A split schedule is a way to change up your workout so that instead of working your body all in one day you work your body over two or three days. There are a few rules that people tend to use to do these workouts and I will try to list the muscle groups that you will work on which days. The real advantage to doing a split schedule is that you get a chance to really push the muscles, do more exercises and hopefully rest them more in between workouts.
When you first start working out you probably work your whole body on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The idea of a split schedule is that you will work your whole body once or twice in a week. On a two day split you will work your whole body on Monday and Tuesday and again on Thursday and Friday.
Here are the major muscle groups:
Quadriceps, hamstrings, chest, back, shoulders, biceps, and triceps
Here is a list of the minor muscle groups
Abdominals, calves, forearms, lower back and traps. Usually you only do specific exercises for you calves and abdominals until you become an advanced weightlifter or bodybuilder.
First the rules
You don’t want to work a muscle group directly on consecutive days as you do not want to overtrain it.
You want to only do one or two big muscle group in a workout
Two day splits
The classic two day split is called “push-pull” one day is pushing exercises and the second day is pulling exercises.
Monday and Thursday you will do Chest, shoulders, triceps and quadriceps.
On Tuesday and Friday you will do back, biceps, hamstrings and calves.
You can decide which of these days you will do abs although some people do abs on all of their workout days, I would rather have abs on Monday and Thursday and at home on Saturday. On the two day split you would increase the number of sets that you do for each muscle group compared to your original workouts of working out your body all on the same day.
Three day split
The three day split means that you work each muscle group about three times every two weeks. The way that you do it is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, rest Thursday and then do it Friday, Saturday, Sunday and rest the second Monday, The idea is three days and then one rest day and then start again. Here are the muscle groups that you would do.
Day 1 chest, shoulders, triceps.
Day 2 Back, biceps, abs.
Day 3 quadriceps, hamstrings and calves.
On a three day spit you would do more sets per muscle group than even on your two day split schedule.
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