Day 1
Muscle group: Legs/Chest
Exercise: Squats with barbell. Bench press lying
Day 2
Muscle group: Back/Shoulders
Exercise Muscle group Exercise: Deadlift. Bench press sitting
Base exercises are split in two days: in the first day perform squats and bench press, in the second day – deadlift and bench press sitting. These are the base exercises for the muscles of the legs, chest, back and shoulders.
To the base exercises one can add a number of isolated exercises or exercises with use of body weight, for example, in the first day, you can perform push-ups on the parallel bars, the second pull-ups on the bar.
If the exercisers would feel fatigue in the muscles of forearm after deadlifts, which would cause difficulty exercising on the bar, then pull-ups on the bar may be performed on day one, and push-ups on the parallel bars – on day two.
Another key issue in the use of the basic exercises in practice is that many of them load the same muscle groups - although in different ways, yet very substantially. Therefore, use in the same training set of, for example, squats with barbell and deadlift would lead to the fact that the back and legs muscles involved in both exercises will be loaded at a double rate. Same situation with exercises for the triceps and shoulders. Such base exercises as bench press and standing press load simultaneously the triceps and deltoids and pectorals. Such duplicate load inevitably leads to overtraining as muscles just do not have enough time to fully recover. This problem can be solved in two ways:
- replacement of hard base exercises with easier ones;
- combining duplicating exercises in one workout with increase of the overall recovery time for muscles subjected to a double load.
Performing heavy barbell squats and deadlifts not only in one workout, but even with a break of a few days is simply physically impossible. Therefore, in the set of «squats – deadlift» the optimum way would be to replace the squats with leg presses or squats in the Smith's machine, that reduce the load on back muscles, or, even better, replacement of the classic deadlift with deadlift with straight legs with a tilt back in optimal biomechanical range of not more than 900. Since the triceps and deltoids are small enough in size and recover faster than large pectoral muscles, the optimum is to combine exercises for the chest, shoulders and triceps in one training session. In bench press and in standing press, triceps play a complementary role. However, because the bench press is a much harder exercise, it should go first. Because the bench press is already loading triceps and deltoid, then, if it is followed with standing press, the number of warming sets can be reduced to one, thus turning the set «bench press – standing press» in a sort of "Superset", which would allow to minimize the total stress impact of workout on the body. This combination of bench presses and standing presses will allow, within one workout session, without excessive spending of restorative resource of the body, to reach the moment of "exhaustion halt" of the pectorals, deltoids and triceps.
On first and second day one can do the exercises for hands:
1. For the biceps - barbell curls standing, and for example, alternating curls with dumbbells sitting.
2. For triceps - French press behind the neck. For triceps - one isolated exercise, since previously, push ups on parallel bars were performed, where triceps works actively; Besides, when making bench presses lying and bench presses sitting, triceps is also actively involved. Thus the triceps will be actively working in each training session.
Attention! Training chest and shoulders in the same day is wrong, as similar groups of muscles are involved, and summary load on the muscles of the shoulder girdle will be high. And as such, one will not be able to provide quality workout for both chest and shoulders.
