A Split routine basically means you work different muscle groups on different days. This gives you the time to dedicate a high number of exercises to just one muscle. E.G Monday you work the chest muscle using exercises such as bench press, dumbbell fly, cable flyes, press up etc. normally choosing about 3-5 exercises and performing about 5 sets for each one.

This type of training is hugely beneficial for building muscle or 'hypertrophy' muscle groups and therefore days will be easier than others. For example, legs are a large muscle compared to arms, therefore it would be a much harder workout.

If your goal is not to build muscle then this type of training could be of little benefit. It is important to structure your workouts without any overlap and that you balance your workout evenly between muscle groups. If calorie burning is your main goal, it is far better to use total body workouts. A day dedicated to triceps will burn much less calories than an all body workout. And using split routines means realistically 4 workouts a week. With time being a limitation to most of us, it becomes easy to miss a workout. This usually leads to the hardest or most unfavorable day being dropped, which could make your physique look unbalanced, and disproportionate

For building muscle, multiple sets really work, but to increase your strength this can do the complete opposite. With more sets comes more fatigue so the intensity decreases. It is intensity that promotes strength gain not volume. So with split routine if building muscle is not your primary goal you would be better of using a total body workout.

Finally, with a whole body workout, it really doesn’t make much of a difference if you miss a session, as you would have at least trained the whole body in a workout! For a basic full body workout perform 2-4 sets and do 12-15 reps.

An example of a workout would be seated leg press, dumbbell chest press, cable seated rows, dumbbell lunge, seated shoulder press, lat pull down, tricep press, barbell curl, plank & oblique twist.

Use this workout 2-3 times a week resting between workouts. 

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