By Matt Barrett
When you begin a new fitness routine, a body part split makes sense, and it will get you results because it’s new to your system. Everything works for a new lifter, and when you’re just starting out almost everything will give you growth stimulus. After your new gains from being a newbie wear off, however, you will hit a plateau rather quickly. This leads to frustration and overall poor planning of periodization methods. Unless you’re new to exercising or using performance enhancing drugs, body part splits are more or less holding back all your gains and results. Right off the bat, you are only training one body part per week. So, if your chest is lacking, getting more recruitment of muscle fibers throughout the week would benefit growth much more than the almighty chest day Monday. Doing full body splits throughout the week will hit muscle groups more than once and give them 50% more training volume, and in return more hypertrophy growth! Secondly, it’s awesome that you got this great new routine off this amazing bodybuilder that you found online, but in reality you are probably not a world class bodybuilder using world class enhancing drugs to get the results that he does. You probably have a full-time job, a family, and kids and little time to get to the gym. You can’t be doing a body split that these pros use that has them hitting a massive body part for 3-4 hours a day. I know you probably want 25-inch arms or a 44-inch chest, but that doesn’t just happen simply because you bought their program. So, what can you do? The most common goals for most people are to lose weight, burn fat, and put on some lean muscle. The confidence you get from being healthy, hitting your goals, and wearing that new outfit are what we are all after. How do you get that? Stick to your full body routines. Things like upper/lower or push/pull routines should be your bread and butter. They will ramp up your metabolism, keep you burning excess calories, and help lay down the foundation of lean mass. Also, if you are mindful of what you are putting into your body and you keep track of it, then you’ll be amazed at the results you will actually achieve. Remember, the body becomes stagnant if it’s doing the same thing over and over again, so leave the body split routines for the old time bodybuilders and get the results you want with full body splits.