Dead/Squat Split

Training Bodybuilding
21

[quote]G87 wrote:
You’re right, I did forget military presses. I guess it’s not really a question of forgetting, but more a question of, how the hell do I put in dips, benching and military press into one workout and get away with it.

What’s a front lat raise? I thought lat raises were only side raises, because front raises don’t activate the lateral deltoid…

You probably have a specific reason for squatting 2x a week though, and not doing exercises that’ll take you to absolute failure?[/quote]

front lateral raise. I believe they’re called lateral raises because you’re making your arm lateral, or away from the body, not because the lateral deltoid, however i’m not positive on that.

I squat twice a week because i need to bring my squat up. it’s as simple as that.

I do get taken to absolute failure. I’ll set the weights high enough that i generally either can’t or barely finish the last rep on sets 2 and 3. Then i’ll do some sort of a finisher on chest/tri day to pump. On back day pullups are my pump, and for squats i’m doing 20 rep squats, so i’m fried by the end of the set anyway.

I like one that thib posted in one of his articles.
bench press with:
45lb platex20
35x20
25x20
10x20
5x20
2.5x20
then, if you can, go back up the pyramid.

22

I structure my split for physique so it may or may not give you some ideas. I also break arms to a seperate day.

My first week is designed as a power week where I will squat and dead and the next week is more volume based and I will do auxilary excercises. My workouts vary week to week based on what I’m seeing in my physique or imbalances I’m feeling so I can’t give you real specific excercise but here is the split

Back
Chest
Shoulders
Legs
Arms

I try to run a 2 on 1 off but my work schedule will dictate what has to happen and sometimes I will switch body parts around to accomodate my schedule. But I never do arms or shoulders before back and chest

Power week - lots of warm up and working sets are low reps with maybe some negatives or rest pause. Not a tone of excercises work is done in the heavy compound excercises. Depending on my schedule I may add shoulders to my chest day for this week.

Back - CDL, some form of supported row (I wont expose my lower back after its already beat from deads), some form of pull up or pull down work

Chest - heavy either incline or flat with dbs if I can get a good spotter - then some suporting owrk

Shoulders - either heavy military or hang press then some supporting work

Legs - squats & SLDL - thats it and its enough

Arms - heavy bb curls and heavy close grip bench and then whatever else I feel will get the job done.

Volume week - I’ll change up the excercises. I wont dead or squat this week and the reps will come up to 8 or more depending on what I’m trying to accomplish. I’ll do a lot of axillary excercises. This week is much more about getting blood into the muscles and giving my CNS a chance to recover.

23

[quote]G87 wrote:
Tim, why would you put chest with bi’s and shoulders with tri’s? i.e. tris work with shoulders on a lot of exercises, just like tri’s… On the other hand, I can think of no exercises where bi’s and chest both work. Just sayin…
[/quote]

When training the small muscle groups, you have two options. Put them with the big muscle that they usually work (chest and tris, back and bis), or separate them from the big muscle they usually work with by at least 2 days. The benefit of this method is that you are fresh when you do the smaller muscle group. You are right, chest rarely works with the biceps (although they do work together during Flys), so when you go do a bicep workout after chest day you are fresh and can go much heavier on biceps.

With triceps, I like separating triceps from chest for two reasons. One, as above my triceps are tired after chest day and so can’t lift as much weight. And two) I can “cheat” and do more chest on that second day that has a tricep emphasis like closegrip bench, board press, dips, etc. They also work with shoulders so doing military presses, etc serves as a nice warm-up but they should not be too fatigued and you should be able to do maximal weight with them on that day.

The benefit of the routine stated is that you can do pretty much any exercise you want (you stated in another post about where to do military press, dips, and bench) and it gives almost everyone plenty of recovery no matter how hard they train.

If you want examples of exercise selection let me know and I can flesh out how that would look on the routine.

24

[quote]Tim Henriques wrote:
My suggestion

Monday: Legs (Squats)
Tuesday: Chest and Bis
Wed: Cardio
Thurs: Back and LB (Deads)
Fri: Shoulders and Tris

Separate out the squats and deads by as many days as possible and you will be good to go.[/quote]

Oh, I should mention this is Dorian Yates’ main routine as well, it seemed to work for him :wink:

25

[quote]luckydog wrote:
I structure my split for physique so it may or may not give you some ideas. I also break arms to a seperate day.

My first week is designed as a power week where I will squat and dead and the next week is more volume based and I will do auxilary excercises. My workouts vary week to week based on what I’m seeing in my physique or imbalances I’m feeling so I can’t give you real specific excercise but here is the split

Back
Chest
Shoulders
Legs
Arms

I try to run a 2 on 1 off but my work schedule will dictate what has to happen and sometimes I will switch body parts around to accomodate my schedule. But I never do arms or shoulders before back and chest

Power week - lots of warm up and working sets are low reps with maybe some negatives or rest pause. Not a tone of excercises work is done in the heavy compound excercises. Depending on my schedule I may add shoulders to my chest day for this week.

Back - CDL, some form of supported row (I wont expose my lower back after its already beat from deads), some form of pull up or pull down work

Chest - heavy either incline or flat with dbs if I can get a good spotter - then some suporting owrk

Shoulders - either heavy military or hang press then some supporting work

Legs - squats & SLDL - thats it and its enough

Arms - heavy bb curls and heavy close grip bench and then whatever else I feel will get the job done.

Volume week - I’ll change up the excercises. I wont dead or squat this week and the reps will come up to 8 or more depending on what I’m trying to accomplish. I’ll do a lot of axillary excercises. This week is much more about getting blood into the muscles and giving my CNS a chance to recover.[/quote]

This seems like a very good idea to keep your CNS from burning out and to continue making progress longer as you have two different days for each workout in the rotation. So, instead of it lasting say, 4-6 weeks before needing change, you can go 8 to 12.

Also, a lot of the eastern bloc countries, when they would do their research, found that only working in one main rep range at a time worked much better as it confused the body less on what to adapt to. They found gains were much less doing say, 1 exercise low rep, one medium, and one high in a workout than it was to have three separate workouts devoted to each one of those. The one rep range workouts sent much clearer messages as to what the body needed to adapt (IE- grow) to.

This is a great idea man. Good to see someone thinking their workouts out like that.

Kubo

26

[quote]Tim Henriques wrote:
G87 wrote:
Tim, why would you put chest with bi’s and shoulders with tri’s? i.e. tris work with shoulders on a lot of exercises, just like tri’s… On the other hand, I can think of no exercises where bi’s and chest both work. Just sayin…

When training the small muscle groups, you have two options. Put them with the big muscle that they usually work (chest and tris, back and bis), or separate them from the big muscle they usually work with by at least 2 days. The benefit of this method is that you are fresh when you do the smaller muscle group. You are right, chest rarely works with the biceps (although they do work together during Flys), so when you go do a bicep workout after chest day you are fresh and can go much heavier on biceps.

With triceps, I like separating triceps from chest for two reasons. One, as above my triceps are tired after chest day and so can’t lift as much weight. And two) I can “cheat” and do more chest on that second day that has a tricep emphasis like closegrip bench, board press, dips, etc. They also work with shoulders so doing military presses, etc serves as a nice warm-up but they should not be too fatigued and you should be able to do maximal weight with them on that day.

The benefit of the routine stated is that you can do pretty much any exercise you want (you stated in another post about where to do military press, dips, and bench) and it gives almost everyone plenty of recovery no matter how hard they train.

If you want examples of exercise selection let me know and I can flesh out how that would look on the routine.

[/quote]

Also a great idea. I agree fully with Tim on this. Throwing Bi’s with Chest and Tri’s with Back basically allows you to hit chest, back, tri’s and bi’s twice a week each as the movements overlap plus allows you to use better weight on the arm movements. As long as there are two or three days in between like he said so it doesn’t affect recovery, it always worked better for me and seemed like a much smarter way to structure your workouts as far as bodypart splits goes. Good thinkin bro.

27

I agree with Mike: I’m very interested in hearing more about LuckyDog’s style of training. From where I’m standing now, this seems like a great way to go nowhere fast by shifting rep ranges and exercises around constantly, but then again, I’m a relative beginner.

BTW, MKubo, where did you get all the info in your first post? Re your 2nd post, I would not have been thrown off if it was tris/back and chest/bis, but it was actually bis/chest and tris/shoulders. Anyway, I guess this brings us to the whole point of “how often should you hit a muscle”… I remember reading recently that you should get 5 days of rest between working on a muscle in a split, but now I’m wondering if it’s better to split the volume per muscle per week over multiple workouts.

Edit: Hey, Blaze , missed your second post. Do you have a link to that Thibaudeau article? I didn’t quite get what you were trying to tell me about :frowning:

28

G87 -
Its easiest to view progress in the gym as increasing weights from week to week. So changing up excercises takes that trackability away from it conceptually. But if your split is built around core lifts they will be in all your workouts and you will see the trends in progression. You can accomplish the same thing with a set plan for two rotating weeks.

I’ve even played with splits that rotated in a third week. Just remember that our muscles are made up of fast and slow twitch fiber so rep ranges need to change and recovery needs to happen so training his always a balancing act between balls to the walls and recovery. Rep range is one of the best ways to manage it.

thedietdoc.com/articles/show_article/585

This link will broad outline more of the merit of NLP and then on the same site is the follow up articles outlining a more specific split. He is far more articulate then I would ever be on the topic. :wink:

29

[quote]G87 wrote:
Anyway, I guess this brings us to the whole point of “how often should you hit a muscle”… I remember reading recently that you should get 5 days of rest between working on a muscle in a split, but now I’m wondering if it’s better to split the volume per muscle per week over multiple workouts.

[/quote]

In regards to this point, there is no perfect answer. It depends on a variety of factors, some of which are listed here:

Bigger muscles require more time to recover than smaller muscles

The stronger you are and the more intense you train the more time you need to recover

Fast twitch dominant muscles require more time to recover than slow twitch muscles

The more intense you train the more time you need to recover

The more experienced you are (when training intensely) the more time you need to require

People that have generally larger muscles compared to smaller people usually need more time to recover (think 250 lber vs 150 lber).

Food, hormones, gender, etc also can affect your recovery level.

The short simple answer most people need about 2-5 days of rest when training the small muscles very intensely, and most need 3-7 days of rest when training the large muscles very intensely.

30

I see… From your reply, Tim, your workout makes a lot more sense. i.e. if I do your recomendation:

Monday: Legs (Squats)
Tuesday: Chest and Bis
Wed: Cardio
Thurs: Back and LB (Deads)
Fri: Shoulders and Tris

I’m only hitting quads, chest, back and posterior chain once a week. At the same time, I’m hitting shoulders, tris, bis and calves twice a week. Seems like a cool idea, though I’d probably further split up Thursday’s workout so I have a whole day for deads and assistance workout.

lucky dog - very interesting stuff. From your original post, I’m getting that you only do the big lifts every other week, though: people in this forum usually keep talking about making gains in the same lifts consistently in order to gain size. You also mention doing the “core lifts” in all your workouts, so now I’m a bit confused. How often do you ACTUALLY do them?

31

[quote]G87 wrote:
I see… From your reply, Tim, your workout makes a lot more sense. i.e. if I do your recomendation:

Monday: Legs (Squats)
Tuesday: Chest and Bis
Wed: Cardio
Thurs: Back and LB (Deads)
Fri: Shoulders and Tris

I’m only hitting quads, chest, back and posterior chain once a week. At the same time, I’m hitting shoulders, tris, bis and calves twice a week. Seems like a cool idea, though I’d probably further split up Thursday’s workout so I have a whole day for deads and assistance workout.

[/quote]

You can do it the way you mentioned but is not necessary. You are hitting the posterior chain twice a week (once when squatting and once when deadlifting).

General leg exercises with a bit more focus on the erectors/glutes/hams make for great deadlift assistance exercises, so extra work for the deads is not necessary IMO. Plus deads respond well to a lower volume in terms of total sets performed on them compared to squats or bench. Whatever you do good luck with it.

BTW cool avatar, I love well done fantasy artwork.

32

Exactly. Plus, it can be more than just those smaller muscles getting hit twice a week.

I am a “Doggcrapp Guy”, and Dante is very big on overlapping exercises to bring up lagging bodyparts. For instance…

You mentioned Tri’s getting hit twice a week…once directly on their own, and once indirectly on chest day.

Well, it all depends on what exercises you use on your tricep day and you could very easily work some extra stuff in to help bring your chest up if it is lagging.

Now, lets say you do 3 tricep exercises, and they are skullcrushers, pushdowns, and kickbacks. Are you getting any extra chest work? Definitely not.

However, lets say for your 3 tricep exercises, you decide to use reverse grip bench presses, dumbbell floor presses and dips. These are all generally known as ‘tricep’ movements, but obviously all are going to overlap and hit your chest pretty good as well. Not enough that it’s going to blow your chest out completely and cut into your recovery greatly as if you did a whole extra chest day, but definitely enough to get you some good extra work in there, up your capacity to handle work in that muscle group and give it some extra volume to help bring it up to your stronger bodyparts. The same principles can be applied for basically any bodypart. It just depends on what you want to prioritize at the time.

Also, re: splitting up weekly volume, that is a HUGE debate in the bodybuilding world now and I’m sure will be for years to come. There are guys who are definitely on the volume/trash a muscle side, like Professor X, then there are guys on the frequency side, like Disc Hoss, and you’ll find coaches who advocate both. I think a lot of it is just trying both and seeing what works for you. Some guys will hit the same muscle group 3-4 times a week, some 2, and some 1 and just blow it out.

I’ll say this- 2 is generally a safe bet for everyone it seems, and a good middle of the road approach. The others are going to be more based on how your body responds specifically. I, personally, do MUCH better and grow faster with higher frequency and lower volume than I do on low frequency and high volume, but there are tons of other guys who are the opposite. There really are no cookie cutter answers for it, but if you play around with each for 6-8 week cycles, you can get a pretty good idea, provided the workouts are all logical and your diet is in order, of which path YOU should be following.

For a tremendous learning experience on this subject,I suggest everyone should take a look at Christian Thibaudeau’s Training Strategy Handbook. One of, if not the best, articles ever written on this website.

Kubo

33

Tim
Maybe I can even rotate Good Mornings and Deads to keep the gains coming: I do remember reading about how they respond better to low-rep work.

As for the avatar, thanks. I always try to enter a workout with all the intensity I can muster, and I suppose the avatar is symbolic of that :slight_smile:

Mike

Lots of good ideas. I have Thibaudeau’s black book of training secrets, but there are definitely some gaps in there that your reply, and the article you linked, fill in. I think I can confidently make my own program now. I have 3 more workouts of Stripped Down Hypertrophy left, and, from what I remember of Thibs’ beast building, a program like this should have me primed for split raining. Hurray!

34

I dead off the floor and squat every other week. On the other weeks I still hit hard just not squats and deads (but maybe racks or sumos). I consider bench a core lift for chest. I will bench every week but will rotate which is my heavy excercise flat or incline or db versus bar. I don’t consider a heavy bench as brutal on the CNS as the squat and dead would be. On non squat leg days I will still move a lot of weight on the sled or have another relatively heavy excercise and run it for more reps then I will for working sets on a squat session (I’ll end squats with doubles or slow negatives)

As a side note since I compete I have to make sure I can survive prep and invariably end up overtrained toward the end if not sooner. I’ll know if I’ve taxed my CNS too much. I wont recover, I’ll stop dropping fat, hormones will start being an issue.

35

[quote]MikeKubo wrote:

Also, re: splitting up weekly volume, that is a HUGE debate in the bodybuilding world now and I’m sure will be for years to come. There are guys who are definitely on the volume/trash a muscle side, like Professor X, then there are guys on the frequency side, like Disc Hoss, and you’ll find coaches who advocate both. I think a lot of it is just trying both and seeing what works for you. Some guys will hit the same muscle group 3-4 times a week, some 2, and some 1 and just blow it out.

I’ll say this- 2 is generally a safe bet for everyone it seems, and a good middle of the road approach. The others are going to be more based on how your body responds specifically. I, personally, do MUCH better and grow faster with higher frequency and lower volume than I do on low frequency and high volume, but there are tons of other guys who are the opposite. There really are no cookie cutter answers for it, but if you play around with each for 6-8 week cycles, you can get a pretty good idea, provided the workouts are all logical and your diet is in order, of which path YOU should be following. Kubo[/quote]

This is a great post. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve made my best gains rotating my weeks but I rarely do what others would call real volume just higher for me. I will occasionally throw in some balistic volume but then back to low rep and moderate rep. I’ve seen the most growth and minimized injuries here - plus it keeps my ADD from flaring up :wink:

On the flip I have friends who train with retarded volume and it works for them. Results speak for themselves you just have to learn to tune it to what is working for you.

36

You DO NOT have to overcomplicate this shit.

I’ve always done DL on back day. My lb gets a pump from squats anyway.

Back/Bi’s (dl)
Chest/Tris
Legs
Delts/traps

Fucking simple as shit.