The fact about full body and split routines is that historically, split routines are the product of modern bodybuilding culture. Ever since competitive professional bodybuilding became a thing, bodybuilders became proponents of this thing called split routines.

This is when people would designated separate days for different parts of the body. This was done so that people could give certain body parts a day or two to recover while working on another body part.

The problem with this methodology is that, many of the bodybuilders who are proponents of split routines do not represent the general populace.

For one bodybuilders train for aesthetic purposes, not performance. If you train the way a professional bodybuilder does, your performance in a sport may be affected in a detrimental manner. For example: big biceps or thick lats will not aid your ability to get past blockers or break tackles on the football field.

Having thick quads will not seamlessly translate to having a great vertical or increase your ability to dunk a basketball. A strong bench press does not necessarily translate into punching power in the boxing ring. Accordingly, bodybuilder split routines are not the answer to gaining explosive, functional strength and power for sports.

Another characteristic of split routines is that the bodybuilders who advocate split routines in bodybuilding magazines are often using performance enhancing drugs (PED) while doing these routines. As a result, you cannot expect the same outcomes as your favorite bodybuilders while using the same workout routines, if you don’t use the same PEDs. You will never build muscle mass and strength as fast as someone who is supplementing their diet with testosterone and deca or some other performance enhancing combination of drugs. It just will not happen.

This is not to say that you cannot build muscle fast and drug free. On  the contrary, YOU CAN! More importantly, the younger you start kids on a resistance training program, the more you will increase their strength development potential. From what I have seen in my personal research, kids who engage in resistance training not only show an increase in lean muscle mass, but they develop improved neural communication between nerves and muscles. By the age of 13 – 15 the window for the improvement on this connection closes. It is during pre-adolescence that this neural connection can be optimized, making the muscle gains that occur later in life more productive with regard to functional strength.

 

Until next time …