Fitness Instinct
Workout regimes focused on body parts are becoming a thing of the past because of their inefficiency. So dividing your workout into shoulder days, chest days, and so on presents several problems and can be preventing muscle growth, instead of promoting it.
The solution is to switch to a classic push and pull split to help simplify your training and experience faster results in a short time.
How does a push pull workout routine work?
Dividing your body into various parts does not take into account how it primarily moves, and what muscles are involved in the movements.
You might want to work only on your chest one day, however, any presses you do will inevitably work and built your shoulders too.
In case you follow that with an all-shoulder training program within a couple of days, do not expect your delts to be prepared for the effort. And in case you work triceps one day or so after that, you also risk overtraining them since they also help in most shoulder and chest exercises.
On the contrary, you can organize your workout with regards to pushing and pulling movements. Hence, your shoulders, thighs, chest, and tris get worked on pushing days, and your hamstrings, back, rear delts, and biceps get worked on pulling days.
You can then repeat both workouts at least one more time in the same week, ensuring you double the frequency with which each of your muscles gets trained without having to impact its recovery.
Additionally, by properly working your entire muscles from head to toe, you tend to burn more calories and discharge more muscle-building hormones than you would if you were hitting one area at a particular time.
Directions
Perform each workout once every week. Exercises that are marked “A” and “B” are alternated. Thus you will do one set of A, rest as required, then B, and repeat until all sets are completed for the pair. Perform the other exercises as straight sets.
[Related Reading: The Ultimate Weight Training Guide for Beginners]
Simplifying Your Training with a Push Pull Workout Routine
Push-pull training may be the best, safest, most flexible, and most efficient way of training and making progress over time. This is the reason why this type of training has stood the test of time.
There are so many benefits to training with this technique. The primary advantage is that you get to train large muscle groups of your body which work together when movement is involved.
Splitting up your workout into the push-pull program makes it easy for you to stress the joints and muscles which work together on a particular day and then let them rest together.
For instance, unlike in a local or traditional split, a push-pull split would allow you to train your shoulders, triceps, and chest all in a single day stressing the connective tissues and tendons in one season.
Thus, the triceps tissues at your shoulder and elbow – areas that are vulnerable to stress- get to relax and rest together for some days.
The most effective method to train and minimize the likelihood of injury is to train the biceps, hitting back, traps, rear delts, forearms, and hamstrings within the same session on one day, and train the triceps, chest, delts, and quads in another session on a different day.
Benefits of Push Pull Training
Extra rest –Whenever you group exercises into the same movements, you assist your body to recover fully. For instance, when you have a shoulder and chest day, your delts can hurt performance because of fatigue (if programmed wrongly).
Foundation builder –Amateur lifters can benefit from carrying out push-pull workouts since they are focused on the body holistically in several cases, and this allows capitalization on an amateur’s gains.
Goal-oriented – Advanced bodybuilders can also benefit from carrying out push-pull workouts from splitting lower and upper body days into specific manners, in case you keep missing the main portion of pressing movements, you could cater an entire upper push day into solving that issue.
What does a push-pull training week look like?
It is preferable you split your week training full body every day with different emphasis. Here, we explain an example of a full push-pull split for a week:
- Monday: lower body pull/upper body push (chest press/deadlifts)
- Tuesday: lower body push/upper body pull (squats and pull-ups). As you proceed you can focus more on the rest of the week being unilaterally biased.
- Wednesday: Rest
- Thursday: Upper push/lower pull (DB snatches/single leg deadlifts)
- Friday: Upper pull/lower push (elevated step-ups/single arm rows)
- Saturday: Rest
- Sunday: Rest
You could also mix it up by swapping or adding in some other kinds of push-pull exercises. Some other examples of push exercises are tricep extensions, overhead presses, and push-ups.
Other pull movements you can add in your workout are barbell rows and barbell curls, lat pulls and other back extensions.
It is essential to change your workout routine every few weeks. This way, you are repeatedly challenging your body.
You could increase the weight, reps, number of sets, and also change the exercises.
Your Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday should be for rest. You don’t have to do any push-pull workout on these days.
As always, ensure you are properly warm-up before every training session.
Also, always make you cool down and stretch after that so that you can accelerate recovery and minimize the chances of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS).
In conclusion, push-pull workout programs are focused on the belief that exercises with similar movement patterns are paired together.
The upper and lower body can further be split with regards to lifting expertise, time allotment, and goals.
You can indeed simplify your training by adopting the right push-pull exercise and sticking to it.
It isn’t only beneficial for growing more muscles, it is also helpful for your health and total wellbeing.
Thus the next time you are hitting the gym, always make sure you pay more time carrying out more push-pull workout programs.
