We shouldn’t ignore our health, even if we’re quarantined. You may know some exercises, but working them into a practical workout plan is another story.
There are many ways to split your workouts. No matter what, you want to give your muscles ample rest time, while activating every muscle group at least once a week.
Here are a few methods.
Bro Splits
Bro splits are the easiest to work around. In a bro split plan, each workout focuses on a single muscle group. Most bro split routines have an exercise every weekday, making them an easy way to keep consistent.
An example bro split plan looks like this:
Monday: Chest and bicep exercises
Tuesday: Leg and core exercises
Wednesday: Back and tricep exercises
Thursday: Legs and core
Friday: Shoulder exercises
Saturday and Sunday: Rest
Their greatest weakness relates to rest days. It’s easy to plan a workout routine with too little recovery for each muscle group. Most exercises don’t hit just one muscle. For example, bench presses and push ups are a chest exercise, but shoulders, biceps and triceps also aid in the movement. The supporting muscle will quickly exhaust if you exercise them the day after they supported. This could lead to excessive pain and even injury.
That’s why I recommend having two leg days on Tuesday and Thursday, while exercising two muscle groups on the other days. Leg days give the entire upper body an opportunity to recover.
Bro split routines are useful for beginners, as they’re relatively easy to plan around. They’re also useful for learning how your body moves and where you need to start.
Full Body
A full body workout is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a routine that hits every muscle group in one workout. When poorly planned, full body routines can lead to excessively long workouts. One only needs to exercise a good 45 to 60 minutes for any workout, and full body is no exception.
To make up for the number of active parts, full body splits include a lot of compound exercises done in quick succession. Compound exercises use more than one muscle group to complete the movement. Doing these in quick succession overloads your muscles, a necessary ingredient in muscle building.
An example exercise routine is as such: doing a minute each of different push-ups variations with no rest for a total of three minutes, followed by three minutes of leg exercises, then three minutes of back exercises and so on.
Since no muscle is left unused, full body workouts require more recovery time. The typical full body workout includes workouts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday with Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday as rest days.
Look into full body routines and find the right combination of exercises for you.
Push-Pull Split
While full body and bro splits separate exercises based on body part, push-pull splits separate exercises based on body movement.
Push exercises require you to extend either in front of you or above you. Examples include push-ups, bench presses, overhead presses, squats and lungs.
Pull exercises requires you to either contract or retract the limbs from an extended position. Examples include rows, pull ups, chin ups, barbell curls and pull downs.
One day you can focus exclusively on push exercises, and the next you can focus on pull.
An example push-pull week looks like this:
Monday: Upper body push
Tuesday: Upper body pull
Wednesday: Legs and core
Thursday: Rest
Friday: Push
Saturday: Pull
Sunday: Legs and core
You can mix and match any of the splits above, as long as you know what your focus is. You can place emphasis on chest during a push-pull routine by doing more chest exercises one day. You can work full body exercises into any routine as warm-ups and cool-downs.
Your goals and consistency will make or break your routine. Once you make a plan — deciding a workout time and what body parts/movement you want to do each day — stick to that routine for a good amount of time. You’re playing the long game. No routine will grant results in only a week. It’s only by consistently following a plan that you’ll see results.
