My progress has been stagnant for quite some time, so I think it’s time to shock my muscles into growth by performing more sets. I currently train three times a week for about 75–90 minutes. What type of training split would you recommend?
You’re correct in believing that to reach the higher levels of hypertrophy, it’s important to find ways to increase the stress on the muscles. One way is to increase your training volume, but the downside here is that if your workouts are too long, you won’t be able to put as much intensity into them. This is the problem with whole-body workouts. Instead, I recommend you divide your workouts into three days, enabling you to increase the effort you can put into each body part.
The workout I’m sharing with you here divides the muscles into three major areas: 1) chest/biceps/triceps, 2) quads/hamstrings/ calves, and 3) back/shoulders. It uses the following split: two days on/one day off, one day on/one day off. For example: Train Monday and Tuesday; rest Wednesday; train Thursday; rest Friday; then repeat.
With this sequence, you never perform the chest workout the day after shoulders, which is important because with chest training you’ll also work the shoulders. Further, the back/shoulders workout also trains the biceps and triceps, which are hit in the first workout as well.
As you can see, these workouts combine conventional sets (i.e., station training) with supersets and tri-sets. Also, the C1 and C2 exercises for the biceps and triceps in Workout 1 are dropsets of 12, 10, and 8 reps per set. Give it a shot—you won’t regret it.
