Making a Three-Day Split

There are different ways to divide muscles of the body into three separately worked out groups. For example,

Back-biceps

Legs-shoulders

Chest-Triceps

or

Back-Chest

Biceps-triceps

Legs-shoulders

or

Chest-shoulders

Back-triceps

Legs-Biceps

Or any other way. There are many variants and most of them have a right to exist. Each of them has some advantages over the others. Consider below the most popular variants of three-day splits for beginners

Program 1

Workout 1. Monday .

Lifting barbell or dumbbell bent-over ( or deadlift with lower block to stomach, you can alternate from workout to workout) 3х8-10

Pulling up ( or upper block to the chest ) 3х8-10

Straight upper block pull down with front arms 3õ8-10

Standing barbell curl 3х8-10

Hammer dumbbell lift 3х8-10

Training session 2. Wednesday

Back barbell squat 3x8-10

Bench press 3õ8-10

Bench presses 3õ8-10

Chest press from the bench while sitting on a bench 3õ8-10

Dumbbell curls up through the sides 3х10-12

Dumbbell curls up in an incline 3х10-12

Training session 3. Friday

Bench presses on a horizontal bench 3õ8-10

Dumbbell curls on a flat bench 3x8-10

Crossovers on upper blocks 3õ10-12

Bench press with narrow grip 3х8-10

Arms curls on upper bar 3x10-12

Explanations for program 1

The undoubted advantage of this program is the economy of time. For example, on Monday, after you train your back, where your biceps are already under a good load and are well warmed up, you can start training your biceps without any warm-up. For the same reason, a couple of sets of a single exercise may be enough to fully work the biceps. The same considerations apply to triceps training on Friday. If you feel sore after a couple of sets, it is pointless to continue training on this day.

Program 2

Training 1. Monday

Lower block (barbell) pulling to the waist 3х8-10

Pulling up ( upper block pulling ) to the chest 3х8-10

Bench press 3х8-10

Dumbbell press on a horizontal bench 3х8-10

Dumbbell Pullovers 3õ8-10

90 degree leg raises on Bench Press 2x (max)

Training session 2. Wednesday

Barbell squats 3x8-10

Bench presses 3х8-10

Straight leg deadlift 3õ8-10

Bench press leg curls 3х8-10

Saddle raises on stance 3х12-15

Training session 3. Friday

Bench press with narrow grip 3х8-10

Upper bar curls 3х10-12

Alternate dumbbell curls with supination 3õ8-10

Isolated arm bends on top blocks 3х10-12

Dumbbell swings up across the sides 3õ10-12

Standing dumbbell curls 3х10-12

Vertical Bench Press from the chest in Bench Press 3х8-10. Attention: Here the basic exercise on deltoids is moved to the end of your workout, after isolated exercises. It must be performed with lower weights and with maximum caution because of accumulated muscle fatigue.

Explanations of the program 2

This program has several advantages. First, within the limits of one workout the antagonist muscles are worked, which leads to increased blood supply (pamping) of the working muscles. This leads, in turn, to additional stimulation of muscle fiber growth. Second, small muscles, such as the biceps, are stressed twice a week - indirectly during back training on Monday and directly during direct training on Friday. This factor is important for the development of small muscles, because they recover faster than large muscle masses. Thirdly, the leg training is carried out on a separate day. It allows you to fully train your legs, without thinking about further training of the other muscles on that day. In fact, training any muscle group after training legs, on the background of their fatigue, will not be quite complete.

General Recommendations

You can still come up with and implement quite a few three-day splits, and all of them will have some advantages or disadvantages. A guideline here can be to put the lagging muscle group into a separate training day and compose a split according to this condition. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss them. The general rules of training at this stage are standard. General warm-up and a short stretching to prepare the organism to power loads. Special warm-up in one or two approaches with small weights before each exercise. The tempo of the execution is medium, without jerks and kicks of the bar against your chest. Rest time between sets of 2 to 3 minutes.

Typical mistakes made by beginners

Trying to copy exercises performed by more experienced athletes. This does not do any good. Experienced athletes have very different goals and objectives and blindly copying exercises they perform may do nothing for novice athletes or cause them to overtrain.

The same goes for copying the training programs of more experienced athletes by beginners, much less copying the programs of professionals. This is guaranteed to send the beginner into overtraining, stagnation of results, and consequently into disillusionment and abandonment of training. It is better to undertrain than to overtrain.

Excessive reliance on isolation exercises. Isolating exercises performed for big muscle groups will give nothing to a beginner in terms of weight gain and strength index. According to the author, beginners can use them only for training small muscle groups such as deltoids, biceps, triceps, etc.

Lifting large weights to the detriment of the correct technique. First, it is fraught with injury. Secondly, incorrect exercise technique shifts a part of the load to other, non-target muscles, and as a result the muscles being worked miss the load. Leave your ego outside the gym. All exercises must be performed in a controlled manner, at a smooth pace, avoiding abrupt movements. Perform phases of movements smoothly. Do not allow the bar to hit your chest while doing presses, and do not pull the weight from its starting point when lifting weights, but gradually apply the force.

Increase the intensity of training by means of different methods of increasing the intensity. At this stage only one method of increasing the intensity is possible - increasing the work weights in exercises. All other methods, for example, supersets, drop-sets, cheating, forced reps, and other tricks are inadmissible at this stage.

Use of "refusing" reps. This strongly overloads your psyche, gives you nothing for your power and can lead to stagnation in results. It is necessary to complete an approach in a couple of reps before the refusal.

Go below 5-6 reps per attempt. Your strength is growing as it is. Low number of reps with big weights strongly stresses the joint and ligament apparatus, which does not progress as quickly as the muscles. So trying to work with too much weight at this stage can lead to serious injury to your joints or ligaments.

Excessive prolongation of training. One hour is quite enough to perform the above programs.

In conclusion I would like to remind you of a saying: ride slowly, ride farther.

Conclusion

It should be noted that many athletes, some of them very famous, have been training for years and decades in accordance with a three-day split, thus making progress, especially in the off-season, when there is no objective to participate in competitions. At the same time, the split programs described above are varied in various ways, the techniques described in the article Effective Principles of Muscle Mass Gaining are applied. However, increased working weights in exercises and the use of intensification training methods make it quite difficult to fully pump two muscle groups in one workout, as is the case in a three-day split, and, in addition, this workout is considerably longer. Therefore, many athletes switch to a Four-Day Split or a Five-Day Split