🧐 Is this the best way to lift to build muscle?
A comprehensive guide to building your own lift sessions to get ripped.
After over 10,000 personal training sessions, I think I know a thing or two about how to write a program for someone who helps their physique.
But at the end of the day, preference still matters, and if you’re a new exerciser or someone who isn’t so familiar with the gym, you might want to do exercises in the way that makes you feel most comfortable.
Today I want to discuss how you can best optimize your training to help expedite the muscle gain process (outside of the food you eat) with smart exercise selection.
Newsletter Summary:
Tips for training that will save you time and energy at the gym (while also getting you ripped)
Why you don’t need to follow a strict “Push, Pull, Legs” Format
One good training quote from Dr. Mike Israetel
🧐 Is this the best way to lift to build muscle?
SECTION SUMMARY:
IF YOU HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO TRAIN MORE OFTEN THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, THAT WILL SERVE YOU BETTER
Fewer sessions means more work required per session
More work per session = higher fatigue, less efficiency in your lifts
This will lead to a clusterf*cking of exercises in your routine that you simply won’t get to, especially if a Bob or Karen is hogging your machine of choice
If you’re serious about changing the shape of your body (or even maintaining your current level of fitness), it’s probably best not to wing it every time you go to the gym.
As you age, you’ll notice it’s harder to just “mess around” when you lift.
You need structure, and your body will demand a certain amount of exercise, stimulus, and strain from your training to keep you where you want or push past plateaus.
Training Frequency and Exercise Selection are the most important pieces of training data you have to manipulate.
Most people would be smart to aim for somewhere between 2-4 training days for optimal results.
Obviously, someone who trains more will get more optimized gains, but someone who can jam-pack a lot into fewer sessions might also be able to crank out some serious improvements too.
The reason someone would have improved growth with more frequency is because of fatigue management.
Think of it this way — someone who trains the upper body on one day and lower body on another and only trains those two days a week needs to cram a TON of work in on those two days for real results to manifest.
By the time you’re on your 7th or 8th leg exercise, you’re fried.
Not only is the desire to lift weights lower, but the fatigue is higher, so technique, range of motion, and the integrity of your lifts start to go out the window.
In short, a higher frequency with evenly dispersed exercises per muscle group (2 lower, 2 uppers) will always beat out a low-frequency, high-stimulation split (1 upper, 1 lower) with too many exercises.
If you must only have two training sessions per week, make sure you’re absolutely demolishing those lifts.
Why “Push, Pull, Legs” is overrated
SECTION SUMMARY:
PUSH, PULL, LEGS IS MOST EFFECTIVE ONLY FOR THOSE WHO HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO TRAIN
Body-part emphasis splits probably work better because they’ll allow you to train body parts twice a week (which will all but guarantee growth)
Body part splits also allow you to get creative — if you want to focus more on a given body part, you can experiment with more sets on a given body part each week, whereas PPL might limit your choices
A “Push, Pull, Legs” (PPL) split is a very popular rotation of exercises that most new gymgoers stumble upon when researching their potential fitness plan.
While PPL is a decent jump-off point, it probably isn’t going to allow you to train every muscle group twice a week (which is the gold standard for muscle development).
If you had, let’s say, SIX days to train per week, then PPL might make sense, because it would allow for 2 training days per muscle group.
But condensing a PPL split into 4 days would present a similar problem as our initial example of training — too much volume in a given day, not enough time at the gym to jump from exercise to exercise, and WAY too much fatigue.
Instead, a body-part-style rotation of exercise probably serves most people the best, simply because it can allow you to focus solely on certain muscle groups, and train them with 2-3 movements per session and not leave you feeling defeated.
An example across a three or four-day split could include:
Day 1: Chest, Biceps, Triceps, Core (2 exercises per body part)
Day 2: Calves, Quads, Back (2-3 exercises per body part)
Day 3: Glutes, Hamstrings, Shoulders, Core (2-3 exercises per body part
Day 4: Quads, Triceps, Glutes (2 exercises per body part)*
*Provided you have room for a fourth day, the fourth day could be a mixture of your “focal point” exercises. If you care more about bigging up your chest and legs, then dedicate another day to them.
This will allow you more than enough time to double up on muscle groups and not spend more than an hour in the gym for each session.
I’m not sure about you guys, but 3-4 50-60 minute sessions sound way more appealing to me than 2 90-100 minute sessions.
It all depends on what your schedule allows for.
One Quote From An Exercise Scientist To Help You
Mike Israetel is the king of evidence-based exercise advice, so I lean on him for a lot of these quotes about how to train most intelligently.
Here’s Dr. Mike’s advice on how to get the most of the muscles you care MOST about training:
“To best stimulate a target muscle, you have to be very mentally focused and have a ton of energy. Therefore, the muscle group that takes precedence in the workout should ALWAYS go first.
If you have a muscle group you care more about, always train it FIRST!”
See the full video below.
Have a great week!