Ep 242 – What’s the Best Training Program?

Is there really a “best” training split? In this episode, Ben and Sawyer break down the most popular workout splits: bro splits, push-pull-legs, upper/lower, and full-body training, and explain how to choose the right one based on your goals, recovery, schedule, and lifestyle.

They share personal experiences, common mistakes lifters make when chasing “optimal,” and why flexibility, sustainability, and long-term planning matter more than any single program. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced lifter, this episode will help you train smarter, not just harder.

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TRANSCRIPT

[Ben]

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins and Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Ben. And I’m Sawyer.

Welcome to the show. Today we’re going to be talking about training splits. What is the best training split?

Is there a best training split? We’ll talk about some of the training splits that we’ve followed over the years. Popular ones from the body part or bro split to push-pull legs to upper-lower.

How to know what split is right for you. We’ll cover all of that and more today. But before we get into that topic, as we usually do, I’d love to catch up with you for a little bit, Sawyer.

It feels like it’s been a while since we had a little face-to-face conversation here. We’ve been going back and forth. Obviously we talk over text pretty frequently and we’ve been doing some coaching together as well.

So we get to touch base on a pretty frequent basis outside of obviously everything work-related as well. So I know you’re going to the East Coast later this week and I’m sure there’s a lot of logistics going on and last-minute things that you’re tidying up. So what’s going on with you?

Just a lot of downsizing mostly. So far it’s been us organizing stuff because we’re only bringing a few bags. It’s been cool and challenging to pare down stuff.

You feel more free, I guess, but you also are like, man, I really like some of this stuff but I don’t really need it. So that’s been going on. And then seeing family and friends and stuff has been cool but also a little bit sad because we’re going away for a while.

Yeah, it’s lots of mixed feelings like everything else. How long are you guys planning on being over there for? So we’re going to the East Coast for a couple weeks but we’re going to go and be in Europe for at least a year is the plan.

So that’s a little bit of a long time to not see family for unless they come visit or whatever. And also there’s just a whole lot of stuff we’re not going to need to bring. So it’s just a lot of sorting through those kinds of things and then saying we’ll see you guys later kind of stuff.

And some people are taking it easier than others. But it’s been cool. It’s like gearing up for an adventure.

You always have mixed feelings of like, oh god, this is going to be uncomfortable or this is going to be exciting. And I don’t know, it’s cool. It’s a challenge.

It’s what we were thinking about the other day, how we’re at the stage of life where a lot of our friends and family are having babies and that’s their new adventure. And we just are taking a different one. And yeah, I’m excited for it.

Definitely. That’s awesome, man. Yeah, my girlfriend was looking at her phone the other day and I feel like every time she goes on her Instagram, it’s like, oh, these old friends of mine just got engaged or they’re getting married or they’re having a kid or whatever.

So I definitely feel like I’m getting to that point in my life, not as much with my kind of friend group or friends from home. Slowly, I think, you know, there’s a couple people that I went to school with who have gotten married or engaged, that sort of thing. Kids, I don’t think quite yet because, you know, mid to late 20s, not quite, but I’m sure in the next couple of years.

One more question about Europe. Where are the places that you’re planning on visiting? So the plan right now is just go to Barcelona for at least the three months that our visa there lasts.

And then maybe after that, if we don’t have a visa situation there, then we go to like Ireland for the summer or something. Maybe. The tricky part is that we have our dog and he’s a pit bull.

So he’s banned in like, I don’t even know what, I don’t even know what is technical. Like he’s a staffie, Staffordshire, whatever, something. Anyway, point is they don’t like him there.

And so we’re like, OK, so we got to figure out some countries that he’s not banned in or like the restrictions are not too crazy. And that’s going to be a big issue, especially because he’s so dog reactive and stuff like that. So that’s going to be the biggest thing to navigate.

But otherwise, I think we’re going to be just doing a little bit of moving around as necessary. And then hopefully we’ll find a place that feels like, OK, this is probably where we want to be for the majority of the year, if not more, you know, so we’ll see. Awesome, man.

I’m hoping that maybe I can get over there at some point for a little visit. Yeah, there’s some definitely some countries there that I want to tick off my bucket list. Yeah.

Which ones? Well, most of the I’ve been to the UK. I would love to go back.

I really liked my first time there, but I haven’t been to Wales or Ireland or Scotland or any of the other countries kind of in that area. I haven’t been to Scandinavia. I’m part Swedish.

I have family there. So that would be cool to be able to go there. I do have family there.

I would love to go to some of the more Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy. I’ve been to France briefly. I’ve been to Austria briefly, Netherlands briefly, but haven’t spent a lot of time at any of these places.

So Germany, I’d love to go there. Yeah. But a bunch of different countries, really.

And it’s cool that they’re all so close by and you can make it, you know, us going from one state to another state, really like them going from one country to another country. But like the culture shift going from country to country is huge. Whereas here, the culture shift going from state to state, you know, it kind of is a gradual transition, right?

As you go across the United States or down. So I think it’s really uniquely placed. Yeah.

Maybe we should do like a festival, like maybe if we did an Oktoberfest or something in Germany, it’d be crazy. That’d be cool. Sure.

It’d be packed, but I want to do some like, yeah, bucket list item, things like that too. So that would be cool. Maybe we’ll have to talk more about like what your timeline looks like and stuff, but I would love to have you come out.

That’d be so cool. For sure, man. And how’s everything going with your kind of fitness stuff right now?

Where, you know, where are you at mentally, physically? You might want to update, you know, people. Just call this a check-in.

Yeah. I mean, everyone, everyone enjoys, I think, hearing personally what the coaches here are up to and what they’re doing and working on. So I think it would be cool to give people a little insight into where, you know, what, what are your, what are your goals right now?

What are you working towards?

[Sawyer]

Sure.

[Ben]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, since we kind of pumped the brakes on the deficit, it’s been first of all, really nice to not be as hungry.

I still have a little bit at the end of the day, but it’s more likely to do with the fact that I’m just like sneaking in a little more treats here and there. But weight is maintaining really well. So I think you made the right call on the number of calories there.

I’m pretty much going to 2400 every day. You’re like 22, 24. And then I just like always go to 24 or like 30, you know, 23 something just to be sure I’m not going over.

But that’s been good. I’ve been excited to see training improvements already, which is really nice, like pretty significant from, from where I was. I mean, granted, I haven’t done that many since I’ve increased calories because I got sick around the time I increased calories, but from the ones that I have done, I’m like, oh yeah, it’s coming back.

Like I feel, I feel stronger. I feel better. I feel like I can go for longer, which is really nice.

And, and then just like in terms of lifestyle, it’s been nice to not have a stringent of calorie requirements too. So I’m still being pretty like diligent about tracking and everything and, and making sure that I’m not going over. Cause I don’t want to undo all the hard work, but it’s nice to be not as like, I don’t know.

I like, you know, not as hungry really. It was the big, that was the biggest impediment to my progress was just feeling like I was just getting hungrier and hungrier and it’s distracting. But then the training performance just, it was hard to keep it up with, you know, you have to like make sure that the meal timing is really well, like really well placed for both of those things.

So I just felt like kind of managing an extra, extra thing. It was almost like having an extra task attached to your job or something that like, or new responsibility that was like hanging over you at all times. So it feels nice to like kind of put that down for a while.

Dope dude. Just for the listeners. So Sawyer and I have been doing a dieting phase for the past couple of months.

We may have talked about it in previous episodes, but it’s been a little while. So he started dieting at around 180 pounds and now is around 165. So it’s, you know, it’s close to kind of that 10% body weight loss, which is usually where I’ll have people kind of pause their diets, especially if they’re feeling hungry, tired, lethargic, low energy.

And that’s kind of a consistent pattern and theme. And it’s not just, you know, a couple of days here and there. And so what we are doing now is trying to maintain the body weight that he is at essentially, and kind of slowly increase his calories if possible.

And basically over the next six, eight, 10, maybe 12 months, the plan is to slowly bring his body weight up probably, you know, five to seven pounds, somewhere in that range and take a really gradual approach to gaining. And then from there, perhaps do another diet down to a similar body weight that where he’s at right now, and that would be a pretty quick diet or maybe even a little bit lower, try to get a little bit leaner. So it’s kind of open-ended, but for right now, what we’re doing is bringing him out of that deficit gradually and making sure that he is getting back to productive training in the gym.

And that isn’t, like he said, an impediment on his lifestyle. And he’s able to adhere to that, you know, over the long term, which is obviously important for anything that you’re doing. So yeah, yeah, I just wanted to give people an update on, you know, what we’ve been doing.

That’s a really good summary. Yeah. And I think it does really help to have kind of a long-term plan.

I mean, this could be a good segue maybe into the topic, but basically having a long-term plan for nutrition, fitness, you know, anything that you’re trying to accomplish, because I think it’s so, it’s, it’s so much easier to be emotionally reactive when you don’t have one. Like, I think that was what I was falling into when I didn’t have you as a coach. It was like, it was, it was hard not to get caught up in the emotions of the moment, right?

As much as I know about fitness and stuff, it doesn’t protect you from the fact that you’re going to be pushing into some discomfort in any one of these areas. And that discomfort is going to start pushing you to be like, hey, maybe you should stop, right? Or hey, maybe you should push harder, even though it’s not sustainable or whatever.

And so even if you know the tools, you don’t necessarily know when to deploy them because you’re going through the motions. You’ve got some momentum behind you. You maybe don’t want to stop, or maybe you’re super uncomfortable, but you could be doing it a little bit better and you need to push harder if you want to get to the results you want.

So it’s like a, you always have to like have a kind of a gauge on like how much of my, my thoughts and my actions being influenced by the discomfort that I’m in right now. And is there a way to resolve the discomfort as opposed to just like, you know, caving immediately versus sometimes it is a good idea to pump the brakes even if you don’t feel like that’s emotionally what you want to do. So you’ve been very good and instrumental about helping me just like think through that process, even when I’m uncomfortable, even when I’m hungry and making sure that’s the right move, you know, from, from every standpoint, especially from having a long-term plan, I think is the best, you know, so I really appreciate that.

I’ve been saying it to you probably every time we talk, I’m like, dude, that’s, it’s been a game changer this year, just having you help me weigh in on things and like, kind of just get it all out, all my feelings. And then you’d be like, yeah, that makes sense. I wouldn’t give that too much credit.

You know what I mean? You’re kind of helping me pick through the most important parts and then make a long-term plan from that, which is hugely valuable in my opinion. Absolutely.

That’s a big part of coaching is just helping people understand when their emotions about certain things are being helpful and when they’re informing decisions and when they are perhaps leading you down a wrong path. And usually it’s just hard to be objective when you are looking at that for yourself. And I think having a plan for, you know, an action plan for when certain things come up, like, okay, if I am hungry, I will do like XYZ things and having kind of steps that you go through as well.

Like those are things that you’ve developed over the years of just working on yourself. But then I think it’s also helpful to have somebody there to say, you know, okay, this is normal for you to experience this, or maybe this is a bit abnormal. And actually that’s a sign that we need to do something differently.

And like you said, especially if you’re kind of the type where you might push yourself harder and harder and harder and not know exactly when to pull back. And then it kind of slingshots the other direction. I’ve definitely experienced that myself.

That can, you know, that can set you back. So it’s nice to have somebody in your corner who can kind of, like you said, be that voice of reason. Definitely.

I’m wondering, do you have, have you had experiences with either clients or yourself or, you know, maybe bodybuilding, you know, people, you know, who feel that way about, I mean, nutrition is a very common one because fat loss and all that stuff is very emotional, I think for a lot of people. But do you, do you get that with training? Like, do you see people like being like, I’m a diehard, this kind of split person, or do you feel like people are more fluid with how they change things up usually?

I would say with most things, it’s the boring answer, but it depends on the person. I think the people who tend to have more, I don’t know if addictive is the right word, but people who tend to be very strongly opinionated about most things, I think that tends to apply to, to something like training or fitness. I mean, you see it in, you see it in politics, you see it in nutrition, you see it, you see it in so many different places where some people just have a tendency to be less open-minded.

And when they really latch onto a certain idea, they will. And usually when they have some sort of personal connection to that idea, like this, this idea is something that made a positive impact in their life, but it maybe didn’t work for other people, then there’ll be a very staunch advocate of that thing. So whether that’s, you know, low volume, high intensity training, whether that is, you know, you got to do the big three, you got to do barbell exercises, you know, if you want to get big, you need to lift super heavy, you know, you could fall into any sort of camp and that could lead you to believe that because it worked for me, it’s going to work for everybody else and everybody else should be training that way. And then there are other people who are a lot more experimental.

They like to try different things. They like to try different training splits because they truly want to see what is the best that I can achieve. And I think the people who really have that mindset should be open-minded because if you want to be able to be your best, you would, in my opinion, you would want to turn over every stone, try everything.

And yeah, there’s something to be said like, okay, if something’s working for you, you don’t necessarily need to change it right now. But if you’re not open-minded to at least seeing other approaches, trying other approaches, and again, like coaching can come in for this because you might not be able to really have the impetus to do that unless you have somebody telling you like, no, I think you have been like overlooking this thing. Let’s try to change that.

Yeah. I mean, in my case, I feel like I was pretty, I mean, okay. So when I first started training, I was very much like, I want to try everything and I want to train as much as humanly possible and just like super gung-ho for it.

And, you know, quite frankly, when you’re young, you don’t really have that many responsibilities. So you can kind of train that way and it’s fine. And I think after a while, you know, law school and everything, like I felt like it was, it got not, I don’t know, I guess I just didn’t want to be in the gym as much.

And so it kind of changed to like a five-day-a-week thing, which was still kind of a lot. And then, and then I was like in that five-day-a-week thing for a long time and I would try to go down to four, but then I felt like, oh, there’s just little things I can’t do or certain amount of volume I can’t do when I go down to four. So I would stay at five.

And that wasn’t that big of a problem in most seasons of my life. But when I was cutting, it was, and then I would get, I would kind of get run down into the ground when I was cutting. And then when you came on board and you were like, let’s do every other day training.

And I just kind of went with it because I was like, all right, I’ve tried this long enough with the five-day-a-week thing. And it just wasn’t, it didn’t feel good. That was a big game changer because it allowed for much more recovery.

And I guess too, as you get, as you get stronger in your lifting journey, things take more of a toll, especially on your joints. So there’s just like, I feel like in the lifetime of training, there’s just going to be different periods, different splits that work better for you. And so I think it’s very dangerous to think this one worked for me at a really good time.

And then you get emotionally comfortable with that. And you’re afraid to stray from that because you could be missing out on a lot of benefits of other ways of training. So yeah, I really appreciate the fact that you brought that up.

And like, you’re like, I think this is a good thing to revisit, even though I felt pretty emotionally comfortable with the five days a week. And I was like, I’ll just find a day, a way to make it happen with the volume or whatever. It’s been nice to not training as often, even though I technically could, I don’t know.

I just feel like I have more room for life and recovery as well. So it’s, on four-day-a-week or so, I’m happy with that, you know, at this point in my life. I’ve definitely experienced that too.

And I have it with clients all the time where if they’re training like four or five days a week and I take them down to three, or I take them from five down to four, there’s this fear of missing out. Like, because I was doing this and I’m doing less now, I’m going to be making worse progress or I got to find a way to fit it in because this is really important to me so I can make it matter. But if you haven’t listened to our episode on time-saving techniques in the gym, I would go and listen to that because we also talk about some of the concepts that we’re going to be tying in today when it comes to number of days to be in the week, how do you, you know, number of days to be in the gym per week, how do you determine that?

And I think that something that’s really undervalued is just stress in general. And if your stress is really high and you’re still trying to do the same amount of work that you were doing before when stress was lower, you’re not going to respond to that, you know, that same amount of volume and that same training protocol that you were responding to before and you actually might make better progress with a little bit less. And I think that’s just a hard concept for people to wrap their heads around.

So transitioning into the topic for today, I think that a place to start when you’re considering what training split to follow is how many days per week do you have available to train and do you want to make training something where you are following the same schedule every single week or can it change and be a little bit different every week? And I think this can come down to your personality, it can come down to do you have a schedule that’s very consistent, Monday through Friday you’re in the office, you’re doing the same thing every day, or is it something where my schedule is variable, I’m traveling all the time, I work remotely, those are two different scenarios and that can lead to either, okay, I do the same thing on the same days every single week or you do what’s called an asynchronous split or a rotating split where let’s say, you know, you’re going to train three days per week but you don’t know exactly what days those days are going to be, maybe you have to train on back-to-back days, that would also influence in my opinion what split you’re going to follow. Because let’s say, you know, you always know you’re going to train Monday, Wednesday, Friday, for that person I’m probably going to set them up on like a three times per week full-body program. For somebody else, if they’re not sure they might have to train back-to-back days, I might opt for something like an upper-lower where every time they go into the gym they’re doing the, you know, something different than they did last time.

So, last time they trained upper, this time they’re training lower, last time they trained lower, this time they’re training upper. And, you know, in one week you might train lower twice and once upper, but then the next week you’re training upper twice and once lower, so it doesn’t always have to look exactly the same. What are some of your thoughts when you’re hearing this?

Well, I think it’s a really good, excuse me, I think it’s a really good point to start out with what’s practical. Like, what does your life actually look like? Because I think it’s very easy to fall down the path of this, I watched this reel or this YouTube clip where they were like, this is the best split because blah, blah, blah, and you get really sold on that idea and you’re like, yeah, oh, that sounds exactly like what I need.

But it might not be compatible with your lifestyle or your energy or whatever. And I think that’s where people can go wrong because they try to make a puzzle piece that won’t fit and they just try to like jam it into their life. And it might not mean that like you don’t get it done, but it might mean you just don’t get as good of results as you could have and you’re more stressed about it than you need to be.

So yeah, I think that’s a good place to start is like, how much time do you have and what are your weeks going to look like? Because then you can factor in, okay, recovery and just feeling like I’m hitting all the muscle groups with a frequency that makes sense for me. Because like at the end of the day, I think it’s important to remember, like as long as you’re doing consistent training and seeing consistent progress, you don’t have to hit a certain amount of volume.

You don’t have to hit a certain amount of frequency. Like we probably made a lot of our gains on the like bro split, which is like the once a week type thing. That’s, you know, maybe not as quick as we could have made it, but it’s like that was the colloquial knowledge of the time.

And so we did it and it worked. So it’s like we could get all wrapped up in the details right at the outset, but I don’t think that’s a good move. I think to focus on what is actually going to fit into your life and feel good and work for your recovery is the most important thing.

And then from there, build something out that really emphasizes the parts that you want to work on the most, you know, parts of fitness that you want to work on the most. And then maybe it’s something that you find, you know, fun too, in some way, shape or form. Enjoyment is huge because if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, like you said, you’re not going to be consistent with it.

You’re not going to stick to it. You’re not going to push yourself as hard. So I think finding whatever style of training split that you enjoy is important.

I think it’s also good to experiment with different ones because you might think like, this is the one that’s the best for me. I love this one, but you try a different one. You’re like, this has its benefits too.

This has its pros and cons. And it can depend on your goals as well. You know, do you want to bring up your upper body?

Do you want to bring up your lower body? Do you want to bring up everything? Like this can all impact decisions around how you organize your training.

And that’s really what a training split is. It’s a way to organize your training. You know, you might see somebody who says this is the best training split.

Push pull legs is the best or upper lower is the best or full body is the best. But there is in reality, there is no best training split. It all depends on the person, their goals, what they enjoy.

And so they’re really just ways to organize training based on the different muscle groups that you’re training. So I think it might be a good time to just give a little overview of maybe some of the most popular training splits. There’s all different kinds.

Like you said, you can make your own training split where you train these random muscles on one day and these random muscles on the other day. And it’s really about applying principles. So volume, you know, number of sets per body part per week, frequency, how many times you’re training that muscle per week, intensity, how close to failure are you taking those exercises, your exercise selection.

These are the things that end up impacting your results. And a training split is how you organize them in order to get you better results or whatever you enjoy doing. So to give some kind of examples here, there’s the classic body part or sometimes called a bro split.

Basically, that means you go into the gym, you train like one muscle. So you’ll train chest or you’ll train back or you’ll train arms and arms. You might, you know, train biceps and triceps or you’re training shoulders again with shoulders.

Maybe you’re training different parts of your shoulder. You know, you can kind of separate it that way. Maybe you go in and you train legs.

Okay. Involves your glutes and your hamstrings and your quads and your adductors and your calves. So there’s more than one muscle group usually being trained on each day.

Like when you’re training chest, you’re still going to hit your front delts and your triceps if you’re doing compound lifts. So of course, there’s always going to be overlap there. But that would be usually for the people who enjoy like pushing themselves like really hard.

Like they like to feel like they can’t even do a pushup at the end of chest day kind of thing. And that’s, I used to love that kind of feeling, right? Like there was a certain, like, I don’t know, just kind of badassness feeling you get from that.

So it can work to people’s advantage when they really like that style of training. So yeah, I think that’s, do you want to like break down as we go through the types of splits, like perceived pros and cons kind of thing? Or do you want to just, okay, yeah, cool.

Cause that’s the one that sticks out to me for bro splits is like, they can be really fun for certain people. Like they just like to focus on one thing and just hammer it, like just go for it. But on the con side, it’s, you know, you’re going to get a certain amount of stimulus from that, but then there’s going to be a lot of damage that, that needs to get repaired after that.

And it means that you need to rest a lot longer. Whereas you, maybe if you had done a little bit less, you could have recovered and come back sooner and stimulated more muscle growth. It’s, it’s a little bit tricky to say like how big of an impact that makes over the longterm, but it’s, it’s speculated at least in the scientific literature that it might be better to do like two sessions per week on a certain muscle group instead of one.

I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. I think just thinking about it logically, it’s pretty rare that a muscle is going to take seven days to fully recover. Let’s say you’re doing a typical split where you fall, you know, Monday is one thing.

Tuesday is the same thing every single week. So usually what we want to do is we want to train a muscle, we want to let it recover, and then we want to train it again when it’s recovered. If we’re trying to maximize muscle growth, then, you know, as soon as we feel like that muscle is mostly or fully recovered, we want to train it again.

Usually if you’re waiting seven days, you’re probably just missing out a little bit on some potential training, like you said. And I think that like you mentioned, doing a little bit less and doing it a little bit more frequently tends to be a tried and true method of being able to stimulate muscle growth on a more frequent basis. However, like you said, there’s plenty of people who have gotten big, you know, training on a bro split or a body part split.

So it’s not going to, you know, be night and day. But I think for the average person, it probably makes more sense. Also, like, you know, if you’re doing legs once a week and you’re killing yourself and then you can’t walk for a couple days, like, or you’re super sore in a muscle, especially for a beginner when soreness is this kind of uncomfortable thing, it may not be the best approach.

And you might want to try to make it a little bit more evenly distributed on each day. Yeah. And I don’t know the data on this, but I would surmise that as you get stronger too, well, your connective tissues take a bigger hit every time you train.

And if you are really hammering, say you’re doing chest day and you’re just doing all the pressing and you’re trying to go as heavy as possible, granted, you will have to go lighter after a while because your body will just, your fatigue will just accumulate, you won’t have much left. But I do think that there’s more potential for injury if you are just hammering something really hard, like squatting patterns, you know, you’re going really, really heavy. And all of a sudden, your low back starts to hurt a little bit.

And you’re like, well, I still got, you know, six, four sets of presses, like presses or whatever. It might not be the best way to train long term, especially as you get really strong. Granted, humans are very adaptable.

And like if you’re doing like a similar program for years and years and years, and you’re just kind of turning it up, you’ll probably get pretty resilient to that program. But I do think that that maybe could contribute to more injury risk, especially for connective tissues, which don’t seem to come back as quickly and they can get pretty beat up the stronger you get, you know. So something to consider.

Yeah, another thing to note is usually after a certain number of sets on a given day for a body part on each set that you do after that is going to be diminishing returns. So another reason why it usually makes more sense to just do a little bit less and do it more frequently. So instead of doing, you know, 16 sets of chest, you might consider splitting it eight and eight or even splitting it, you know, five, five, six or something like that.

Because by the time you get to that fifth or sixth set, you’re probably going to be able to get a good stimulus for that muscle at that point. And so going past that and continuing to hammer and hammer and hammer, you’re getting less and less and less as opposed to just letting that muscle recover and come back on a different day. I think that’s, you know, that’s pretty much all I have to say about the split.

Do you want to say anything else or should we move on to another one? I think that’s good for the bro splits. Do you think we should go in order of like lowest frequency to highest frequency or something like that, just to kind of have a continuum?

Sure. Yeah. I was going to maybe talk about, I mean, it obviously depends with some of these splits too.

You can do them once a week, you can do them twice a week. So it could vary. Upper lower was the next one that came to mind for me.

I think that this split is probably the most like foolproof split. It’s hard to mess up because, you know, by nature, there’s not going to be overlap if you’re alternating between the upper body days and lower body days. You can do it, you know, upper lower twice a week.

So like, you know, you might go in and do upper Monday, Tuesday, lower rest Wednesday, you know, upper Thursday, Friday, lower rest Saturday, Sunday, that that’s great for a lot of people because they get the weekends off. They have one day of rest in between the kind of the back to back upper lower days that can work really well. You know, you could do it six times a week, so you could rest one day, we can go upper, lower, upper, lower, upper, lower.

But then again, you can’t hammer yourself too hard on any one day because you’re not, you only have one day of rest in between training that muscle again. So you would probably need to adjust your sets down on a given day or adjust your intensity to be a little bit lower. And I think this kind of thought exercise demonstrates how these different factors interact with each other.

Volume, so number of sets, frequency, so how often you train a muscle and intensity. Usually you can only dial up, you know, two of those things. And that’s what these splits do.

Usually they have two of these things in order and one is not. So like on a, on a bro split, the intensity is really high. The volume is really high on each day, but the frequency is low.

On an upper lower, you know, you can kind of adjust these things up and down. So let’s say you go with the upper lower three times a week. So you go upper, lower, upper, lower, upper, lower.

That means your frequency is really high. If your intensity is high, that means your volume has to be lower. If your intensity is lower than your volume could be a little bit higher.

And so you get to see how all these different factors interact with each other. But really I like an upper lower because, you know, you can get into the gym, you can train a couple of different of these movement patterns for your body part and you can get out. And I think it’s, it’s just a very beginner friendly way to train.

And I would say the upper lower and the full body three times a week are probably the splits that I program the most often just because I think they’re good for recovery. You’re not going to overdo it. And I think it just gives you enough frequency and enough volume to work on developing technique with exercises too, if you’re new to the gym, getting enough practice in with these different movement patterns.

Yeah. Well, I like, I like that when we’re kind of in the middle ground, it means that we have room to dial things up a little bit or dial things down a little bit and not be in hot water already. Like if you were doing the bro split and you were like, all right, well, I want to add a little bit more frequency, but it’s like, you’re doing all the things you were still doing, like the high intensity, the high volume, your recovery might just go to crap.

If you try to add another chest day, like it might not work, you know, just with that one change. Whereas if you have an upper lower and you’re doing each of those twice and you’re like, well, okay, I want to add, you know, maybe a third lower day because I want to emphasize a little bit more on legs that probably wouldn’t destroy you at least not right away, depending on your intensity might need to change those things a little bit, but it wouldn’t be like an immediate, like falling off a cliff.

Like this is a little bit too much already, which could be a good and a bad thing. Cause maybe the changes you need to make are more subtle, but at the end of the day, at least you’ll, you’ll not be too far away from what’s more sustainable. So I think that’s a good, really good point that you make.

And I think another way also of thinking about this, I really like how you explain the interplay between those three variables. You could just think about it as like dosage per week to like those three variables, volume, intensity, frequency, equal dosage. And you can only handle so much dosage for your muscles in a week.

And so you can decide which ones you like doing a bit more of and which ones you’d like doing a bit less of, or if you kind of want to keep them all pretty much in the middle. But at the end of the day, if you’re making progress, you’re, you’re, you’re managing your recovery well, which is the bare minimum, what you want to be able to do. And then you can play with the idea of like increasing one a little bit more, seeing what happens if you do dial one up, but you don’t want to do so in any kind of extreme manner.

You kind of want to do it in a smart way. So I really like how you said, like, these are good beginner friendly programs because they’re hard to mess up and you have a lot of room to play with things from there. So if you’re like, okay, this is working well, I’m doing four days a week, up or lower.

And I’m curious to see what would happen if I dialed up the volume a little bit, or if I did another day and had more frequency or like kind of be doing both by adding another day. So that would be cool because I think that would give people a lot of room to experiment and find their way of going about things without necessarily needing to like change as much about their mindset around training or what they’re comfortable with, you know? So that’s pretty cool that you put it that way.

Yeah. And I liked that you mentioned that you can also have like a, it doesn’t have to be an even split of the number of upper and lower days that you have for weeks. So if you want to prioritize your upper body more, you could do three upper body days and two lower body days or vice versa if you want to prioritize your lower body more.

So I think it’s a very versatile split. Like I said, it’s hard to mess up a full body. You know, if you’re trying to do it in a way, it can be difficult to like fully manage recovery.

So upper, lower, I think is very straightforward. Maybe one con that I could think of, and it’s kind of similar to a con that I’ll discuss when we move on to push-pull legs, is I think some of the isolation exercises probably tend to get a little bit overshadowed. And I think the upper body days can get really long for that reason because your upper body includes so many different muscle groups.

You know, where do you put abs? That’s another like question as well. Do you put that on your lower body day or your upper body day?

For the upper, lower, I’m probably putting it on my lower body day because upper body, you have to train back, you have to train a chest, you have to train arms, you have to train shoulders. It starts to add up a lot, especially if you want to, you know, exercise for your side delts and for your rear delts. If you want to have multiple exercises for biceps or triceps, different angles for pressing or pulling.

So, you know, you probably can’t fit everything that you want to fit in on one upper day. You’ll probably have to fit it, throughout the week. So you might not be able to do everything you want to do in one day.

And if you do, you might need to employ some of those time-saving techniques that we talked about in a previous podcast. For example, I follow some variation of an upper, lower split. So I basically, you know, it is a little auto-regulated, so I might take extra rest days here and there.

But if I have a perfect scenario, I’m training upper, lower, upper, off, and then repeating that split. So, you know, that’s four days rotation. So that’s not going to fit perfectly into a week.

It’s going to vary a little bit. But my upper days get really long. So I do use some of those time-saving techniques to get enough volume in, to get enough frequency in.

So that would probably be one con of the upper, lower, is just the upper days tend to get a little bit long. But the lower days I think are pretty typical, just because lower body, you can’t do a ton anyways. Like you start to, they’re just big muscle groups.

I find you don’t really need as much volume for your lower body usually as you do for some of the muscles in your upper body. Again, depends on the person, but usually I think you can get away with lower volumes on lower body and make similar progress to upper body with higher volumes. Yeah, I would agree with that.

And yeah, for mine, because I’m doing a variation of an upper, lower as well that you programmed, which I thought was really smart. We did kind of a hybrid leg day. So like the lower also has shoulders on it.

So just to not have to do that on upper days, to have like crazy long upper days. And then we have abs on like off days. So as, as like, you know, technically I’m training on like non-training days, but just doing abs doesn’t feel like training.

It just kind of feels like, I don’t know, feeling like doing a set or two of crunches and maybe some Russian twist. And I usually am doing my cardio at that same time anyway. So it’s kind of like an abs cardio off day, but it just doesn’t really feel like training.

It just feels like, okay, I’m getting some movement today. So yeah, technically I guess you could say I train every day, but I don’t really feel like it. And that’s the important part is that I feel rested.

Like I actually feel like rested by the time I go back into the gym and I feel ready to attack the weights. And that’s been something that’s been problematic during deficits for me in the past, especially. That was pretty cool that we found out a way to do an upper, lower that made a lot of sense for me.

And then, but yeah, we can move on to the push, pull legs. Cause that’s the one I actually have done probably the most. Go ahead.

I think that’s just an important principle that you went over right there is just because you call a split in upper, lower, there’s no rules with, with designing training splits. You can alter things the way that you want. You can put calves on an upper body that you can put abs on a lower body day, or you can put shoulders on a lower body day.

There’s tons of ways that you can customize these splits to you. For example, I have a couple of competitors and I designed their training splits based on the body parts that they need to bring up for their divisions. And it might be a combination of some body parts that are upper and lower.

So, you know, for my athletes who compete in bikini, let’s say shoulders and glutes are the two things that they’re going to need the highest frequencies on. So I often will put those on, you know, similar days. So they might have a high, you know, three days a week, they’re training shoulders and glutes.

And you know, the other two days a week, they’re training some basically other muscles, but basically just shoulders and glutes three times a week on those days. So, you know, what do you call that split that doesn’t fit into the conventional box. So it’s just a way to understand that, again, these training splits are just, they’re an organizational tool and they exist for a reason because a lot of these things have been tried and true.

And this is what tends to work for like averages. But again, you have to tailor things based on yourself and your goals. So the templates, they’re starting points.

[Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And they’re really cool. We can talk about.

[Sawyer]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Ben]

We got to go to push. Yeah, no, it’s just cool to have something that’s like a little bit different to try each time. And I think once you’ve tried a few of them, you’ll kind of get an idea of like, yeah, this one was probably the best.

And then from that template, you can develop it into like what even feels even better to you. So. But well, yeah, we’ll explain another one now, which is the push-pull leg split, which is where you’re training, not always back to back to back, but you’re training your pushing muscles.

So like chest, shoulders, triceps, then you’re training your pulling muscles on a different day, which is like back biceps, maybe rear delts, you know, things like that. And then and then you’re doing legs on that third day. And that’s a very popular one, or at least it was when I was coming up and like kind of when college age, I guess.

And the question for me was always like, how the heck? I guess I’ve gone from like trying to get six days in a week to five to now four. So I guess as my life has gotten busier, as I’ve gotten older and stronger and these factors have changed, I’ve gone from push-pull legs, which was a big one for me for a long time now to upper lower.

But push-pull legs is a great split because all these muscles are working synergistically with each other. And so you don’t really have to worry about overlap still like with the upper lower, but you’re also getting to do more volume on those days for those muscle groups because you’re like more specific about what you’re training. Anything else you want to add about describing the push-pull legs?

I think it might be one of the more popular spits among people who are really into fitness and fitness culture, especially kind of the young. I see a lot of young men gravitating towards the split. And I think it’s especially the archetype of those who are trying to do everything they can to put on as much muscle as possible.

And so they want to be in the gym every single day. Me too, dude. Me too.

It’s probably the split I follow the most as well, because you can easily justify getting in the six days a week and just, you know, going ham every single day. And I think it’s nice because you get to train some arms on, you get two upper body days to one lower body day kind of ratio. Basically, you get to train arms after you kind of do your main compounds.

And I think that it’s also a split that a lot of, I, you know, I think a lot of fitness influencers tend to follow this split. So that’s one reason why I think it’s so popular. It is tried and true.

You can make really good progress on that. There’s tons of variations too. So you could follow a push pull split and then you put legs, like you put quads on the, on the push day and you put like hamstrings on the pull day.

That’s a variation. I’ve seen variations where instead of doing biceps on pull day and triceps on push day, you switch it. So you do your compounds and then you’ll do biceps on your push day and triceps on your pull day.

That becomes a little bit more complicated with how to program that effectively. I’ve done all that shit, man. There’s again, same here.

There’s variations where you can do like, I’ve seen people do push, pull, rest, legs, rest, because then you kind of have rest days in between those upper body days. And you know, you take a lot of recovery around your lower body day and you get to kind of have a rest day before you start that cycle again. So there’s so many different variations, you know, push, pull legs off, push, pull legs off.

And people just repeat that. Again, it’s, it really just comes down to how someone enjoys training, what muscle groups they’re trying to prioritize. I think also again, maybe a little bit tricky to really prioritize those smaller muscles that tend to need more isolation work because the way that they’re typically structured is you start with compounds and then you go to isolations.

And I think that’s how most splits are. But if you really want to bring up, you know, your arms or your delts, you might need a split that either puts those at the start, you know, starting your pull day with biceps, starting your push day with triceps. Or again, if you just kind of switch that, you know, put biceps on your push day and start with those and then do your compounds.

Usually moving a muscle up at the start of your workout is going to prioritize it a little bit more. You know, there’s other ways to prioritize a muscle too, through volume or intensity or some of the other factors we talked about.

[Sawyer]

Yeah, I agree.

[Ben]

But those are just some considerations when you’re considering, you know, one of these. Yeah, it’s true. I mean, a lot of people don’t understand why their calves grow so slow or, you know, their arms aren’t as big or whatever.

But a lot of times you look at their training and they’ve for five years, they’ve been doing the same order of exercises. And it’s usually, yeah, big, heavy compounds and then isolations. And not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But if you find that you’re starting to develop imbalances that you want to correct, yeah, I think exercise order is a huge lever to pull there. That if you haven’t tried, I think you should definitely give it some thought. With push-pull legs, the issue that I ran into, I guess, just as a young dude trying to build as much muscle as humanly possible.

And like, I found myself constantly, you know, in class, like designing splits because I was like, oh, I could figure out how to hit these better. And really what was happening was I was running into a recovery issue, but trying to do six days a week, you know, trying to do three days on, one day off, three days on every single week. And that was just too much volume for me, especially the way I like to train with the intensity and the volumes I like to train at.

But I didn’t want to let it go. So I think that, yeah, you have to be careful about the split you choose and what it can, it’s not really that the split is the issue, but it could bring about like you thinking, oh, I need to make sure that I hit a certain frequency with this, with this number of days. And you kind of set yourself up for failure because you’re already setting the bar too high.

You’re not even considering what your recovery capacity is. You’re just saying, well, I’ll find a way to make it work and then just going with it. I think that’s a dangerous place to be, especially if you are one of these more anxious neurotic types about fitness like I am.

And so, yeah, you have to take a step back and say, well, okay, I’ll try that split for a while. But if I start feeling beat up, I do need to make some changes in the downward direction and just be honest with yourself about that. But that’s hard.

You know, a lot of people don’t want to do less or they don’t want to do more. It’s like a lot of times we get stuck in these kind of identity things where, where we kind of become the split almost or the split becomes like a vehicle for our anxiety or our particular brand of like dogmatism for adherence. You know, we call it like discipline, but it really is like us just being kind of stubborn.

And as you encounter more issues, it’ll humble you, but it also will frustrate you first. And I hope that when you guys feel those frustrations or like those rattle the cage a little bit, that you use those opportunities to learn more instead of just doubling down on like, this has to be the split that works for me. Cause like we said, there’s a million of them and they’re not, these are just templates too.

You don’t have to stick to a template for the sake of like, you know, following the program because you’re the one making the program. You’re the one that has to do it on multiple different levels. It needs to check a bunch of boxes, lifestyle, results, you know, fun, all those boxes need to be checked.

If you’re missing out on any of those, it’s not going to be a sustainable thing for you, you know? So super well said. Yeah.

I think just thinking about wrapping up here, there’s maybe two splits that I would talk about, but I don’t think we need to go super in depth with full body. So full body training was very popular in kind of like the thirties, forties, fifties. I think it’s a great program for, you can definitely make it work whether you’re a beginner or advanced, but I think for beginners, you get more frequency with lots of different exercises, kind of learn those major movement patterns.

So like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, full body program, maybe five exercises or so on each day, focusing on, you know, your presses, your poles, hinge squat, and then isolations for various muscles. I think that’s a great split. And then Arnold’s split, which is kind of like a variation on a push-pull leg.

So you’re training chest and back, you train basically like arms and delts usually, and then you’ll train legs on a third day. I think that can be great if you want to prioritize either chest or back, but not both. And then you want to bring up, you know, your arms or your shoulders.

I think putting those on your, on their own day can be a good idea. Or, you know, you can add an arm day to your existing split. So you can, you have push-pull legs and then add an arm day and then rest and then repeat.

So again, different variations. And I think to kind of wrap it up and bring it back to, okay, so what is the actual like practical take-home here? I would say if you’re building, if you’re deciding what training split is going to be the best for yourself, first figure out how many days per week is realistic and, you know, that you can be consistent with going to the gym.

Then determine what are your priorities in terms of the muscle groups that you care the most about training is that’s going to determine how you kind of split things up. And then from there, pick a split that tends to hit those boxes. So allows you to get the frequency and that you need the volume and that you need to determine what is an appropriate amount of intensity.

Most people, I don’t, I don’t overthink that with, it’s usually just like train close to failure, you know, one or two reps within failure and you’re pretty good. You’ll get better at it over time too. Yeah.

And you’ll get better at it over time for sure. And then, you know, you can play around with it. So once you have a template, go ahead, try it out.

Don’t spend an endless amount of time tinkering with it. And like sorry, I said, trying to get the perfect split because ultimately at the end of the day, training and muscle growth, it’s, it’s experience-based. You have to get into the gym, try it out.

If you have a question, of course, you know, leave it down in the comments, you know, reach out to us. We can help, but ultimately you’re going to have to experiment and try it out for yourself. And oftentimes that’s going to be our answer is like, you know, should I do this exercise with this number of sets and this frequency?

Most of the time I want to say try it as long as it’s not like a, some, some sort of thing that’s going to be like super dangerous or detrimental, which is, it’s hard to do. You know, I think again, people get this anxiety about like, if I do this thing, then this is an optimal and I’m going to lose out on results. Whereas like, honestly, if it’s, if it’s reasonable, if it seems reasonable, try it out, see what happens.

You know, you shouldn’t be in the gym for five hours a day. You shouldn’t need to do that. And you shouldn’t, you know, be in the gym for, do anything wacky.

Like, oh, I’m in the gym 20 minutes, three times a day or something like that. You know, you don’t need to overcomplicate things or, you know, reinvent the wheel. So pick something practical, stick to it, see how you’re doing with it and then adjust accordingly.

Yeah. And by the way, we love talking about this stuff. Like we talk about this for fun actually.

So you don’t, you wouldn’t be bothering us with this stuff, this kind of conversation. Of course, if it rises to the level of like, okay, this person needs coaching because they have so many questions, then we’re going to say that. We’re going to say, look, okay, the number of questions, they’re all really good questions, I’m sure.

And they all really do matter for you to understand. But like, yeah, at some point once we’ve been talking to somebody long enough, when we kind of get the idea of like, oh, this person is like riddled with anxiety about their split or they’re really struggling to get this thing going, we’ll start to understand like, okay, this person probably needs more help than just a simple question answered or like, hey, do you think this would work? Because it’s deeper than that.

We start to see. So yeah, so don’t be afraid to reach out. But just if we say, hey, I think you need more than just a little bit of question answering, just know that that’s probably why.

It’s not that we think you’re dumb or that we’re just trying to scam you or something like that. It’s just that we’ve probably been there before and we understand what it’s going to take to get you to release a lot of that anxiety or the results that you’re not getting is probably going to be a little bit more work to get there. And that’s okay.

Like not everybody is just like set up perfectly for success and they need a little help sometimes. And that’s why we do what we do and why we love it. So yeah.

Thanks for being here, guys. Thanks for listening. Yeah.

And on that note, if you do feel like you would benefit from having somebody who can advise you on these things, help you to design a program, help you to find something that’s reasonable. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not sure what to do. Again, that’s what we do.

That’s why we have made this our career. So if you’re interested, there will be a link down in the description below for coaching. You can head over to our website, veganproteins.com and fill out an application. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible. You can find us on all the social medias at Vegan Proteins, at Muscles by Brussels, and then the other coaches, myself at Benny Mitchell, Sawyer at Soyboy Fitness Coaching, and Alice at Vegan Proteins. Alice, those are all of our Instagram handles.

I can reach out to us, send us a DM anytime. If you’re enjoying the podcast, it would mean a lot if you can share to your story, share with friends, family. We’ll make sure to re-share if you tag us in that.

So thank you again for listening to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. I’m Ben, this is Sawyer, and we’ll catch you guys on the next one. See you guys. Bye.