscle groups a day. I don't want to train for much more than 1 hour and I don't mind to train 6 days a week.

The doubts I have are more on scientific grounds:

Can I split my routine to be like Upper/Lower and train 6 days-a-week with more volume than only 3 days?
Wouldn't it be better if I split, because my "post-workout nutritional income" would have to deal with less "volume of muscle"?
 
You can split the routine all you want, as long as you can maintain progression over the duration then you are ok.

However I tell you, if you follow a simple whole body routine such as many of teh routines found in the Simplify and Win thread you will not overtrain or underatrain for that matter.

The problem essentially is that when you get to the heavier weights teh volume will catch up with you or should I say to your nervous system, which has a funny sense of humour and usually fails before the muscle system does leaving limp and tired on top of it, you would be wasting all the effort you put to get to the heavy stage.

Try a simplified program, use the required template of 1 set for 15's, 2 sets for 10's and 3 sets for 5's and see how it goes, ifthe 15's feel light, slow your reps down and rest less, believe me by the time you get to the 5's you'll be glad you did, I hope you have calucated or at least tried to get some reallistic rep maxes!

Try it, before you start tweaking things, tweak once you know and have tried the system out, as we call it the "vanilla method".

Cheers
 
Not only do I agree with what Fausto said I’ll add what my experience is telling me as I near the end of my second cycle.

Can I split my routine to be like Upper/Lower and train 6 days-a-week with more volume than only 3 days?
Click to expand...

Yes you can split your routine however, I wouldn’t recommend pushing your weekly volume higher because of it. In fact as things get heavier you may even find it necessary to cut some volume to keep your heavy lifts progressing.

I work out 6-7 days, closer to 7 usually, with my daily core exercises being one push, one pull and one leg exercise. My set/rep scheme has no more volume than if I was working out 3 days a week. Early on in the 15s and through the 10s I also used some isolation exercises on what I felt are lagging body parts but progressively drop those so as things get heavy I’m only focusing on the core multi-joint lifts.

This has been working great for me because I like to exercise every day and it keep my workout times down to 30-40 minutes including warm up and cool down.

To reiterate what Fausto said, it’s best to keep things simple especially the first cycle to get the hang of things though simple always IMO going to be a generally good idea.
 
I think I will just split Upper/Lower and mantain volume. Like you said I also like to train almost every day. Thanks for your advice! I will tell you how it went in the end!
 
I tried a two-day split on my last cycle and made pretty good gains with it. I only did each workout twice, however, working out four days per week. I've never been able to train more than that without overtraining.
 
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