Beginner's Build Part V: How Much Should I Do? (Part II)
Choosing a Training Split As a Beginner
In the last part of this Beginner’s Build Series, we established why it makes sense to restrict your starting volume to the minimum amount of hard sets per week required to produce significant muscle and strength gains. Below, we’ll cover how to divide that volume in a training split that makes the most sense for a beginner.
Beginner Split Selection
I wrote an extensive post on training split selection previously, where I covered the most common options for breaking up which muscle groups you’re training on which days throughout the week:
Body-Part split
Push-Pull-Legs
Upper-Lower
Full-Body
Ultimately, no split is inherently superior to the others, per se; rather, each one offers different pro’s and con’s with regards to training variables and personal preferences that determine which option is the best for you.
In addition to those variables and preferences that everybody ought to take into account, there are a few particularly key factors to consider in order to make the ideal choice in the context of a beginner:
1. Beginner Volume
2. Beginner Frequency
3. Making It Sustainable
Beginner Volume
As we covered in Part IV, new lifters can and should get away with using low weekly volume–a low amount of hard sets per muscle group per week. With this in mind, it makes the most practical sense to follow a full-body training split, in that the other options leave you with little bang for your buck per session from a time-management stance.
For example, if you were to follow a low-volume body-part/bro-split, where you train only one or two body parts per session (ex: Day 1 = chest and triceps, Day 2 = back and biceps, Day 3 = shoulders, and Day 4 = legs), you would be spending maybe 15 minutes actually lifting at the gym each day.
This isn’t against the rules or anything, but, considering that on 4+ days per week you’re probably spending around 10+ minutes getting ready to leave for the gym, 10+ minutes driving to the gym, 10+ minutes showering and changing, and 10+ minutes driving home, it’s fairly inefficient in terms of managing your time.
Using an upper-lower or push-pull-legs split is an improvement in this respect, but you’re still spending 40+ minutes in start-up and wrap-up time for maybe 30 minutes of training if we’re being generous with our math.
The full-body split alleviates this time-efficiency issue in two ways. First, by training more body parts per session, this split allows you to increase the number of sets you’re completing per session. As a result, you reap a greater bang for your buck. Instead of 2 or 3 total working sets per session, you can now easily start out completing 6+ total working sets per session while keeping your volume low for reasons we discussed in the last post.
Second, the full-body option allows you to achieve a greater training frequency–how many times you train a given muscle group per week–in fewer sessions. For example, if you want to train each muscle group twice per week with a push-pull-legs split, you need to train 6 days per week (2 push days, 2 pull days, and 2 leg days) and spend 6 days worth of start-up and wrap-up costs in the process. However, with the full-body split you could train each body part even 3 times per week and cut your start-up and wrap-up costs in half.
But, why would you want this higher frequency?
Beginner Frequency
As we covered last time, the amount of effective sets you can perform per session is limited at around 6-10 sets–meaning that performing more than this in a single session costs more in terms of energy and recovery but doesn’t give any more muscle gains in return.
For this reason, higher frequency training is typically used when people are already completing a lot of sets per session and looking to ramp up their weekly volume further. However, in the case of a beginner, a higher training frequency of 2-3 sessions per muscle group per week is useful when using lower volumes as well.
Beginners can reap significant gains from as low as 1 set per muscle group per session while accruing very little fatigue in the process. This means that you probably only need one rest day before hitting the same muscle group again, in that your recovery time from the first session is lower and the demands of the second training session are also lower because you’re using such low volume.
As a new lifter, you can and should leverage this to your advantage to complete a greater number of cycles of, “train → recover → grow → train again” within a single week without overtraining.
Whether you opt into 2 sessions per week or 3 depends upon how great of a commitment you can sustain over time, which is our next topic of discussion.
Making It Sustainable
Maximizing and optimizing your training program for muscle and strength gains is great, but it’s futile if you create a plan that you aren’t going to stick to overtime. For this reason, it’s important to assure that your training split and frequency selections match the time and energy commitments you’re both interested in and willing to make.
I covered this in my general post on training split selection, but it’s particularly important for beginners, in that, like any habit, you’re probably most likely to skip out on your trip to the gym when you’re starting out because you haven’t ingrained the practice as routine yet.
In order to set up realistic expectations and select a training frequency accordingly, consider two questions:
How much time do I have to spare each week?
How big of a deal is lifting to me?
The first question is probably the more important of the two because it sets the far limit of what’s actually feasible; whereas, the second question zeroes in on what’s reasonable to expect of yourself.
In other words, your time constraints dictate how many times you can fit the gym into your schedule, and your desire to lift dictates how much you’re willing to sacrifice to actually show up and lift.
If you’re passionate about training or dead-set on achieving your lifting goals, you’ll make it to the gym even when it’s inconvenient–when you’re tired, when there’s traffic, when you just don’t feel like it. In this case, it’s probably realistic for you to lift three times per week if you want to and if doing so is mathematically possible with your schedule.
On the other hand, if you care about lifting, but not enough to make it to the gym if it means getting out of bed after a crappy night of sleep, showing up late to the weekend hangout, or interrupting your Harry Potter movie marathon on a rainy Saturday, then 1 or 2 sessions per week is probably a better option for you.
And, an easy way to determine where you fall in terms of commitment is to consider how much you care about the reasons to lift we covered in Parts I, II, and III, as well as other central, “Why’s” behind your resistance training.
One way or another, you won’t build significant amounts of muscle overnight or across a few weeks. And, even if you do, you’ll lose those gains if you don’t remain consistent with your training over time. For this reason, it’s important to choose a training split and frequency that is sustainable for you.
Forcing yourself to show up for an extra session per week in your first month of training is cool, but showing up to a realistic number of sessions every week of every month of the year for years in a row is cooler.
Conclusion
In summary, in order to utilize an appropriate beginner volume without throwing away a bunch of time to start-up and wrap-up costs, it makes sense to utilize a full-body training split when you’re starting out lifting.
This split also makes it easy to increase training frequency to 2-3 sessions per week, which will produce greater muscle and strength gains.
But, your decision to raise your training frequency should depend first on whether doing so is feasible within the constraints of your schedule and realistic considering your drive, or lack thereof, to get to the gym when you don’t feel like it.
(SPOILER: sometimes you won’t)
Now that we’ve covered volume, training split selection, and frequency, we’re left with the last aspect of the question, “How much should I do?”: how heavy to lift.