Lately, I’ve noticed many coaches and influencers, like Jason Blaha, who used to advocate for full-body splits, now promoting 3-day PPL routines.
Personally, I don’t quite understand why you would do incline press, flat press, and standing OHP on the same day instead of moving the standing OHP to the second upper body day and adding a row instead. This would create a horizontal push/pull, legs and vertical push/pull setup, which, in my view, allows for better intensity management while maintaining similar recovery.
But the main point here is that when I first got into training, frequency 1 was heavily criticized. Now, it’s being considered a perfectly valid option and is even being promoted for the average person with time constraints.
The longer you do this, the more often you will see things come in and out of fashion. Much like how Mike Mentzer is enjoying a new wave of popularity because of Tik Tok. Or how Rippetoe brought back Bill Starr’s training.
The inevitable conclusion is that there are about a million different ways to succeed at getting bigger and stronger, as long we apply the principles of effort, consistency and time.
Right about the time that “Influencers” hit the scene some science nerd published a paper saying high frequency was great.
Influencers didn’t read books, just the internet. So they latched on to this study like it was the only information available. And people who followed influencers believed them.
Later, this frequencey study was shown to be total BS. And the author came out shortly after and said Twice a week was best. But it was too late, the Influencers and the people they influenced had already latched on to 3x per week.
Today, 10 years and several studies later 1.5 times per week (accounting for overlap) is the best frequency, with no noticeable benefit after that. Just like all the old guys on T Nation had been saying for years.
But if you weren’t paying attention between 2014 and 2024 it could seem like this shift happened overnight.
Honestly, I barely know him and don’t follow his content. When I first came across his channel, I watched some of his older videos where he defended fullbody splits for 95% of people. Recently, I checked out his channel again and saw that he’s now promoting PPL splits. Blaha was just an example of the trend I’ve been noticing towards lower training frequencies lately.
Anyway, why does he have such a bad reputation around here? From the few videos I watched, his content seemed pretty decent.
What has always seemed curious to me is that these trends try to establish an optimal frequency that is the same for all muscle groups/movement patterns.
Although I’ve never tried a 1.5 frequency, it makes a lot of sense to me that it could be the one that works best for the majority of people. If one day my current split stops motivating me or working for me, I’ll probably try the 3-day rotating upper/lower split.
This stuff gets tricky, there are all sorts of confounding variables.
Like higher frequency means more practice, so higher frequency is Great for “performance.” Doing 2 sets of pull ups 4 times per week is way, way better than 8 sets of pull ups once a week. To increase the amount of pull ups you can do. But maybe it’s only slightly better for the size of your lats.
Anyway, the way I understand the research, Volume is the Key. You can only do so many sets, and doing higher frequency just means dividing those sets over more workouts. And it takes 72 hours to recover from training. Also, if you hit a body-part twice, the 2nd workout should be about half the volume of the 1st workout.
P/P/L (possibly 4 times per week) or Upper/Lower both fit in that range pretty well.
He is a blubber slug, committed stolen valor, and attacked people for no reason claiming they were lying and using steroids, only to start using steroids himself, at which time he went from blubber slug to blubber slug on steroids.
Many years on down the line, he actually looks relatively normal, but never actually achieved anything near “good” by his own volition and knowledge.
Can’t sleep on this site for a second - all the good responses are already taken!
So I’ll just triple down on:
Blaha looks(ed?) like melted ice cream
Your split is really just a mechanism to get your total volume in. I prefer a body part split, because it’s so foolproof, but some may find they can’t go hard enough on their later lifts (like OHP in your example). In that case, there’s sound logic to move that to another day. When you do that, and improve, we might think it’s the added frequency; it’s more likely that you’re getting in better reps now.
Use the frequency what fits your training style, schedules, recovery and experience. It does not really matter if high frequency groups get slightly better results in studies.
Don’t think there’s a secret formula. Consistent quality effort is the key.
That was way back when, before characters like Sean Ryan and Andrew Bustamante told everybody about the typical routs into being a spook.
A younger dude I knew signed up at a kiosk that they put up at his university for a recruiting drive after 9/11. Not as glamorous as some routes, nor as action packed, but I think he did switch from analyst to agent after several years.
