Regarding Ian King’s 12 weeks program - Upper body, its a two workout per week program, and then one day legs. Basically giving you 4 days off. Can you train the other days of the week. Or would that really be over training
Example
Monday - workout a - Chest, upper back, tri
Tuesday - legs
Wed - lower back, bi’s, shoulders
Thursday - Off
Friday - Chest (lighter day)
Saturday - Arms
Sunday - off
Are the Fri/Saturday days too much??
Dfuniversal,
Charles Poliquin seems to be a good source of information. He wrote that he sees the best results when each muscle group gets abused once every 5 days. (As I recall, he was writing about hypertrophy gains, but I’m seeing the same sort of thing in strength training.) After 40+ years of training (Yeah, I’m OLD.), I tend to favor very simple splits that beat-up half of the muscles–skip a day–beat-up the other half–skip a day–beat-up the first muscle group again–skip two days then start the next week with the second muscle group, three workout days/week. (The workout days could involve two short workouts or one longer one, depending upon whether or not one can afford to live in the gym…) Theoretically, that hits each muscle, three times every 14 days. With any delayed workouts, call it around one workout per bodypart, every 5 days. If you and your training partners insist that a particular workout must happen on a particular day of the week–“We ALWAYS squat on Saturday”–the 3-day split won’t work: every second Saturday will be an upper-body day.
Coach King’s routine would have some muscles hit twice per week, which seems ok if one of those is a low-intensity workout. It also calls for some muscles to be hit once/week, which is ok if every one of those workouts is a HARD workout. Neither way is The One Best Way, Approved By God. You might try one split for several weeks and then try the other. (Workout routines get stale if they aren’t rewritten every couple of months.) On any given day, the best routine for you is the one that you have enough faith in, to keep you coming back to the gym for your fair share of torture.
Strength & courage,
Coach Joe