Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

Muscle Rules
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because it takes two workouts, or two days, to work the entire body.
A three-day split trains each major muscle group over the course
of three workouts. There are numerous variations, but here is one
popular version:
• Workout 1: legs and abs
• Workout 2: chest, triceps, and deltoids
• Workout 3: back, biceps, and forearms
MUSCLE RULE 4:
Prioritize free
weights and full-body
workouts.
It is possible to break up those muscle groups even further and follow a fourday,
five-day, or six-day split, where each workout is devoted to fewer muscle
groups (Schoenfeld, Grgic, and Krieger 2019). In most cases, however, any training
split beyond a two-day upper–lower routine is used by professional bodybuilders
who want to train each muscle group with a very high volume. Most of you will
not have the luxury to spend hours each day in the gym to isolate every major
muscle group. Furthermore, a three-day training split is inefficient.
With full-body training you can stimulate all the major muscle groups in a
single workout, which is advantageous for almost anyone. Indeed, a systematic
review on training frequency demonstrates that two sessions per week per major
muscle group is the minimum recommendation for achieving optimal muscle
growth (Schoenfeld, Ogborn, and Krieger 2016). Why split your training up so
you have to do six workouts when you can do it in only two?
Training Frequency
Most people train a muscle group anywhere from one to three times per week,
depending on their program. As we just covered, training each muscle group twice
per week appears to be the minimum frequency for muscle growth. For building
strength, up to four sessions per week per muscle group has been shown to be
superior to one or two (Grgic et al. 2018). With those points in mind, that is why
the recommended structure for training is three full-body workouts per week, as
covered in chapter 8. In my experience, that structure hits the sweet spot for most
people. The frequency is high enough to optimally build muscle and strength
with only three trips to the gym each week.
What research hasn’t yet demonstrated is the upper limit of training frequency
per muscle group per week when hypertrophy is the goal (Dankel et al. 2017).
Since there is no scientifically backed research to say that training a lagging muscle
group six times per week is better than three, I turn to real-world observations.
It is clear that most athletes who train a given muscle group almost daily—let’s
call it six days per week since even professional athletes take a day off—have
built that muscle to a proportionally large degree. For example,
• professional cyclists have proportionally large thighs,
• gymnasts who perform the rings have proportionally large biceps, and
• swimmers have proportionally large upper back muscles.
You can probably think of numerous other examples. Importantly, the aforementioned
athletes are training those muscles with a relatively high intensity. A
marathon runner doesn’t build big thighs, even though those muscles are being
trained daily, because the intensity is too low to stimulate growth (i.e., a low level
of motor unit recruitment).