Workout strategy: Split sets or whole-body workouts?

In My Humble Opinion
1

What are the tradeoffs of more intense workouts vs. shorter time between workouts?

I am considering whether to overhaul my workout routine. Currently I have a five-day exercise cycle that alternates cardio with weight training at the gym:

cycling, upper body, cycling, legs & core, rest

(After I got a stent a couple of years ago I put cardio as a higher priority, so that’s not going to change.)

As you can see, I will exercise each muscle group once every five days. These sessions includes multiple sets*. My concern is that five days allows for recovery and then backsliding.

I am wondering if it would be more beneficial to exercise each muscle group more often but with fewer sets. So make each gym session a whole-body workout but just do one or maybe two sets of each lift. My workouts are about an hour, so just combining my current two workouts into one long session would just be too fatiguing for me. (BTW I am 64.) This would be 48-72 hours between workouts, where 48 is usually considered ideal.

I was hoping there would be a factual answer to this but when it comes to exercise you’ll ask 10 people and get 11 opinions, so here we are.

  • I do three sets for legs, four for upper body and core. I increase the weight on each set for the first three sets; for a fourth set I leave the weight the same as the third. I set up the weight so I can do 8-12 reps on the last set. On the first set I do up to 12 reps and then increase the weight by about 10% on each set. This is usually to failure on the subsequent sets (unable to complete a rep in good form). If I cannot do at least 8 reps on any set then I reduce the weight for the next set.
2

Just a quick note, but what are your training goals? If you want to simply be fit and strong and look it, I’d be inclined to say you should train much less.

In my twenties, I tried to follow the “48 hour ideal”, and could never make it work. With time, I realized only physically gifted or chemically assisted people can train hard that often; you either train with suboptimal effort or injure yourself, when not fully recovered. Also, in the past 20 years evidence has mounded that a single (work) set per exercise done with real effort is just as good as protracted set scenarios, with the above caveats.

Splitting my workouts never worked too well, either. There are loads of great exercises and exercise combos that basically erode each other with the splits; when I’ve fried my grip with heavy dumbell rows, it’s hard to do a good deadlift a couple days later etc.

So, I always felt full-body workouts were the way to go for me. I would feel “unrecovered strain” in my joints, ligaments and flesh with too-frequent training, and my stalling progress showed it. Split routines are a bodybuilder thing. I was never one. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to look good naked, as well as be fit and strong.

Now at 45, I train once a week, always a full-body workout. I do only one work set per exercise (an exception being pullups), but I do every exercise with intense effort. Basically as hard as I can without entering the danger zone. Effort is key, says studies and my personal results.

My body tells me I need at least five days to recover from a training session, and it takes a full week to really be back in prime. I’m stronger almost every time I grab the weights, in one or more lifts, which is proof that my system works. I think worrying that five days of recovery allows for backsliding is folly. Doing hard exercise and then fully recovering is what makes a guy stronger.

I always increase the poundage if things start to feel doable, and sometimes even when they don’t. This is a great way to break through plateaus. Obviously, you (the general you) need to have lots of experience to keep injury-free this way. But doing the same thing over and over again, for any longer period of time only makes you more efficient doing it. It doesn’t build muscle, it doesn’t increase stamina. I keep my body guessing, by increasing poundage / tweaking lifts.

One key tenet I follow is to keep the workouts at 45 minutes, max. Doing longer training sessions is counter-productive, due to dwindling hormonal status, unless one is physically gifted, or chemically enhanced. Doing only one work set per lift (apart from pullups) allows for the short training time.

Due to the limited number of exercises per shortish training session, I cycle certain pairs of lifts that work the same muscles. So, I concentrate on increasing my weighted dips stats for a while, and then turn to benching with the same mindset, etc.