You need to find a weekly workout routine that fits best with your physical recovery time and schedule. Some people can recover very quickly from a workout and others need 3 or more days per muscle group. Regardless, you need to have a set schedule of workouts to stay focused and on track.
For the longest time, I did a standard Monday: chest/tris, Wednesday: back/bis, and Friday: Shoulders/Abs/Legs (I’ve always neglected legs). For the most part this routine worked fine. Each muscle group had a full 7 days to rest (except for shoulders which gets hit pretty hard on Mondays, but because I did them on Friday had an extra day to rest). I made big gains in my chest and my back, but not proportionately as big in my tris and bis. I realized that by the time i got to my tris after my chest workout, and the same for my bis after a back workout, they were so tired from supporting my chest/back workout, that their own workout was relatively weak.
After being away from the gym for a few months, I’ve changed up my schedule quite a bit. Instead of being on a day-of-the-week routine, I’m on a day-on/day-off schedule, so I hit each muscle group every six days instead of every seven. I’ve also changed the combination of my workouts to hit each muscle group individually. So on a Monday, I’ll workout chest/bis, Wednesday: back/tris, Friday: shoulders/abs/legs, and on Sunday I’ll start the rotation over again with the chest/bis.
Breaking the workout into chest/bis and back/tris means that when I finish my chest workout, my bis are completely fresh to do isolated weight that’s much heavier than I could’ve done if they had just supported a back workout. And while my physiology requires at least 3 days for my chest or back to recover, my bis and tris are usually good to go to play a supporting role the day after they were worked individually. So far I’m seeing good results with this routine.
Another key, and likely reason that I’m seeing good results so quickly with this routine is that it’s important to change it up every now and then. Your muscles can get used to being worked out in a certain way and without shocking the muscle, it will adapt and not need to grow to move the same amount of weight. This type of plateauing can be broken by changing the order of your exercises, and also the type of exercises you do to work out a muscle group.
Thanks Dan, for the suggestion on the topic.
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Interesting… I’ve been pairing complimentary muscle groups for a while, and I’ve never felt that my tris/bis were suffering due to exhaustion from helping the larger muscle groups. Still, it might be nice to change things up a bit, and pairing chest with bis would actually give me a chance to do a bicep exercise between flat and incline bench press to rest up my chest and lift heavier on my second chest exercise since tired biceps don’t impact my chest exercises. Are you doing something like that, or are you still doing all large muscle exercises first followed by small muscles?
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Again, another great post. Some more gems here that add to what you emailed me. Very timely for me too since I will be hitting the gym today.
Here’s another potential topic for you - the importance of leg workouts… Legs are something I generally ignore because I jog/ride thinking that takes care of it. Any really good reasons why I should focus on legs?