[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Goodfellow wrote:
Hey prof,
Have you ever considered training your bodyparts 2x a week?
I’ve heard a few pro’s say that bodyparts grow faster only if you don’t end up beating yourself into the ground… As a mortal, you’ll have to reorganize your training some, and not everyone likes training everything twice a week either. Higher frequency is also less joint/tendon-friendly, as they have little metabolism to speak of and need time to recuperate… And even longer to adapt. You can train a muscle 6-7 times a week if you really want to and go about it the right way, but your supporting structure will eventually give. when they train it 2x a week and ronnie coleman did it for quite a while.
I’d try it myself but I don’t know how i’d feel training two muscle groups in the same day, for instance - back & shoulders.
He trained biceps multiple times a week at first, then chest, now(if he still does it) shoulders.
Whatever he wants to/wanted to emphasize, but not the whole body at once like Ronnie does/did.
(you can do everything twice a week, but you’ll need time off more often and chances are you won’t be able to use a routine like the one Ronnie followed/is following. 2 exercises per major muscle-group, one for calves, hams, quads or so would be a better idea for a regular trainee if you wanted to follow such a regimen. Ronnie basically just groups his regular sessions together so that he can do them all in 3 days instead of 6, but he still does 3-5 exercises per bodypart and his sessions are very long.
He does a 4-way leading up to contests with regular frequency, his off-season routine was/is:
1 - Chest, Tris
2 - Legs
3 - Back, Bis, Delts
He had slightly different workouts for the first 3 days of the week vs. the other 3.
If you want to train that way, try
1- chest, back
2- legs, abs
3- delts, arms, order depends on exercise selection though)
or alternatively:
1- chest, bis, tris
2- legs, abs
3- delts, back
for example… That’s one of yates’ splits, but he didn’t train for 6 days straight…)
FWIW:
Delts before back on the same day works fine for me… Does take longer than the usual single bodypart though, of course. I wouldn’t train them after back on the same day, mind you.
You will be shot after heavy back work (or should be, at least) and won’t be able to do them justice, plus a tired upper back makes it impossible to keep a tight setup during overhead work.
My delt+back sessions usually looked something like
- overhead press variant
- lateral raise variant
- pulldowns or rack pullups or whatever for backwidth
- rack pulls with scapular retraction after each lockout (hard to do shrugs after these, so I usually skipped them. But you can throw some in at the end if you want) OR some sort of row, krocs or yates’ or t-bars…
(and here either shrugs if I did rows instead of rack pulls, and/or inverted rows or face pulls and such for shoulder health maybe, or v-handle rows if I wanted to focus a little more on the lats, but I would do them before rack pulls if those were also done on the same day)
(Sorry for the hijack, X)
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Thanks also for this detailed response Ceph.
I’ve been trying to look up ronnie’s training lately, I watched the whole relentless dvd (highly recommend it). Maybe he trained delts/back together in one of his other dvd’s?