Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1772: Can a Split Routine Be Effective for Beginners?

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover the pros and cons of split routines and their appropriateness for beginners. The history behind split routines. (1:53) Are split routines still a part of gym culture? (4:27) Who are split routines for, and what are the pros/cons? (5:47) PRO: Total volume/maximize the pump. (8:13) PRO: Combine exercises. (11:30) PRO: Build lagging body parts. (12:59) PRO: Love going to the gym. (14:30) PRO: Ability to apply advanced lifting techniques. (16:40) CON: Tend to overtrain. (19:22) CON: Intentionally miss workouts. (21:22) CON: Understand the complexity of workout programming. (24:41) CON: Higher risk of injury. (28:15) CON: Be honest with your current dedication to the gym. (29:28) Writing a split routine, the RIGHT way, and the mistakes to avoid. (34:58) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: MAPS Split 50% off! **Use Promo Code 50SPLIT at checkout** Visit Legion Athletics for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** Mind Pump #1745: How To Pack On Muscle To Your Lagging/Stubborn Body Parts Are Split Routines Effective for Beginner Weightlifters? - Mind Pump Blog Full Body Routine vs. Split Routine for Beginners – Mind Pump Blog The Breakdown Recovery Trap, Why You Aren’t Progressing – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, please only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we talk about split routines. Are they effective for beginners? And are they effective for people in general?

So we actually talk about split routines where they came from the pros and the cons and whether or not a split routine is right for you. Now in this episode, because we're talking about split routines, here's what we did. We took Maps split, which is a body builder style, split routine, and we made it 50% off just for this episode. So if you listen to this episode and you decide, you know what split routine sounds

right for me. I want a good, well programmed workout. That's a split map split sounds right. Here's what you got to do. Go to maps split.com. That's MAPS SPL IT.com and then use the code maypssplyt.com and then use the code 50 split. That's 50 SPL IT for that 50% off discount. Also, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Legion. Legion makes some of the best performance enhancing supplements you'll find anywhere. One of my favorites is their pre workout called Pulse.

Now it has the efficacious doses of caffeine and beta alamine and other compounds that help with performance recovery and the pump. Take a dose of pulse 30 minutes before your workout. Watch what happens. It's it'll be one of the best workouts you ever had. They have lots of other products to like weight protein, fish oil, multi vitamins and more. Go check them out, head over to mindpumppartners.com. Click on Legion, use the code MindPump for 20% off. All right, boys, let's do an episode on full body workouts and split workouts.

You know what's funny? I was on a podcast recently and I actually got asked this question about split routines, like what was the deal with them? And it takes me back to memory lane when I first learned about the history. So I'd say my 20s up until that point I had followed lots of split routines and I didn't realize the history of full body workouts. I did a little bit of research and I found that pretty much every strength athlete before I'd say the 1940s or so, 30s, did full body routines where they would work out the whole

body three days a week. And then after that, you started to see more body builders and strength athletes start to do body parts splits. And there were some reasons for this. One of them was that strength athletes started to do this less as a hobby and more as like they placed more focus on it. So they had more time to spend. And what they would do is they would spend more volume and more sets in the full body workouts and found that it became just it wasn't pragmatic to work out for two and a half

hours in a workout. And so bodybuilders started to split things up and say, okay, I'm working my full body, it's taking me two and a half hours. What if I did instead of three days a week and it's six days a week and it did an hour workout each time instead of two and a half hour workout,

three days a week and that's kind of what started bodybuilders down that path. And then programming started to become more complex and you know, so your team's really dominated. Is that simultaneously happening at the same time that PEDs are being introduced? Yes, okay, so it is around the same time. It is and you know, when you look at,

when you send a muscle building signal, it does spike and drop very quickly. So after about 48 to 72 hours, you see this drop in the muscle building signal. So hitting the each body part frequently benefits the natural lifter especially. When you're on anabolic steroids, you have this loud artificial hormonal signal

that says build muscle no matter what. So you get away with not hitting it as frequently. Now that being said, you could still hit the body frequently with the body part split, right? It just depends how you do the split. You don't have to do, you know, chest on Monday and then not hit it again till the next Monday. You can split the body up

so that you hit each body part two, three days a week like you would with a full body routine. So that, yeah, it is true that the anabolic steroids came into the fray at the same time. Nonetheless, the argument that I hear all the time for splits is that it still is the predominant way that advanced lifters work out, even in natural competitions. And I think a lot of it has to do with the just total amount of volume that they're contributing and the fact that they like to work out every single day, right?

Yeah, I think it's still a big part of gym culture in general, especially in the commercial gym setting. I think that bodybuilders did such a good job of like really kind of sort of displaying the body parts split as the best way to ultimately get this physique where you could hyper focus on individual body parts. And you could spend the adequate amount of time really building and developing certain

areas of your body in comparison to taking it from a total body approach. And so I think that was sold very hard in those commercial gym settings. And you still see it today, but there's some good and some bad, which I think we're gonna bring out in this. Are there any bodybuilders that run a full body routine? Are you familiar with any? None that I know of.

They all pretty much do splits that I know of. I haven't seen a full body routine bodybuilder in a long time. There's different kinds of splits allow you to have. There's a lot of complexity. Now, I will say this Justin, because as you were talking, I thought of this because you're the athlete guy, right? You played college sports and you're almost, you've always, almost always been focused on performance and for you aesthetics is kind of a side effect. I think it's safe to say that body parts splits are pretty much mostly

appropriate for bodybuilders or people trying to improve their aesthetics. When it comes to sports and athletic performance, it makes no sense to break the body into body parts. It's all about movement for athletes, but for bodybuilders or people looking to sculpt and shape their body, now you start to see some value in a body parts split. Yeah, it does make sense. And yeah, from an athletic perspective, it's just kind of weird to really single joint

focus and have, when you really need your body to work in unison for these big gross motor movement patterns that you're trying to establish. And so in this setting, it does actually, when you're trying to really focus on your aesthetics and, you know, balance it out, your physique and get certain muscles to respond and grow, you know, there's definitely some value here. Well, I think that's the first main positive thing about splits is that it allows you to really increase the volume on a specific muscle that you, and a lot of times when you're, you know, bodybuilding, you're looking at your physique and you're looking at

what body parts are lagging. And then when you go back to the drawing board or you go to your off-season or getting ready for the next show, when you are programming, you are trying to build in more volume for that specific muscle group. And so, I mean, when you split up the body like that, if let's say I had lagging triceps, nothing stops me from like, I'm going to do all triceps for this hour and get after it like that where you just wouldn't do that in a full body routine. You would dedicate a whole hour to working your triceps out. So I think that's one of the main benefits in like the bodybuilding. And I do want to touch on this because we tend to advocate full body workouts

more than body part splits. But that's because body part splits are more appropriate for people who don't miss workouts. They were super consistent, who trained with lots of volume. And we know that we're talking to a large audience, we're talking to mostly everyday people who want to get more fit. Time is a constraint for a lot of people.

So you have to consider all these factors. Right, but splits are very effective when they're applied properly to the right person. And you said the first one, which is just total volume, right? So if you train the whole body three days a week versus the whole body over six days, you're gonna spend a lot of time in the gym in one workout or three workouts versus six.

Now, there could be some benefit to that where you'll can make it to the gym three days a week. Or you could look at the detriment in the sense that, you know, if you're doing a two hour workout, that second hour isn't super effective. And so like what body parts you leave for the second half of your workout, right? Whereas like you said, Adam, when you're trying to sculpt and shape your body,

today's arm day and my arms are a weakness, why can I spend a lot of time on just training my arms? So the volume per workout aspect really is one of the main positives I would say of a... Oh, it's also great for chasing the pump, right? So, I mean, we talk about the benefits of cycle plasma hypertrophy, right? So trying to fill the muscle belly's full of fluid, nothing, I think, is better than that than doing a split routine because it allows you to dedicate

so much time, work, volume towards a single muscle group where, you know, that's one of the things that even though I love full body routines, I don't get as much of a massive pump as I do if I'm targeting one or two muscles in the entire world. Oh, yeah. Do chest shoulders and triceps on one day versus full body? Right. You're going to get a bigger pump on the chest shoulders and triceps when that's all you're doing versus the full body.

And that has benefits by itself. Yeah. It does. You maximize in the pump. Does a few different things. One is it increases, like you said, it's our plasma hypertrophy. So if you look at a muscle and you analyze the size of the muscle, a percentage of it is due to the actual muscle fibers,

but a larger percentage, believe it or not, is due to all of the non-muscle fiber structures within muscle, which is the fluid, the blood, the glycogen, the capillaries, the connective tissues that are in between the muscle fiber and all that stuff, makes up a larger percentage of the muscle. So when you're trying to develop this visual look, the pump is very important. This is why bodybuilders have valued the pump for so long, is that they know that it contributes to the look of a particular muscle.

And especially if you have a lagging body part, it's in terms of development, getting that muscle to get a really good pump is the first step to bringing up a lagging body part. If you've ever had a lagging body part, you probably also have the same body part be challenging to get a really good pump is the first step to bringing up a lagging body part. If you've ever had a lagging body part, you probably also have the same body part be challenging to get a pump on, right? So if it's your chest, then you know,

yeah, it's hard to get my chest to get a pump unlike my shoulders, which is a strong body part, right? But if I have an entire workout dedicated to just chest that maybe another body part or two, well, that can really focus on getting blood pumped and pulsing. Yeah, and on that end in terms of the, from the performance end of just focusing

on the movement patterns, a lot of times you could be compensating, you can be, overdominant in certain muscle groups and be somewhat, neglecting some of these like a body parts could be a focus if you if you hyper focus them in hypertrophy setting like this. I also found that I mean we talk about the importance of practice right and when you split the body part up in the muscle groups like that I get a lot of practice on one muscle so I also started to piece together like combinations of exercises and how well they went down.

That's a great point. I mean, that body part splits is what led me down realizing, oh, when I do a enclosed bench press and then I go right over to overhead extensions on the cable and I'm like, oh my God, I get this massive. I would have known that unless I was doing a body part split where I was doing so many exercises for just the triceps and messing with so many different companies.

That's a great point. Like, I'll give you another one, right? And I know, especially you Adam, you're going to know this, like a great three exercise combination for a body part would be compound lift, stretch exercise and squeeze exercise. Right? If you do a combination, like, and you could just with any muscle group, you do it with triceps. Okay, dips, there's your compound lift, stretch overhead triceps extension, squeeze tricep press down, right. You can do this with your chest, right, bench press, fly,

cable crossover, right. So combination exercise, being able to combine the right exercises, that'll give you the best pump. You have that ability in a split because you're doing so much in one workout. Yeah, you're not doing that in a full body routine where you're only doing a few sets of one for that one muscle. Right, right. You're not gonna do three exercises

like you listen for four or five sets. Yes, yes, much. One of the biggest pluses with a body part split routine is it allows you to really pick up lagging body parts. If I know today is back day and that is a weak body part split routine is it allows you to really pick up lagging body parts. Like if I know today is back day and that is a weak body part, rather than a full body workout where I'm only doing one exercise for back today, I'm doing three or four. I am really, it really lends itself well to focusing on the squeeze, the feel, the pump. And also something that isn't talked about a lot when it comes to building muscle, which

is strength endurance. We talk a lot about maximal strength, how much weight you can lift with one rep. We talk a lot about even hypertrophy rep ranges, but we don't talk too much about strength endurance. If you take a power lifter and you have them trained with a body builder in a full workout, the power lifter is going to crush at the beginning of the workout. But you keep following the workout towards the end and you watch the power lifter is going to crush at the beginning of the workout, but you keep following the workout towards the end and you watch the power lifter because that's because the bodybuilder has this ability to set after set after set to perform. That's how I was always able to get Justin.

He's technically stronger than me and most list but then we have by 45 minutes in though. Get so stronger. Super sets man. We've had a little fast. Where you at now guy. But that does contribute to hypertrophy. Yeah. The ability to do set after set and body builders

can do that very, very well. In fact, that's quite unique to body builders, right? Is to be able to do set after set on a muscle group and continue to perform, whereas other people are like, I'm not, you know, just six sets, I'm totally tapped out. Well, you know, you can't do that in a full body routine because it's just too much volume in a workout,

but with a split, when you're only doing two or three body parts or one body part, you can definitely do that. Well, and it's also very beneficial for someone who really likes to go to the gym. Like, if you're one of the things that I don't like. I'm so glad you said that, because we have a lot of fitness fanatics that they're like, what do I do on my days off?

I do. Right, or they just, they really want to go to the gym six days or seven days a week. Yeah. And I could totally relate to that. I like when I was in my routine of, you know, right after lunchtime, I was going to the gym for an hour. Like I liked being in there seven days a week and just would modify and change or focus on just a single body part that I was lagging like you were saying earlier.

Like one of those, one of the things I liked about a split routine is it allowed me to be able to go to the gym basically every day and pump up a muscle group because I could just split up the body in a way that allowed it to. And you can't, I don't like when people discredit that because that's a behavioral thing

that I think is really important. If you're someone that loves going to the gym daily, okay, I'm one of those people. Obviously, I made it my career to work in gyms, right? I love it. So we can't discredit that. You love going to the gym every day. Okay, well, why don't we divide your workouts up and divide your body parts up? So you can work out every single day because part of the value of exercise isn't just the

results you get on your physique, it's also the quality of life that you get from it and how much you enjoy it, right? So if you like to work out every single day, a full body routine you can't necessarily, I mean, you can, I guess you could do mobility and stretching stuff like that, but I get it for the muscle building fanatic, but I want to go to the gym and lift, I want to lift every single day. Well, splits allow you to do that. want to go to the gym and lift? I want to lift every single day. Well, splits allow you to do that. Now you're in the gym six days a week.

Yeah. You're not over training and you're lifting weights every single one of those days. Well, as much as I love compound lifts and I love performance training, it is fun. It's a fun change of pace to really focus in on the feel of the muscle. Like you said, the stretch, the squeeze,

these other attributes that your muscle provides focus in on the feel of the muscle. Like you said, the stretch, the squeeze, you know, like these other attributes that your muscle provides that you could train it that way and get a completely different experience. And I think that it provides a lot of value to give it different type of stimulus as well. Yeah, you also have the ability now to apply advanced intensity techniques.

So like if today's back day, and I'm doing, I don't know, four exercises for back, three sets each, so 12 sets and a whole workout, well now a drop set, harsh holes, right? Super sets at the end or whatever. Now it starts to make sense because I'm hammering that muscle group in one workout. It doesn't make sense of the full body workout so much.

If I'm doing one exercise for back, you're gonna be one of the best ones. Yeah, I got straight set, barbell row. So I never get to apply strip sets, I never get to apply partials because it just doesn't make sense. It's not really a worthy trade. But if it's only back day,

now there may be some value to applying some of these advanced training techniques. So you can have a lot of fun with them But if it's only back day, now there may be some value to applying some of these advanced training techniques. You can have a lot of fun with them and there's value in them. Now I don't think you should do them all the time. But if you're advanced throwing them in here and there, it makes more sense in a split workout. And you can start to derive value and benefit from them.

Primarily being the pump, the ability for a muscle to handle lots of volume in one workout, the strength endurance I talked about, full body workouts certainly lend themselves well to doing that so much. Yeah, this is where it would make sense to see a bunch of isolation or cable exercises or machine exercises in a day because you're just hitting that one muscle group. Normally we would say, okay, if you're doing your back, how dare you miss one of the biggest compound lifts for it, but that's okay, you're in a split,

and you're gonna come back and hit back on other day, or maybe you did really heavy rows three days earlier, and so you're still a little sore for that, so I'm gonna go all cables and machines that day. So, it allows you to kind of modify things, I think, a little bit differently when you're focused just on one muscle. Yeah, and by the way, when you do a split, that means some of your workouts are going to be

really hard and some are going to be not so hard. They have to be. Leg day. You know, if I'm in the gym doing 20 sets for legs, that's going to be a brutal workout. Right. I go in the gym and I'm doing, you know, 30 sets for arms. Still, it's going to be easy. Yeah.

In comparison. So, you get this, you get this nice, tight trading effect of intensity. And you also have oftentimes more recovery time in between workouts. Splits typically will train the whole body twice a week. If you look at the way splits are designed, good ones are about twice a week. Full body routines typically revolve around three days a week. So you get a little bit more recovery time in between body parts. Now, of course, you make up for it with increased volume. But if you're used to a full body routine where you're hitting the whole body three days a week, going to a higher volume, maybe less frequent type of workout, go from

three to two, you may see some additional benefit from doing that. But also too, I mean, if we're gonna start talking about maybe some, some negatives that, that stand out for me like if you're, if you're, for instance, all entire leg day, I would, I, and I've been through this myself, it's very easy to over train. Yeah. And to, to get too much of volume for that day when you go to repeat them, you know, later that week, it's, it makes it very hard to get through that. Yeah, because you get caught up in the mentality of today's shoulders,

today's biceps and triceps, today's legs. So then you start to get caught up in the mentality of like, well, I gotta push through, yeah. And destroy my body part. And so in my experience, this is why I like split routines for people who are a little more advanced. People who aren't as advanced, they tend to go there and they tend to over train doing

a split. So that overtraining potential is higher, mainly because of the mentality. You know, today I'm only doing two body parts, but I need to leave the gym and feel like I did when I did a full body workout. It's a totally different feeling. Well, this is why I think our splits for someone who is just starting in the gym, why it is, this is the main reason why it's not good for them. It's really hard for a beginner to know how to judge intensity.

That's something that you learn over time and practice. And you give a client a hour to do one or two muscles. It good luck not overdoing that. I mean, either one, they're going to go, they're going to grossly over train it, or they're going to under train it because they're so concerned that they're going to over train it so they don't do anything intense at all and they just kind of touch weights for an hour. But that's why I don't like it for a beginner is that, you know, the beginner is still trying to learn their body and figure out like, you know, what happens when I do these this exercise, that exercise, at this intensity to do,

how sore do I get? Real, real hard to gauge that when you're doing four, five different exercises for three to four different sets in an entire workout. It's just, it's a ton of volume. Yeah, another reason why, and this is probably one of the main reasons why I don't recommend splits to a lot of people, except for people who are, you know, again, more advanced and consistent, is that what you tend to see, because as a show, as a trainer to coach, and we all do this, the three of us talk this way, when we train clients, we don't just look at the month or the, you know, the two month period, we've trained people for years, so we look at the big picture, and people tend to miss workouts.

Unless you're really, really consistent, like I said, if you're advanced and consistent, this doesn't apply, but if you're like the average person, you miss workouts, and you tend to skip the workouts that you don't like, and so they tend to be the same workouts, like the guy that skips leg day or the woman that skips arm day. So it's like, yeah, I got a split routine six days a week. But if you look over the course of a year, I missed, you know, 12 workouts and, you know, nine of them were leg day. So it's like, that didn't happen on accident. I think a lot of times, too, people don't even realize what they're doing. In other words, like, like you say that statement, and I know there's people, because I was this person who would be like,

well, I don't intentionally skip leg day, I don't do that. But what I would do is this, because rarely ever did I have a whole year of five days a week training with no interruption, it's very common that once a month, you know, or at least every other month, there's some sort of an interruption there

where I miss four or five days, and then I go back to gym. Well, when I would go back in the gym, I'd always start my routine back with my favorite muscle groups, or like back where the routine started, like just days on Monday, and then it would go to, you know, shoulders and back, and it's like, so what would end up happening is I would fall off, and maybe I fell off on Thursday, and let's say Friday was leg day, but then I was off for a whole week. I'm gonna start back up on Friday. Yeah, I start back over again.

I don't start on legs where I left off. Where ever to your strengths. And it took me a long time to really start at the piece that together that, wow, I've been doing this for years, and that does add up over years of lifting consistently. And one of the things I did to change that is now, no matter what, I always start with the lagging body part. So if I have a two or three day interruption,

even if the last thing I did, so let's say, and I did this a lot when I was trying to develop my shoulders, my shoulders were lagging body part. I needed to develop that. I hit shoulders on Monday, let's say, you know,, I missed Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So I would start back at shoulders, even though I was due for say, back legs or something else, because that's a lagging body part. And even though I didn't miss it that week, I never wanted to miss that because it was a lagging body part. Yeah, this is why I think splits are, can be excellent for the dedicated and the consistent and not great for the undeticated or the inconsistent.

So if you're a fitness fanatic and you don't miss workouts, splits are great. If you miss workouts, splits are not so great because with a full body workout, if you miss a workout, or you're still hitting your whole body again, the next time you work out, if you miss a workout and a split, I can guarantee you over the course of a year, it's usually

the workouts that you don't like the most. So if you're hardcore, you're consistent, you're super serious about your results, you've got some experience, split routines are phenomenal. If that's not you, you're probably better off doing a full body. Well, it also requires a bit more understanding around programming. Totally. You have way more complex. When you are hammering a single body part or two, you have to, and this doesn't matter if you're doing body parts with a full body, when you program period, you should be programming in a way that you're also thinking about future workouts,

right? I mean, when you look at, when you unpack a maps program, when we sit down on those conversations and we start, okay, we wanna do this on day one. It's not just throwing exercises for a part of us. No, it's not just that workout. All of us are writing that going like, okay, well, if they do this, this, this,

when we ask them to go do legs again or back or whatever on Wednesday again, we have to take into consideration what they just did on Monday and what they're probably going to feel like. How taxed they are. Yeah, on Wednesday. So that means we probably shouldn't run at twice Z exercise because that's going to be too much intensity. So we want to be somewhere. So you have to think of those things.

This is where it becomes extra difficult to program in compound lifts and the major. Yeah, like where do you put deadlifts back there? Or where do you put them? And unfortunately a lot of times you'll see people just end up gravitating towards machines or maybe less effective type exercises to fill that space because the focus is that body part

and this is just an easier way to accomplish that, which then isn't moving them forward and giving them quite as much progress as they'd hoped for. Yeah, like try to do a chest exercise that doesn't involve shoulders and triceps, right? Try to do, like, where do you put dead lifts in a body part split? Like, programming workouts, there's a lot that goes into it,

and unless you're an experienced coach or trainer, it doesn't seem that way because on its surface, on its face, it looks like, oh, it just exercises in body parts and yeah, I know 10 exercises per body part. No, it's way more complex. When you're adding days to the routine, you're adding more variables. Here's a simple example, right?

Let's say you work out Wednesdays, back, and Thursdays, legs. Okay, so do you deadlift on on Wednesday? And if you do, then can you squat the following day? Probably not. You're deadlifting hard on Wednesday. You ain't squatting the day after. So if you do wanna deadlift on Wednesday,

then the next day you work out legs, you might wanna do something like lunges, or Bulgarian split fan squats, or leg presses. For example, right, this is presses. For example, right? This is just one silly thing, right? Or what if I do hamstrings and I want to do heavy stiff leg肌 delifts? Well, then how does that affect squats or how does that affect that lifts on the day before?

Or what if I'm doing heavy bench press and then the day after shoulders and I do an overhead press. My shoulders still soar or tired from. So there's all these programming questions. So whenever a average person writes a split routine for themselves, I can pick it apart way easier than I can when someone writes a full body workout. Because a full body workout, less room for air. Less room for air.

Now that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of program that goes in a full body workouts, but there's less variables, way less variables. So split routines tend to be, if I had to take all workouts and categorize them by good programming or bad programming, a greater percentage of split routines would be a bad programming than full body workouts. So if you are doing a split routine, the value and in following one that's well-written and proven is much higher than it would be to do a full body workout because you want one that's written expertly

because there's lots of things you might not consider. And this is actually why, this is a fact now, people would think it's the opposite, but it's not true, injuries tend to occur higher in split routines. I think that doesn't make sense. Full body workouts you should get hurt more. No, tends to be split routines

because people don't consider the previous workout, how it affects today's workout, how that affects tomorrow's workout, how this week's workout affects next workout. No, with splits, there's almost always either in over application of compound lips or an under application of them. Yes.

It's rare because they're on the side of all isolation machines. Yeah, so that's what you'll see. And that's what my biggest critique on a lot of bodybuilding routines that you see out there is they're just all isolation. They completely ignore all the compound lifts. It's like, Jesus, those are the biggest bang for your buck. Then you go the other direction where someone's like,

oh, I know those are all great exercises. I gotta make sure they get them in. Then there's too much of it for somebody who's training five, six days a week. So that balance of how to integrate the lifts with the biggest bang for your buck, the right amount in a week without overdoing it. So you get stuck in that recovery trap you talked about.

That's difficult to do in a split. It's more difficult to do than I think in a very straight forward, full body routine, two to three times a week. Now, one of the positives we talked about also can become a negative. Earlier we talked about how a positive would be that you get to work out more often. That can also be a negative for some people. If you're, you know, you got a family, you got a job, and you're just being realistic

with yourself, you're like, I'm not going to be able to go to the gym consistently five days a week or six days a week. Okay. And splits not for you. It's not for you. Just don't do it. You're better off doing a full body routine. So that can be a, come a negative.

It could definitely become a negative that you're in order to hate your entire body adequately and appropriately and with maximum effectiveness and not neglect body parts and not create imbalances, you don't want to skip workouts. Well, if there's six, if six out of seven days requires you go to the gym, the odds that you're going to miss a workout goes up through the roof. So you have to be very honest with yourself. Unless you're dedicated hardcore, consistent, and have some experience, then more days in the gym becomes a negative. Now, if you are all those things, more days in the gym becomes positive. Well, it really, I mean, this is why there's so much value in learning both and utilizing both because it just depends on what season of life you're in.

If you've been listening to this podcast since the beginning, you definitely heard me advocating for going to the gym seven days a week at one point. There was a period there for several years where I was like, when we were first talking about full body routine and Sal was talking about training three times to four times a week. And I'm like, no, I like to go seven days and that's where I was at in my life.

I was going seven days a week and I like to train that way. I don't train that way right now. So now my routine looks more like a full body routine than it does look like any sort of a body parts split. So it really depends on where you're currently at in your life and what your current goals are. My goals right now have very little to do

with sculpting and changing my body. It's more maintaining, staying healthy, staying mobile, staying strong and just overall, like that's where I'm at. Where I was beginning this podcast, I was in the heat of sculpting and building a physique. You were competing. Yeah, so I think it's important that no matter who you are, that you understand the nuances of both types of programming and know when and how to use them for yourself. Now I'm going to add to that because I like to work out every day, not for the... I enjoy this too, but this isn't the main driver. I do like the physique effects since

sculpting my body, and that's all fun. But the main reason why I like to work out every day is it's a form of meditation for me, and I start my day that way. So I wake up in the morning, and I work out. It's the first thing that I do and I notice when I work out first, I better at work, I'm better, I'm more patient with my kids and my wife and I have more energy and I feel better. So I would prefer to work out daily and in pick my favorite form of exercise daily, which is strength training, just because I enjoy it the most. So a body part split would work more in that case, right? Versus where it's full body three days a week.

Now I've got three other days, I gotta think of something else to do in the morning. And sure I can think of things to do, I could do mobility, I could do other types of exercises, maybe some conditioning work. And I might do that in the future, but right now, I like to lift, and I like to do it every single day,

but not necessarily for the sculpting effects, although that falls along with it, but rather, I like starting the day off that way. So whether that's a pro or a con, you gotta be very honest with yourself. Again, if you're dedicated hardcore, your physique is very important to you. This is where you're at in your life

and you've got some experience, it could be a plus. You got other stuff to go on in your life. Five or six day week routine is not necessarily. I think that's one of the main reasons why we highlight like total body workouts is you're every day average person. I don't think they consider what kind of dedication it requires. Yeah. For you to pull off a split and it's always something that aesthetically, maybe driving you in that direction. But there's a way to get that aesthetic version with total body workouts.

But if you're truly somebody who is really fine tuning and sculpting and really getting after it, and you're not phased alive, like I had him saying, this may apply perfectly for your goals. I don't think it's just aesthetics that's driving people to do this too. I think it's just the motivation and the hype energy you have when you're starting, right?

Like, how many times you guys have a client to down with you and they're like, I'll do six days a week, you know, because they're all fired up. It's like, something has to fall in. Yeah, I mean, it's a New Year's resolution, whatever, and they're like, I'm all in now. It's like, okay, wait a second.

The last, you know, five years of your life, you've been in the gym five times. And you're telling me now that you wanna go five, six days a week. And they really believe it because they're so motivated at that moment. But I think it's responsible for you as a coach or a trainer to be like, okay, listen,

you haven't done that yet. So why don't we start here? And then eventually we can move into like a split routine where you're coming in six days a week and I write you something different, but let's first build that consistency. Yeah, now that being said, if you're relatively fit and you've been consistent for six months to a year, and I mean consistent, like you haven't missed workouts, you're seeing progress, you feel good, and you want to take your body to the next level, a split will do that. Like a good split routine is going to really take you to the next level.

And some of the results that people get from a good, well-programmed split routine, I mean, are unparalleled. They really are. But you got to have all those prerequisites first. Now, we wrote a split routine called map split and we waited. I was actually, I want to wanna say the fourth or fifth program that we wrote and we specifically did that because we knew if we wrote it before,

first everybody would have done that and ignored the other programs. But we waited, we waited because we wanted to make sure people had the tools and then we sat down and said, okay, let's write a split routine the right way, let's programming so that it works well. So that, and by the way, here's some mistakes that you've seen a lot of split routines.

Mistake number one, they hit the whole body once a week. Big mistake, I don't care if you do full body, I don't care if you do split, studies are very clear on this. The best results that you'll get in your body is when your body parts are hit two to three times in a week. So how do you accomplish this with a split? Well, that means that two days in that week. So how do you accomplish this with a split? Well, that means that two days in that week,

you're hitting chest and back or two days in that week you're hitting shoulders and arms and legs, right? So you can still do a split, but still hit your body with adequate frequency. The split routines that are always subpar for most people are the ones where... One day you crush it, then you rest seven.

Yeah, and you're not hitting it at all, right? Here's number two, big mistake. Going to failure on every set. This is a mistake for most workouts, but especially for a six day week routine, split routine. Just too much intensity all the time, too much volume. And then the third mistake is junk volume. This is when people don't know how to program workouts properly,

and they do what you said Adam, where because they are like, oh man, I'm my back is sore from deadlift, so I can't squat and my shoulders are sore from bench pressing to like our finishers. So it's just a bunch of isolation exercises. Well, today's shoulders, but I don't want my triceps to get tired,

so I'm doing laterals and cable laterals and cable flies and all this isolation exercises. And so those are the three mistakes not hitting the whole body frequently enough, throwing failure at everything and just a bunch of junk volume because they don't know how to program properly. So if you see those in your split routine, throw it away, it's not effective. And that's what gave split routines kind of a bad name in my book. And that's why we push people to go full body. But if you're gonna do a good SplitRoutine,

follow a good one and of course we wrote one called MapSplit. And I do believe because we're talking about this episode, I got clearance here from Doug, that we're gonna make that one 50% off for this episode. Is that thumbs up? That is a thumbs up. Okay, so you can follow MapSpl split, which we wrote. It's a split routine. You're in the gym, I believe six days a week if I'm not mistaken. One day's a mobility day

if I'm not mistaken. So if you want to sign up, you go to maps split.com. So MAPS SPL IT.com and then the code for the 50% off discount on that is 50 split. So 5.0 SPL IT. Look, if you want more free information from us, head over to mindpumpfree.com. And you can also find us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin. Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam. And you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal.

Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump Media.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps for performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming,

designed by Sal, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family.

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