Experience with training more than 4 days per week

[TAWS6]

I recently switched back to a 4 day upper/lower split coming off a 5 day phat style split. Its kind of funny how all the extra work didn't do anything expect wear out my joints and force me to take time off. By the time I dieted back down to 12% all my measurements were the same as when I was training 4 days. At the time I also thought I set a PR on pendlay row but after looking at the video I took of the lift my form was sheeet... So yeah. Unless you just really enjoy training...........

Current set up. Heavy/light phat style upper/lower split RIR based with double progression for everything minus main lifts. With everything supersetted the workouts have been quicker than when I was doing a push/pull/legs. So another fail on my part..

Upper strength (5-8 reps_- bench press ss w/ pull ups, incline db press ss w/ pendlay rows, face pulls, barbell curls, skull crushers
Lower strength (5-8)- squat, DL, calfs, abs
Upper volume (8-12)- Incline press ss w/ db rows, db flat press ss w/ lat pulldown, lateral raise, db curls, tri press downs
Lower volume (10-15)- Db rdl, lunges, leg curl ss w/leg extenstion, calf, abs

[coachcalande]

I spent my entire summer doing:

Chest/back
Legs
Shoulders/arms
Off
Repeat

I’m so damned happy to be back to this:

Chest/back/shoulders
Off
Legs/arms
Off
Repeat

Soooo happy.

[TAWS6]

Yep. I really tempted to do two uppers and one lower day a week at this point. 3 day crew. I'd prob lose a little bit though.

[air2fakie]

Yep. I really tempted to do two uppers and one lower day a week at this point. 3 day crew. I'd prob lose a little bit though.

You'd be surprised how well you maintain. Make both Lower days strength versions, do them on a rolling basis and do 1 OR 2 per week depending on what other sporting activities you have going, if you have other stuff to do or if you just want to rest. You won't notice any difference in strength or muscle.

It really only makes a difference if you're looking to improve strength or muscle, and even then the gains at this stage are minimal unless you're gaining weight.

[SuicideGripMe]

3-4 days a week has been the best for me. Programs I've run that seemed to work the best were 3 day fullbodies (basic), upper/lower (westside style), and low frequency programs like Frankie NY's Mass Program.

5 days isn't only unneccessary, I think it's counter productive for the vast majority of lifters (90%). If more just focused on their diets and hard compound lifts... they wouldn't "need" all the extra days or nonsense.

[TAWS6]

Even for the other 5-10 percent of elite lifters specialization cycles can be run 3-4 days per week. Most guys don’t like maintaining certain muscles while trying to bring up weak points. They want to go 100 percent all the time on everything. I feel like guys who bench 5 days a week or whatever will eventually destroy their shoulders.

[TolerantLactose]

About the only time I can recall training >4 times a week was after the lockdowns and my gym was doing this 1 hour open, half hour cleaning cycle. I was seriously detrained at the time so I don't know how effective it was other than for me to get back into a groove.

[SaulGuzman]

Personally, I'd recommend training 2 days rather than 5 or 6 days. In my experience, people who were training 5 or more days a week ended up feeling demotivated, injured or both are true.

I believe that 3-4 days a week would be the most suitable choice for the majority of people. I also think it's very wise to use SS. Unfortunately, with how busy gyms are nowadays, it's not a realistic option for everyone.

As for the PPL, I'm not sure if you're referring to a 5-6 day slipt or a 3-day. As I mentioned in another thread, it it's the former, I find it excessive, and if it's the latter, I don't agree with the idea of doing all leg work on a single day.

Even for men looking to show atractive. I understand the importance of the upper body, but I believe they could benefit more from a fullbody as it:
- Bench, dips or pushups
- Press or handstand
- Pullups, chinups or pulldown
- Row
- Isolation for something in the upper
- 1 exercise for legs (rotating among the week: SQ or variation / DL, variation or reverse lunges / Glute ham raises or leg curls)

[Camarija]

Yep. I really tempted to do two uppers and one lower day a week at this point. 3 day crew. I'd prob lose a little bit though.

Simlar to Coach, I'm going to run:

Upper
Rest
Lower
Rest

3.5 day, should be enough rest
Only issue is hitting the gym on a Sunday every once in a while

[air2fakie]

I don't agree with the idea of doing all leg work on a single day.

Even for men looking to show atractive. I understand the importance of the upper body, but I believe they could benefit more from a fullbody as it:
- Bench, dips or pushups
- Press or handstand
- Pullups, chinups or pulldown
- Row
- Isolation for something in the upper
- 1 exercise for legs (rotating among the week: SQ or variation / DL, variation or reverse lunges / Glute ham raises or leg curls)

Doing a full leg day is going to be more effective for most people, even beginners, than picking one of those leg exercises above three times a week.

People have been doing a single leg day per week successfully (from a muscle standpoint) for many decades. Although more frequency would certainly help at the beginner level.

[coachcalande]

Yep. I really tempted to do two uppers and one lower day a week at this point. 3 day crew. I'd prob lose a little bit though.

My son who is now a monsterous 290 pound football team captain trained like this for quite awhile :

Monday- upper
Wednesday -lower
Friday -upper


Monday-lower
Wednesday -upper
Friday-lower

Repeat

[SaulGuzman]

Doing a full leg day is going to be more effective for most people, even beginners, than picking one of those leg exercises above three times a week.

People have been doing a single leg day per week successfully (from a muscle standpoint) for many decades. Although more frequency would certainly help at the beginner level.

I don't doubt it. In fact, judging by the contributions you make in the forum, I'm sure your opinion is much better informed than mine. However, I don't understand why a full leg day would be more effective.

From my perspective, at the very least, DL would be better done alongside the upper or not included in the program at all. But having a single leg day where you do DL and SQ seems much less eficient to me than spreading them out over the week.

Even without DL, I don't quite see why it would be better to do 4-5 leg exercises in one day with the loss of performance that entails instead of splitting them into 3 sessions and maintain a better performance.

That said, I think a program consisting of 2 upper days and 1 lower is a good choice. I just don't understand why it wouldn't be even better to distribute that leg day.

[TAWS6]

It basically comes down to energy management. Past intermediate it just gets brutal to do any upper body compounds after you just squatted 315+ for reps or did heavy DL or rdls ect..

[air2fakie]

From my perspective, at the very least, DL would be better done alongside the upper or not included in the program at all. But having a single leg day where you do DL and SQ seems much less eficient to me than spreading them out over the week.

In actual practice, almost no one lifting any serious weight wants to do DL alongside a typical upper day in an intermediate program. You'll understand when you get there (srs). I also didn't say specifically that one has to do both DL and squat on a single leg day as you don't need both in a program, although I don't see that as a problem with proper programming.

Plus, there is a muscle building benefit to doing additional leg exercises on the same day after a big lift like SQ or DL, appropriately programmed of course - over just doing one leg exercise each over 3 workouts per week.

Even without DL, I don't quite see why it would be better to do 4-5 leg exercises in one day with the loss of performance that entails instead of splitting them into 3 sessions and maintain a better performance.

That said, I think a program consisting of 2 upper days and 1 lower is a good choice. I just don't understand why it wouldn't be even better to distribute that leg day.

You didn't say to distribute any 4-5 leg exercises over 3 days. You said the below, which is what I was responding to. And a single leg day can be more than 4-5 leg exercises, appropriately chosen and programmed.
It's just a fact of life that you have more energy and strength for those exercises that come earlier in the workout. It's not a "loss of performance" simply because you might not be able to lift as much on subsequent exercises, they're not there for max "performance".

- 1 exercise for legs (rotating among the week: SQ or variation / DL, variation or reverse lunges / Glute ham raises or leg curls)

[SaulGuzman]

I understand now. Thank you for the explanation!

[air2fakie]

I understand now. Thank you for the explanation!

No problem... For novices a 3x/frequency on legs would be better to build a muscular base and work on form/bracing, but that'd still need to be more than 1 exercise each workout (unless maybe if it's squats).

[paulinkansas]

FB push. Rest day optional. FB pull. Rest day optional. Repeat. If there is a FB push and pull on back to back days, there is 1 or 2 rest days. I don't go by a 7 day schedule, since I go by time available to workout. I probably have the most fukked up work week schedule compared to anyone on this forum. My schedule = there is none.

[CollegeBoy12]

I've been doing an upper/lower 3 day ULU with supersets and its great. I superset chest and back 2 exercises each, then bis and tris. Then do myo reps for a delt exercise.

Short workouts like PPL. About 45 mins to an hour max. Very useful for having a life, especially with a newborn.

[TAWS6]

I've been doing an upper/lower 3 day ULU with supersets and its great. I superset chest and back 2 exercises each, then bis and tris. Then do myo reps for a delt exercise.

Short workouts like PPL. About 45 mins to an hour max. Very useful for having a life, especially with a newborn.

I definitely think that’s the way to run upper lower as an advanced lifter.

[Horizon92]

I recently switched back to a 4 day upper/lower split coming off a 5 day phat style split. Its kind of funny how all the extra work didn't do anything expect wear out my joints and force me to take time off. By the time I dieted back down to 12% all my measurements were the same as when I was training 4 days. At the time I also thought I set a PR on pendlay row but after looking at the video I took of the lift my form was sheeet... So yeah. Unless you just really enjoy training...........

Current set up. Heavy/light phat style upper/lower split RIR based with double progression for everything minus main lifts. With everything supersetted the workouts have been quicker than when I was doing a push/pull/legs. So another fail on my part..

Upper strength (5-8 reps_- bench press ss w/ pull ups, incline db press ss w/ pendlay rows, face pulls, barbell curls, skull crushers
Lower strength (5-8)- squat, DL, calfs, abs
Upper volume (8-12)- Incline press ss w/ db rows, db flat press ss w/ lat pulldown, lateral raise, db curls, tri press downs
Lower volume (10-15)- Db rdl, lunges, leg curl ss w/leg extenstion, calf, abs

You might recall a short while back I was discussing different splits, and at the time I was trying to make full body work because it had been an effective and enjoyable way for me to train back in the day. When I returned to lifting back in July this year I just hopped onto a 6x PPL split which I did for a short while back pre covid which gave me hella gainz, probably because bodybuilding > powerlifting for hypertrophy lol.

Anyways you wrote in my thread how you thought upper/lower was superior, and the more I thought about it the more I realized just how flexible an upper/lower split is.

So, first of all, some misconceptions I had about upper/lower was basically that

1) A 50/50 split didn't make sense because you need a lot more movements for upper body than lower body
2) If my push and pull days took forever, how the hell am I gonna join them together ??

Well, the solution was obvious. First of all, the upper/lower split lets you seamlessly choose between doing higher volumes and more rest (which would be the case of 2 or 4 days per week upper/lower), or lower volumer higher frequency 6 times per week. I think the beauty in this is the ease of autoregulation.

I think what you've said about people doing "too much" definitely has merits. It might be a result of the constant attention wars on youtube and SoMe where everyone, even legit content creators, are scrambling to create new and interesting content no matter the cost. Jeff Nippards video on full body 5x/week comes to mind. Content creators basically has no choice, if they want to stay relevant they have to keep churning out new and novel things. Legit science stuff just doesn't sell, so if content creators can create something and rationalize it by using science, they will. We know that high frequency training works, there are studies like the norwegian powerlifting study that can easily be leveraged to create the argument that high frequency is the holy grail to strength and size gains. But in real world, practical scenarios I think going in, creating proper stimuli and then letting the muscles rest and fully recover, then go create stimuli again is by far the best way of building strength and size. It only took me like 1-2 weeks of trying to make high frequency full body training work to realize that it takes a ridiculous time investment just figuring out how to manage fatigue and volume on a program like that, and I could feel the injury risk skyrocket as tendons and joints didn't get time to recover. There is also the enjoyment factor - if you're hitting every bodypart 5x per week for instance, you just can't be going hard in the gym. I don't know about you guys, but I go to the gym as therapy and stress relief. I also just think that while lifting very high frequency with lower relative intensity probably works really well if set up correctly, I think that its still going to be inferior in a pure hypertrophy context in objective terms - and thats not even considering how much harder it is to setup and execute a full body HF routine.

As mentioned the beauty of U/L is its flexibility. While 24 hour recovery is basically always too short unless really holding back in the gym as is the case with full body HF programs, an upper/lower allows for incredible flexibility based on how hard you pushed yourself, how your recovery went and your motivation. As an example, imagine you go to the gym on monday and you're feeling fantastic, setting PRs and just having an amazing upper workout. The next day you go in and again you have an amazing lower workout. On wednesday you wake up and feel super beat up, so you take wednesday off. Thursday rolls around and you're feeling recovered upper body, so you hit upper body and on friday you hit lower. At this point you've done 4 workouts and can take a well deserved rest until next week - or, if you feel recovered and motivated, you could also just hit another session in the weekend. Upper, lower or both. Who cares? I also want to add that a lot of isolation stuff can just be added onto leg day. So for instance abs, neck, traps and side delts can just be tacked on to leg day as well cause those muscle groups can handle high frequency.

You could structure it like OP did:

Upper strength
Lower strength
Upper Volume
Lower volume

^ Lets say your days are getting a bit long and you don't mind going in 5-6 times per week. You could either just up the frequency and make these days shorter by cutting sets and transfering them, or you could take different isolation movements / lower priority movements and put them on days 5-6. You could do this as a regular thing or only in certain circumstance. If life gets hectic, you can go down to 2x per week.

Going back to what I learned about recovery doing Smolov back to back some years ago, I also learned a lot about the effectiveness of training high rep and low rep, so this structure makes a lot of sense. You could probably do like low rep/medium rep/high rep days if you wanted to go 6x per week. So lets say for the squat you'd do one day of almost pure technique training at high 1RM percentage - I'm talking 3x3 or similar that basically won't do anything in terms of direct hypertrophy, but which will indirectly help hypertrophy by making you capable of doing more in the lift. Then you'd have the "strength" days where you're doing 2x6 or 3x5 or whatever, and volume days with 3x8. I mean this is the magic behind Smolov and it really works. I put like 40KGs on my squat or something crazy in just a couple of months doing Smolov base cycle over and over again.

I guess at this point TAWS6 is looking at me going like "bro why do you insist on training every fkin day?? thats sub optimal!" - and to that I say.. yes, I agree. In terms of pure hypertrophy, my hypothesis is that its better to fully stimulate a given muscle, give it several days of rest to fully recover, then hit it hard again with marked increases in demands. In my case in particular, I use weightlifting as a part of my treatment for ADHD so I benefit a lot from getting into the gym as often as possible. It also happens to be enjoyable for me. Some people however would much rather have a more balanced approach, and I think the good news is thats probably superior both in terms of hypertrophy goals but also in terms of just living a balanced life.

If we imagine a bro split taking recovery a bit too far and a high frequency routine not prioritizing recovery enough, an upper/lower split is probably in the ball park of whats correct, and the beauty is that you can just go by feel because thats probably one of the best indicators of when you're ready to go again. If you feel ready to hit legs again on day 3 of your bro split, tough luck. If you don't feel ready to hit legs on day 2 of your high frequency routine, you're screwed. With upper/lower, this won't happen because you can easily just skip a day and get right back on it.

Obviously the closest relative to an upper/lower is PPL and I do think PPL is good, however an entire day for push and pull is probably overkill for most people. The more I experience and think about it, the more I realize that as long as you have exercises which hit the targeted muscles sufficiently, its a lot more important that the sets are high quality than to just keep piling on volume. Imagine a pull day - you might be doing something like pullups, cable rows, machine rows, three different bicep curl variations and rear delt work. Unless you're doing like 1 set of each - at which point you're just bunnyhopping equipment - its probably gonna be overkill. Makes more sense to split it up, have higher frequency, more flexibility and more mental focus throughout the entire workouts.

[TAWS6]

I actually do like lifting more than 4 days. The problem is that my joints always hurt lol.


Another option is full blown specialization cycles

Upper- chest spec or what ever
Maintenance everything else

Lower- ham spec
Maintenance everything else

Or

Mon- chest/hams, wed maintenance everything else, Friday chest/hams


Lots of ways to hit everything twice per week without being in the gym all the time

[Camarija]

Next bulk phase, I'm going to go low dose tadalafil and go 6 days / week

Upper
Lower
Arms
Abs & calves
Upper
Lower
Rest

It's dumb, but maybe it'll be fun

[Michiganian]

Could be my age has something to do with it, but, I can't imagine lifting more than four days/week. Well, I can, but, I know that'd quickly bring me to my knees.

I'd been doing an amalgam of the Starting Strength and Fierce 5 novice FB routines doing A, recovery day, B, recovery day, A, ... That turned out to be too much time in the gym in each session, so now I'm doing A1, A2, recovery, B1, B2, recovery, A1, ... That seems to be working out well.

I've been back at it about two months. Have made enough gains I'm going to throw MICT cardio (on a rower) back into the mix on recovery days. See how that works out.

If the MICT cardio doesn't interfere with my lifting days I'll try bumping it up to HIIT.

Back when I had a gym membership I used to do a M-F five-day program: HIIT, upper body split, legs, upper body split, HIIT. But, that was almost entirely on machines, no compound movements, and more reps, less weight/resistance than I'm doing now.

[CollegeBoy12]

Obviously the closest relative to an upper/lower is PPL and I do think PPL is good, however an entire day for push and pull is probably overkill for most people. The more I experience and think about it, the more I realize that as long as you have exercises which hit the targeted muscles sufficiently, its a lot more important that the sets are high quality than to just keep piling on volume. Imagine a pull day - you might be doing something like pullups, cable rows, machine rows, three different bicep curl variations and rear delt work. Unless you're doing like 1 set of each - at which point you're just bunnyhopping equipment - its probably gonna be overkill. Makes more sense to split it up, have higher frequency, more flexibility and more mental focus throughout the entire workouts.

I think doing PPL once per week is great as a truly advanced trainee, and can be an alternative to the routines already discussed. I had a very positive experience with it.

The reason why is that you often can grow off LESS volume as you get truly advanced. The loads you're using are just so heavy at that point, plus your execution is usually so good that it creates a huge amount of stimulus per set. I know "in theory" more volume sounds better, but it often gets way too hard to recover from that if you are TRULY big and strong.

I mean, think about it - how much volume do you really need when you're benching 315 with good form? 6-8 (10 at most) weekly sets with high intensity can absolutely get it done.

The bonus of this setup is that its excellent for your joints and connective tissues as well.

[paulinkansas]

I'm going to go low dose tadalafil
It's dumb, but maybe it'll be fun

Are there any side effects in bodybuilding to tadalafil besides its primary prescribed purpose?

[Camarija]

Are there any side effects in bodybuilding to tadalafil besides its primary prescribed purpose?

According to studies, the two big ones related to bodybuilding are increase in fat mass loss, increase in lean muscle mass gain.

The hypothesis is that the effects are attributed to increased circulation, better / more efficient nutrient delivery and waste removal.

There has been detectable increases in free testosterone, but on the level of actual TRT, not TRT abuse.

There are other health benefits but not related to bodybuilding, more general health.

John Meadows said anecdotally the only effects were increased pumps and circulation, but he was on a cocktail of a bunch of stuff so it would be hard to pinpoint the isolated effects.

Anyway, the studies seemed promising and I've been intered in testing it out.

Also plan on having a cardio partner