Column 63 | Your plan - my verdict

ANSWER

For a three-way split, your plan is divided up just right in terms of the combination of muscle groups. When it comes to the distribution over the respective days of the week, I recommend that you do workout 1 on Monday, workout 2 on Wednesday and workout 3 on Friday. This way you have a day's rest between each workout and two more days for recovery before the next cycle. However, I have found four mistakes that you should definitely avoid if you want to make further progress through your training:

1. WRONG MUSCLE ORDER

In the third session, you should train your chest before your shoulders and triceps. Otherwise, there is a chance that your deltoids will fail before you can stimulate your chest muscles enough to grow.

2. TOO MANY SENTENCES

Overall, you are doing too many sets. As we all know, muscles do not grow during training, but in the recovery phase; training only provides the growth stimulus. So that the body can quickly switch to the recovery or growth phase, you should not train more than necessary.

3. TOO HIGH AMOUNT OF TRAINING

Stick to a training duration of up to one hour. After this time, cortisol levels rise dramatically, which can lead to muscle loss. Given this premise, it is probably necessary to shorten the sets per exercise. For large muscles, ten sets are the maximum, and for small muscles, six sets. The rest time between each set should be around 1.5 to two minutes. When training your legs - especially when doing heavy exercises such as squats or leg presses - it can also be three minutes to ensure that the cardiovascular system has sufficient recovery.

4. WRONG EXERCISE ORDER

Always start your training session with multi-joint exercises, followed by isolation exercises. Always follow the rule "compound exercises ALWAYS before isolation exercises" to ensure effective training.

Here is an example of a training week:

When training your chest, your shoulders and triceps are also stressed. This means that these muscle groups do not require as much training afterwards as if they were trained separately. In other words: chest training replaces a large part of your shoulder and tricep training. This saves you valuable time and your body can move into the recovery phase more quickly.

You should only do the flat bench press every now and then, as this exercise only works the lower part of the chest muscles. The incline bench press, however, is much more effective as it stimulates the entire chest muscles.

I cannot recommend side exercises for the abdominal muscles, as they only make the midsection appear unnecessarily larger - even if the increase is muscle. You should also avoid additional weights when training your stomach, as they stimulate the muscles to grow so much that the midsection can become "clunky". As on Monday, a certain amount of pre-fatigue also comes into play on back/biceps day. The back training has already put a lot of strain on the biceps. This means that they don't need to be done as many sets afterwards. This saves time and energy.

Now to your second question: During back training, the biceps often help too much - even if unconsciously. That's why their strength can decrease before the back muscles fail.

Here it is important to concentrate solely on the target muscles; the arms should only act as a link to the handle. If you learn this mental focus over time, you will feel the training stimulus more in your back than in your arms. However, this requires a certain amount of practice.