The Best Workout Split for MAXIMUM Muscle Gains

Whether you are following a total body workout split or a bro split (or any variation of) you are going to want to watch this video. Find out the best workout split for building maximum muscle gains and overall performance. There is a key message that you will not want to miss when it comes to ans

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Your training split is killing your gains. I promise I’m going to make this worthwhile for you today because a lot of us are following very, very, very different types of training splits.

Are you here people? You’ve got buddies at the gym that do the bro-splits – don’t bash them yet, guys. Not yet. It’s too early. Especially as you’re going to see here, total body training – you could even take the guy who influenced me a long time ago to dial back my workouts a bit.

Mike Menser. High intensity workouts, one muscle group every 14 days. You go and take that and think “That is so much different from the advice that some people say now, with more frequent training, with total body workouts. So how is it that even existed? How are people able to get away with that if it never worked?

” Maybe it does. So, what I want to do is go over some of these splits to tell you what I think is going on here. Right here we’ve got the days of the week and the typical training schedule. What I’ve laid out here first and foremost is a total body split. For a total body split you’re looking at the classic ‘train everything Monday, Wednesday, and Friday’ and you have a bunch of off days.

What’s nice about the total body split is a few things, what you’ve probably heard. Number one: you get a little more recovery in the week. Which is music to my ears. That’s the first thing. Number two: You’re getting more frequent stimulation of the muscles in your body – all of them – so you’re getting that opportunity to resume muscle protein synthesis every 48 hours or so, which is what the research is pointing us to.

I’ll be back to research in a second. But that’s what it’s pointing us to here, why this is superior and why a lot of guys are moving toward this. We even have our own program coming out, which is Total Body Split. So, I do believe it’s extremely beneficial for many, many, many, many people. But if you could go back – this is not new.

This is not new. You could go back decades and decades. Guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger were doing both total body Monday, Wednesday, Friday splits and even more than that. What they were doing was taking your typical total body workout which consisted of all of – your legs, chest, shoulders, arms, back, everything – and they put them all in one workout. And he just decided to split it up a little more into a push/pull with legs included in both of those workouts.

So, a push workout would be chest, triceps, shoulders, and quads. Then a pull workout would be back, biceps, and hamstrings. So, you’re doing that now and you’ve taken one workout, split it over two, increased the volume of those exercises a little bit – because you could do so because you didn’t have so much to do in one day – shorten the workout a little bit. Yes, the frequency is greatly enhanced here with six days versus three, but the workouts were a little bit shorter. The idea was the same because you’re still stimulating every 48 hours.

So, the research with the proponents of total body training will say, but we go and look at some of the other ideas and we have push/pull legs as well. That’s another popular thing. People have probably heard about that. We’ve programmed push/pull legs many times. With a push/pull legs what we have here is, a gain, six days a week.

And we can do this even in a beginner versions. I’ll explain that in a second. But with a push/pull legs, the benefit is that you’re starting to train more athletically. My big benefit with this split is that I get to pair muscles together that share similar functions. So, I’m not thinking about chest training.

I’m not thinking about tricep training. I’m thinking about push training. When you saw Antonio Brown coming through here, we did a push workout. When you saw Seamus coming through here, we did a posterior chain workout. We’re grouping muscles that tend to work together because athletically, that’s how we’re going to function.

So, I like this, and I veer toward this a lot. What we do is – if you wanted to go more toward a beginner level, we could do a push workout on a Monday, we could have a day off. We could do a legs workout here on Wednesday, a day off. A pull workout here, and a couple of days off. So, we’re dramatically decreasing the overall volume, but at least we’re still maintaining the benefits of those similar functions and shared functions to at least train the body in that way.

What we don’t want is what we talked about with bro-splits. We can break this down even further. A lot of guys do this. Again, we’ve used bro-splits in training for a particular purpose because you always have to ask, “What is the end goal? ” If it’s straight hypertrophy there are going to be benefits to bro-splits, in terms of developing muscle, and building muscle like a body builder.

Even though we don’t train body builders. But we do recognize that guys want to build muscle and sometimes doing that, it’s important to split things up. However, this is why bro-splits get a bad name. What we’ve done here is, we go shoulders, chest, triceps, back, biceps, legs, and then a day off. Why is that not so good?

Because based on what I just told you here, you’re sequentially overlapping shared functions. I’m going with a push muscle – shoulders – and push. Chest. And push. Triceps.

Where’s the recovery. We know that when we do chest exercises, we’re going to impact the shoulders. If you do a bench-press here, you know you’re working the shoulders. Where’s the recovery from your shoulder training from the day before? Especially as a natural athlete, recovery is paramount.

Where is it? It’s absent. So, what you want to do is make sure you’re not doing bro-splits like this because this is where they get a bad name. Instead, you opt for something different. Instead you’d opt for – again, I’m just sharing some of the popular splits that are out there.

I’m not trying to make a judgment on any of them… until the end. We have chest and biceps. Chest and bis. Back and tris.

Legs. Legs are often done twice a week simply because it allows you to train them more frequently, for the reason we talked about down here. Then shoulders and traps, or shoulders and whatever you want to include. Shoulders and abs. Whatever that split might be.

We’ve got this other version here. This is another popular one. Chest, back, legs, shoulders, arms, and then legs. Again, split out more of an anterior/posterior. This is very popular.

Especially arm day on Friday is key, because before you go out to the bars, if you could just do as few sets of biceps and triceps, you’re good to go. I promise you. Especially in – a chest day is intact. This is great. Again, what we can do though is take a bro-split and actually make it work.

The way you make it work for you is based on exercise selection and then putting the workouts in the right sequence, so you avoid this and benefit a bit more from the principles of what we established back here with the total body training. So, let’s take a look at this one here. When I train my biceps and chest, I wait 48 hours and I’m back to back and triceps. So, I have the potential to involve biceps in my back exercises here. I have the ability to hit my chest again and my triceps if I choose the right exercises.

Again, if I place them in the right sequence, in terms of the time lag between workouts – in my back workout – that would demand, however, that I do exercises like an underhand barbell row, or even better, a weighted chin-up. You guys here me talk all the time about how I think the weighted chin-up is a gre