Front foot elevated split squat: 4x6-8 Camporoni deadlift: 2x8
Felt the split squats a lot in the inside of my hip, like right up in my groin, and the outside of my glute too for both legs when they were in front but especially my left. The deadlifts I didn’t really feel much different to a normal deadlift and stretching my rear foot was bugging my Achilles area a bit so I only did two sets of those.
Afterwards I re-did the tests @j4gga2 recommended:
Knees to chest: could touch my chest with both legs still however when pulling my right leg I didn’t feel a stretch/pull in the inside of my left unlike last time and when pulling my left I didn’t feel much of a stretch in my left hamstring this time. Felt a good stretch in my glutes still with both.
Leg raises: these were pretty much the exact same as yesterday.
My left SI joint and the front of my left hip feel a little irritated now - not sure if it’s in a good or bad way, they just feel worked kinda. I liked those split squats though and will aim to do them several times a week.
Felt rubbish as soon as I started and did much more walking than running but still a decent effort. It’s very hot today too which increased the difficulty a bit.
Eh look based on that response I’m pretty sure those drills aren’t really going to help you out. Really sorry I didn’t have anything more useful for you
I’ve gotten a new job this week which is fairly physical so I’ve taken a couple of days of the gym. I’ve been lifting lots of stuff above my head and ended up hurting my left shoulder too, which is another reason I’ve had a couple days off, but it seems to be getting better now.
Strength is not irrelevant to physique improvement. Form follows function. Also if we assume that most hypertropy training is done at an intensity which roughly equals 60-85% of the 1 rm, it will make a difference if that range equals 60-80 kg or 120-160 kg.
If physique improvement is the goal, your 1 rm doesn’t matter and neither does doing THE big three (although most people agree that they are good mass builders), but strength certainly matters.
Most people you see training for physique who don’t really apply progressive overload principles or do a lot of compound movements will have a pretty good base of strength to go off of or will be “endocrinologically enhanced”.
Why would frequency matter?
If we assume you go to the gym 3 times a week and you have one leg day, that means you have 4 leg days a month. If you instead trained legs on all of these days you would have had 12 leg days per months.
“But I do more volume on a designated leg day than on a full body day”.
Let’s say you’re doing 6 exercises on a leg day. If you did 2-3 compound exercises on each full body day, you would at least match that but be able to do them with greater intensitiy.
You’ve been out of the gym for a while and even though you kept training, your strength will have taken a hit. A greater frequency helps to create faster neurological adapation and therefore faster strength gainz. Which will allow greater physique gainz.
If I am saying full body, I am not talking about doing the same routine on every one of those days. Nor am I saying you should do a barbell back squat, a deadlift and a barbell flat bench press on all of your full body days.
Upper/ lower splits would also go in the same direction.
I just think that the vast majority of people will benefit from more frequency in their training and bodypart training splits make the most sense in the following scenarios:
enhanced
very advanced
goes to the gym 6 times a week for some reason
All just food for thought obv. That you’re welcome to disagree with but maybe you find some of these thoughts in any way helpful.
I probably didn’t word it well but I will be aiming to improve my strength, as like you said progressive overload is needed. But it is only as a means to improve my physique rather than an end goal.
My schedule at the moment makes it difficult to go to the gym at the same time every week so my plan is to aim for a pull, push and legs session each week as a minimum and if I can I’ll do a fourth session of whatever is next in the rotation. In terms of training the same body part/muscle group more frequently, I think I would start struggling to recover, at least without adjusting the intensity which is high. Volume is already pretty low each session.
The other problem I would have with full body is it’s difficult to hit each muscle how I want to without using lots of exercises. Using compound exercises makes this easier but I still cannot isolate muscles as well sometimes. I also like to sequence my exercises so they compliment each other and I couldn’t do this if I did less for each body part on each day. For example today I did dumbbell rows which fatigued my lats and then lat pull-down afterwards where I could really stretch them or with chest I might do flyes before my presses to really exhaust my chest.
Regarding your final points about body part splits, I disagree partly due to the above points, partly because I think most things will work for a while and partly because lots of good bodybuilders have said differently. I trained like this before COVID and it was the best period of training I ever did. I set multiple PRs nearly every workout, got leaner and put on muscle - there’s an element of newbie gains I think still but I’ve not had results like that before.
To be honest I’m not really clever enough to argue what is best and there seems to be good points online for nearly all combinations of low to high volume, intensity and frequency so I’m just going with what I found to work. If it doesn’t work for me again I may well switch to something like upper/lower or full body. The bodybuilding section is full of topics with posts similar to these, from people cleverer then me, discussing what is best for hypertrophy.
Finally and maybe most importantly for a casual lifter like me, this is just how I like to train the most. I appreciate your input though so thank you.
Grip is pretty much the limiting factor on the first three exercises. It always is but I feel like it’s weaker than usual at the minute. If I had to guess I’d say it’s worn out from carrying heavy boxes at work all the time and using a lot of tools. I purposely didn’t use straps for the first two sessions to limit the intensity but I will be for at least the top set of dumbbell rows from now. Annoyingly as the dumbbells get heavier the handles get thicker.
Breaking myself in really slowly with legs so I don’t get crazy DOMS.
First good session since being back. Intensity is where it should be, I felt the exercises mostly where I wanted to and numbers are up on nearly everything. The hammer chest press I last did in December 2019 and 15x55 was a PR so it’s good to know I’m around as strong as I was while less used to the exercise and at a lower bodyweight.
I’ve started eating more over the last week to account for the harder sessions and my weight has jumped from low 83s to around 84kg. I’m not sure at the minute what to do weight wise. On one hand I want to gain weight to build as much muscle as possible but on the other I would still like to be leaner.