I have been training twice a week for a few months training with a routine approved by Jordan peters himself that looked along the line of:
Split:
monday: Upper Heavy
tuesday:Lower Light
Thursday: upper light
Friday: Lower heavy
I have 3 exercise rotations
Low volume, High intensity (1 rest pause set per muscle group for Upper - while a leg workout could look like leg Press, lunges, db leg curl, glute bridge, still 1 set Rest paused)… quite a DC-esque approach
But I am often missing workouts (I am a surgeon and It Just happens due to my work)
I wanted to know if I could make decent progress if i condensate workouts and do 1 exercise per muscle group (as i al ready do for upper body) INCLUDING quads, hams
To be honest I don’t care about having trunk-like legs so if they grow a bit slower I don’t care (Eg. I like men’s physique proportions)
So i would have 2 workouts
Mon: upper Heavy Lower Light
Thur: upper light Lower heavy
Thanks, of course that comes at the cost of de-prioritising leg work (less work, and later during the workout). Hopefully I’ll still see some progress anyway, even though as far as aesthetics goes, I don’t care about lower body (I have decent legs btw) as much as my upper body
Quick note. Lower body training can stimulate overall growth. It’s also good for CNS adaptation. If you don’t want to prioritize that’s fine, but don’t skip it all together. IMO 2 days a week is minimum already but if medical needs prove to be prohibitive one day is better than no days.
It sounds like your schedule is unpredictable. Are you able to even set it M/ Th that way? The nice thing about an upper/ lower split is they don’t interfere, so on easier weeks you can go often and “earn” those less frequent weeks.
I don’t know your current level of development, but if I were to have just two days a week to commit to training, I feel as though I’d almost certainly want to do an upper day and a lower day that included some arms and maybe shoulders.
Not completely unpredictable, but a couple of days a week spaced by 2-3 rest days should be doable… I don’t really like the idea of having Just One upper and One lower day per week: while you’re right about the fact that It allows for more flexibility (training 2 days in a row), such might cause a LOWER frequency (Eg. The weeks i can only train twice)
To answer your question, yes, you can definitely improve doing twice-weekly full-body workouts. One of my most productive lifting periods was based on exactly that. I had two workouts I’d alternate, resting two to four days between, and doing conditioning or cardio days when i had the time.
Because you’re emphasizing upper body mass, I like @davemccright’s idea while agreeing with @blshaw’s advice. My leg was crushed by a 600-pound boulder, and i couldn’t train my legs for several years. When I could finally start training legs again, my upper body muscle mass and strength both increased, which i attribute to systemic improvement and increased testosterone from leg training.
I think if you did a heavy upper-body day, perhaps with deadlifts or lunges thrown in, along with a lower-body day ending with triple sets of any number of high-rep, upper body combinations (push-ups/ curls/ rear delt flyes; curls/ triceps extensions/ lateral raises; dips/ pullups/ lateral raises; etc) you’d have continued development.
It doesn’t have to de-prioritize legs. There’s no rule that says you have to train them last on a full body split – you can always put them first in the workout. Or alternate. I trained full body 3 days per week for a long time and I would often train legs first in a session. It worked fine.
