Was Arnold wrong?

I was looking at my bookshelf the other night and noticed a whopper taking up a bunch of space on my shelf :

The Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger

That book was everything to me when I was first getting started working out. I followed Arnold's splits, workouts, diet, etc thinking that if I just worked out like him I'd look the way he does.

Of course, that's not true. We all have our own shape, our own genetics, our own muscle insertion points, etc.. We're all unique and will respond to things differently .

But for the longest time, we all thought it was true just because Arnold said it.

What about his workout splits? Should every muscle group be separated out by itself?

Chest day? Back day? Shoulders and Tris day? Quads and Hams ?

Or should you go with something more like an upper and lower body split , or a push-pull-legs split ?

A lot of that depends on your personal preference, but I'll give you my feedback.

If you hit each body part once per week in a traditional split, you have 52 opportunities for building muscle . 52 times where you've stimulated the muscle and allowed it to recover (grow).

If you went with a higher frequency option - like an upper/lower split that you hit 3x a week, you'd actually hit each body part 92 times per year . That's nearly 2x as many recovery periods, 2x as many chances for growth, 2x as many opportunities to get better.

For me, I go with the frequency over the 'old school split' - but it's just something for you to consider.

Is it better to hit the muscle harder with a week in between exercises? Or is it better to hit it more frequently, potentially reducing volume a bit for faster recovery?

Something for you to test out ... but I'd put my money on the frequency over the traditional split.

This is a topic I go into with much more depth on our podcast: The Nut Club .

Episode #10 just dropped on Friday .

You can check it out here:

https://nutrithority.com/pages/podcast

Jared

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