#workout splits

Building muscle is something that every person wants to do when they first start picturing themselves in their dream body with big muscles and chiseled abs, but I have a few key techniques that will help you on your way to your dream body. There are three key techniques when it comes to exercising that will you build muscle faster. The first technique involves picking the correct workout splits. The second technique is to not overtrain the muscle. The third technique is utilizing progressive overload.

           Now I know you may not know what I mean by workout splits which is why I am going to explain everything. A workout split is the decision by person on what specific muscle group they would like to workout each day of the week. A good example of this a lot of people prefer to workout the back muscle and bicep muscle on the same day. Another great example is a person who works out the chest muscles and triceps muscles on the same day. Workout splits can be crucial to the rate at which you are able to put on muscle. For an optimal result of building muscle fast a person is going to want to train each body part at least twice a week. Training a specific muscle twice a week will help that muscle grow faster as more work is being put on that muscle. A larger frequency can be better to build muscle at times.

           The second technique of not over training is one that can be a very confusing topic to grasp but I’m going to break it down. As I stated in the previous paragraph a larger frequency of training a muscle group more than once a week can be good but there need to be some key factors that are involved for that to be beneficial. A muscle group needs forty-eight hours to recover after it has been trained. If the muscle group has not had time to repair and recover itself then continuing to train will only hinder the rate at which a person is building muscle. A good example of this when someone is putting up dominos and you are trying to make a cool design, but they fall over. The same concept can be applied to over training, muscle is like the dominos because if a person train it again without the proper rest, then that is the dominos falling over therefore making the repair time start over from square one. The ideal number of days a person should be working out a week ranges from three to five but anything over that is not giving your body enough time to heal.

           The final technique is a concept for building muscle is called Progressive Overload. Progress Overload basically means going harder than last time. For muscles to grow they need to be put under a certain amount of stress for the muscle fibers to be torn and then repair. The amount of stress needed to tear the muscle fibers will depend on the person because as a person becomes stronger in the gym it will take more stress also known as weight to tear the muscle fiber. That’s where the concept of Progressive Overload is so helpful because it states that a person is trying to increase the weight they are lifting even if it only five pounds every couple of weeks so that there can continue to be a large amount of stress being placed on the muscle creating those tears. I have used it myself in the last couple of months trying to increase by five pounds every two weeks and have started to notice a difference in the amount of muscle I have been putting on.

The Intro

I recently joined a flag football league after the first practice I was sore for days and was more winded then I would've liked to be. I was a three sport athlete in high school and had multiple athletic scholarships for colleges. I always prided myself at being in the best shape so this told me I had to make some major changes to my workout. First, I added a regular legs day to my workout. Previously, I worked legs in a few times a month just for toning.

The second change I made is against almost every rule that any male looking for real size lives by. I started doing cardio. It's no secret that when bodybuilding it is ideal to keep cardio to a limit. This is because if you do too much cardio your body will not just destroy your excess fat but will also start eating away at the hard-earned muscle you work so hard for. This is where I had to choose between performance and size. It really wasn't too hard of a choice because I'm a competitor and my team always comes first. However, I make sure not to go overboard with the cardio. I've been running a decent paced mile and doing about 15 minutes of cardio after my workouts to build up my lungs and further work my legs. 

My workouts are intense, I go very hard for usually around an hour to an hour and a half depending on if I'm working on my abs. I usually don't leave the gym until I'm exhausted so for this reason I don't lift on game days. The intensity of the game itself is enough to satisfy as a full body workout. Because of this I re-did my splits to go back to doing two complimentary muscles a day. By complimentary I mean muscles that work together without exhausting each other.

The Split

Monday: Legs, Abs, and Cardio

Tuesday: Chest and Triceps

Wednesday: Biceps, Back, and Abs

Thursday: Football Game

Friday: Shoulders and Abs

Saturday or Sunday: Rest

The Result