A Simple Strength and Muscle-Building Program and the Death of Bro Splits

• 2 warm up sets.
• 3-4 sets x 5-8 reps, 8-12 reps (women)..
• Your shoulders are one of the easiest areas to injure so be sure to be well-warmed up before going into your working sets.

• 2-3 sets to failure.
• When doing dips, bend your knees, cross your lower legs, and pitch your body forward. If you do dips straight up and down, you put yourself at higher risk of shoulder injury.
• Use a dip assist machine if you’re not used to doing dips to build up to unassisted dips.

In a standard pyramid progression, you start off with a relatively lower weight but relatively higher reps. For each set, increase the weight but decrease the reps. 

The benefit of standard pyramid progressions is that, when you reach your heaviest weight, your muscles, tendons, and ligaments are really warmed up. The downside is that you can exhaust your muscles by the time you get your heaviest weight so your technique suffers.

In a reverse pyramid, you start off with a heavy weight and low reps. With each set you decrease weight and increase reps.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the bro splits vs full-body workouts. Recall that with bro splits, you assign a day to each major body part and maybe train a minor muscle on that same day (e.g., chest and biceps; back and triceps). In each workout you try to “destroy” that particular muscle group with the idea that it will take a long time to recover. 

With a full-body program we usually train all (major) muscle groups during each individual workout. Two implications follow: First, you will train each major muscle group several times a week (3 in a standard program). Second, your muscles won’t get “destroyed” after each work out since you’re only doing 3-5 sets for a particular muscle group as opposed to the 14-18 (or more) in a standard bro-split. It follows, that you can train each muscle group more frequently.

Why do full-body programs seem to be outperforming bro splits? First, (on average) protein synthesis mostly occurs over the first 48 hours from your workout. This means that the majority of muscle growth/repair occurs only in the first 48 hours, post workout. After that period, resting your muscle has minimal mass/strength gain benefit. After 48 hours, your muscle is, in effect, ready to be trained again .

Understanding this allows us to properly conceptualize the debate between bro splits and full-body programs. It’s not really that training your full body in a session has some magical powers, it’s that a full body program allows you to increase each muscles’ training frequency over a given period. In a standard bro split, each major muscle group is trained only 1x/week, but muscle growth only happens for the first 48 hours. In a (standard) full-body program, each major muscle group is trained 3x/week. This means there are 3x the growth periods compared to a bro splits program.

Hold On a Second…
If you’ve been lifting for any reasonable amount of time, your spider senses should be tingling from what I’ve said. Something’s not quite right. Anyone who’s an experienced lifter will tell you that for muscle growth you simply can’t push a muscle group hard enough in just 3-5 sets of a single exercise. To really get that drained, quivering-jello-muscle feeling, you need to work that muscle over at least 3 or 4 different exercises of 3-5 sets each. That is, you need a minimum of 14-18 sets on each muscle group to truly damage it in order to get the gainz you’re after.

What am I getting at? When we compare full-body to bro splits programs, total training volumes will differ. And the research is clear on one thing: Training volume is a primary driver for mass and strength gains. The whole point of bro splits is to increase training volume over what one could do in a full-body program. That’s why bro splits became the gold standard for weightlifting. Let’s look at that more carefully.

Assume a standard bro split program:

Day 1: Chest 16 sets.
Day 2: Legs 16 sets.
Day 3: Rest
Day 4: Shoulders 16 sets.
Day 5: Back 16 sets.
Day 6: Rest
Day 7: Arms 16 sets.

Compare that to a 3x/week full body program where each body part gets 3-4 sets x 3 times/week (9-12 sets/body part/week).

When we compare the two programs head to head, for each body part, the bro splits program does an additional 4-5 sets of volume each week (assuming we hold reps constant). That’s a big difference. Take chest for example. Even if I’m only benching 150 lbs x 6 times, for 4 sets that’s 3 600 lbs (900 lbs x 4 sets) of volume difference in just one week between the programs. Now add together the volume difference for each body part between programs. That’s a massive difference in total volume between the programs in just one week. Imagine over a year.

No thanks, Mr. Science Man, I’m keeping my bro splits. Keep your stupid “science” away from my precious gainz!

What’s going on here? In a lot of the comparative studies they have to hold training volume constant across the two types of programs. Without this control, volumes are different and there’s no way to can point to frequency as being the differentiating variable. Great for controlled science but this doesn’t translate well outside of the lab since the whole point of bro splits is to increase training volume. I’ll bet my last scoop of protein powder that if you compare training volume between any real-world full-body program vs any bro split program, there will be a significant difference in total weekly training volume (favoring bro splits).  If total volume drives gainz, it’s bro splits all the way.

Hold on a tick. We started this whole article citing the trend in the literature, across various studies and study designs, that full-body training generates results superior to bro splits. But the studies are a sham. They’re comparing apples to oranges. Bro splits have higher volume. If volume drives gainz, how can a lower volume program produce moar gainz than a higher volume program? The meat in my head is getting overtrained with all this!

Wait! There’s more! There’s another training dogma that’s come under increasing scrutiny: that muscle damage is the mechanism for muscle hypertrophy. Bro splits seek to maximize volume because it is the best way to guarantee maximum muscle damage. The reasoning goes like this:

Moar muscle damage leads to moar bigger muscles. And moar volume leads to moar muscle damage. So, moar total volume leads to moar muscle damage which leads to moar bigger muscle growth. By transitivity, moar volume leads to more bigger muscles. Therefore, bro spliz all the way.

But what if muscle damage isn’t the primary driver of muscle growth? And what if, like everything else in the world, the law of decreasing marginal returns also applies to training volume?

I’m not going to rewrite an already excellent article so I’ll summarize. Short term spikes in inflammation (signaled by interleukin 6; IL-6) trigger the metabolic pathway for muscle repair. But long-term/chronic inflammation (also signaled by IL-6) interferes with muscle growth. IL-6 serves a dual role depending on its intensity and duration.

See where we’re going with this?

Bro splits lead to long-term inflammation since there is massive muscle damage. But what does this do to the potential for muscle growth? Recall, it undermines it (relative to a short and intense IL-6 signal). What does high frequency training do? It leads to short-term spikes in IL-6 which…(say it with me) activates the muscle-growing metabolic pathways three times a week.

Pair this with what we observed above, that most protein synthesis (muscle-building) usually only occurs over the first 48 hours post work out, and we’re on our way to resolving the volume-frequency paradox.

Let’s walk through it. The law of decreasing marginal returns tells us that there’s some upward bound to the gainz we can make by adding more volume to our workout. At some point, more volume isn’t going to translate to moar units of gainz. We can see this by imagining extreme ends of a continuum of volume training. At one end I lift one pound/week. Surely adding one more unit of training volume will lead to a better  rate of gainz. At the other extreme, all I’m doing is lifting weight, from the time I wake up, until the time I go to bed. In fact, I sleep with a 45 lb plate on my chest so that with each breath I exert force x distance. Adding another 45 lb plate on my chest at night (i.e., increasing volume) isn’t going to add more units of muscle gain. In fact, adding more volume at this point probably decreases my total gainz and negatively affects rate of gainz.

Somewhere between the two ends of the continuum, there’s a point where adding more volume doesn’t increase units of muscle gain (i.e., the marginal rate). I’m still making gainz but the amount of gainz/unit of additional volume starts to drop. And somewhere beyond that point, adding volume will actually undermine muscle growth.

Bro splits push us past the point where we make optimal gainz from volume. The additional units of volume in bro splits are actually detrimental to growth rather than beneficial (relative to lower volumes). The kind of inflammation we get undermines optimal growth whereas frequency training gives us the amount of volume much closer to the goldilocks zone–and we get that optimal volume 3x/week.

There’s another lesson here. If, after training, you experience short-term soreness and you want to preserve your precious gainz, don’t suppress it with anti-inflammatories or anti-oxidants. You’re interfering with the muscle-building signal.

EDIT: I just discovered this interview with  Firas Zahabi, George St. Pierre’s (GSP) coach, who is widely regarded as one of the best MMA coaches in the world–he also happens to be a philosophy major! I can’t recommend watching this interview strongly enough. It summarizes everything in this article

Summary
To summarize, two main dogmas of bro science are under serious attack from non-bro science (aka, science): First, contra bro science, full-body training (i.e., high-frequency training) is superior to bro splits for muscle hypertrophy.* Second, contra bro science massive muscle damage and subsequent soreness don’t guarantee optimal gainz. The amount of muscle damage and inflammation matters. A third take-away is that for any weightlifting program, experiment with reps, sets, weight, and rest periods to maximize total program volume for your body.

*Note: It may be the case the bodybuilders using steroids will still do better on bro splits because the steroids allow their bodies to recover faster from massive muscle damage. It’s also what allows pros to train twice a day. This should not be read as an endorsement of steroid use!

Caveat: Pretty much all of the studies that show superiority of higher frequency training over lower frequency training used cohorts of advanced lifters or athletes. There was little or no difference in the results of studies that used beginners to compare different relative training frequencies. This is probably explained by the fact that beginners will make significant gainz no matter what they do. For advanced athletes, the low hanging gain-fruits have already been plucked. Different training methods will matter more.

Additional Sources Consulted: 

1. http://www.lookgreatnaked.com/blog/bro-split-versus-total-body-training-which-builds-more-muscle/