What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, AthleanX.com.
Today I'm addressing the oh so popular question of "what is the best split?" that question
of "what is the best training split; how should I be training the total body?"
Push, pull, the split muscle group, what is the best way to split up my routine? The answer
is so complex that it would take m 5000 videos to answer it.
Again, you want the truth? I'll give you the truth. The truth is that it really depends
on so many different factors. What is your goal, first of all? Are you training for explosiveness?
Are you training for size only? Are you training for strength?
What does your entire week look like of training? More than that: what does your entire month
look like in training? What have you trained the month prior to that? All of these things
matter. When it comes to these hard and fast rules, people get really caught up in them.
So much so that they lose the forest for the trees. I'll give you an example. Right here
is a perfect exercise to illustrate this. We know that there's a push-pull split and
I'm a big advocate of push-pull splits.
Again, depending on the sequence of your training and where you're at in your particular training,
and what your goal is. A push-pull split relies on the fact that certain muscle groups tend
to pull.
I.E. your back, your lats, your mid back, your arm voids, and your biceps. They would
go and work synergistically together.
If you're trying to maximize your recovery in between sessions you would work those muscle
groups together to allow you to recover in between those sessions as opposed to hitting
your back and then inadvertently, or auxiliary hitting your biceps and then coming right
back the next day and hitting your biceps again, with them not being recovered from
your previous workout.
That's the idea behind that. The same thing applies to the push of chest, triceps and
shoulders all working in concert to push. If you follow that rule and follow that rule
only you will lose sight of the fact that there's a great exercise you could be doing
right now that could be working your back and your triceps together.
Again, a push and a pull. Guess what? They actually work well together. Look at this
exercise I'm doing. All I had to do was lie down on the ground – again, I'm doing this
in a home version so I have the two bands anchored behind me on something sturdy. It
could be a couch. I just have it on the bottom of the piece of equipment.
If you're in the gym you could easily take this into the gym and do a cable setup here
and either lay on the bench or lay on the floor. What we're doing is, we're actually
working on the synergy that occurs between the back and the long head of the triceps
to create a killer exercise to hit both of these areas. We call it a tricep extension
pullover because that's exactly what the hell it is.
It's a tricep extension into a pullover. When we do our first part of the exercise here
we do a tricep extension, right? We do a line tricep extension. It really hits our triceps
hard, we get peak contraction here up at the top, and it's different than we would if we
were doing this with a dumbbell. We actually still have tension at the top here because
a line of resistance is behind us with the bands being pulled in that same line, right?
From here we can intensify this even more adding more contraction to the long head of
the triceps which will help to extend our arms and bring them back behind our body,
or at least in the direction of going towards the back side of our body here. We're extending
them, but at the same time we're doing a classic abduction of the upper arm and bringing it
down closer to our sides in a pullover fashion, which is exactly what the lats do.
So you see, synergistically this abduction of the arms and the extension here of our
arms as we get here past neutral, or down to neutral at least as the act of extension,
that's something that the triceps handle. If you were to lock yourself in thinking "Push-pull.
I can't train triceps and back together. It's always biceps and back" that's not going to
get the job done.
So I think there's so many ways. Like I said, 5000 videos to answer that question. The most
important concept is this: vary your training and know what you're doing and have a purpose
behind your training.
Remember, training without a purpose is just working out. If you want to work out and have
a purpose behind it, that's not only how you're going to get the fastest results, but you're
going to get so much more out of every workout because you're going to be having a game plan
and a reasons and some science behind what you do.
I hope that at least answers the question a little bit, that you've got to stop thinking
about the perfect split and you've got to start using all variations of splits of your
training if you want to get the best results.
If you want a program that lays out your splits exactly how I feel you should be following
them, in the sequence that you should, given the goals that I know we're trying to accomplish;
head to AthleanX.com right now and get our Athlean-X training system.
In the meantime, let me know what you guys want to see here on these videos. I'll do
my best to cover them in each and every video that I do.
Remember, this channel started for you and it's going to continue being for you and I
rely on your requests to make sure I do.
All right, I'll be back here again real soon. See ya.