The Basis of Hypertrophy

The Question

Welcome. You're now in the mysterious realm of exercise limbo where broscience is ubiquitous and all of a sudden every person with a fitness Instagram is a certified personal trainer. This leaves you scrambling to watch an entire channel-worth of Youtube videos from that dude with click-baity thumbnails on Youtube while reading sporadic articles on Men's Health in a hopeless attempt to formulate your own semi-educated opinion. My hopes are that the articles I have written may somewhat debunk the myths you may have encountered on the way.

You have one friend who swears that his push/pull/legs routine got him jacked in half a year, the other preaches that the conventional chest/tri, back/bi, shoulders, and legs routine contains the magic recipe, and your third friend is trying to convince you that full-body is the one and only way to lift. The best part? None of them can fathom a world where all the aforementioned programs have their own respective benefits. As with all aspects of fitness, your specific goals will inevitably lead you to the program that you strictly adhere to. What I mean by this is there is no single routine that will provide maximum benefit for all types of individuals. You need to evaluate your options and decide which program you perceive to be most in line with your own goals. Therefore, the essence of this article is to shed light on the notorious debate of split routines versus full-body routines so you can further assess which works best for you. I will do my best to provide an objective platform based on recent clinical research and a collection of works.

Split Routines

Let's commence with the basics. What constitutes a split routine? A split routine is a regimen that involves exercising a small grouping of specific body parts once per week. This means that each day at the gym that week you should be exerting a different muscle group. This could mean that Monday you focus on chest and tricep exercises while Tuesday you hit back and biceps, and so forth. As previously stated, this cycle repeats weekly, which means rest days are up to you to implement throughout the 7-day span. Common examples are as follows:

Chest/Tri, Back/Bi, Shoulders, Legs: This is an extremely intuitive arrangement with a focus on the larger, compound movements preceding the isolation ones for the smaller muscle counterpart. Day 1 - chest and tricep exercises. Day - 2 back and biceps. Day 3 - shoulders. Day 4 - legs. Rest days are incorporated as you see fit.

Push/Pull/Legs: Day 1 - pushing movements (ie. bench press, military press, tricep pushdown). Day 2 - pulling movements (ie. seated row, standing bicep curls). Day 3 - legs (squats, leg press). Rest days are to be incorporated as you see fit.

What are the advantages and disadvantages to this routine?

Focus on a single muscle group
Let's consider this from a practical perspective. No matter how you cut this, in traditional split programs, every muscle group is being hit once a week, no more and no less. Unless, of course you are debating whether or not to hit legs for the third week in a row (you know who you are). In that case I highly encourage that you do and I will make note to center my next article around the necessity of exercising your lower body. I digress. Since you are devoting an entire workout to one or two muscle groups, split programs are fantastic when it comes to exerting maximum effort into those fibers when you do work them out. For instance that one day of shoulders is all about ensuring that when you wake up that next morning you cannot do another shrug to save your life. A person pursuing a full-body plan may begin with incline bench press and five sets of dips before even touching shoulders. In that case you can bet that when you do hit that military press that some of your maximum strength will be compromised from the previous exercises that recruited your shoulder muscles supplementarily. Meaning the weight chosen and the reps performed may suffer a decrease. Therefore, the focus on one muscle group allows you to devote maximum energy and strength to the muscles at hand. Who would benefit from this? This is undoubtedly a great avenue to take if you are seeking to strengthen relatively weaker muscle groups, or even out muscle imbalances.

Infrequent Workouts
With split workouts since you are in fact only exerting the same muscle group once a week, there is optimal time for rest and a much smaller window for over-training. Each muscle gets nearly a week to recover, giving yourself ample time to overcome lactic acid build-up in addition to added soreness succeeding the day of the workout. An enormous benefit: injury prevention. Continual exertion of the same muscle group can be a recipe for injury, hence spacing out your muscle groups as such can be advantageous for your joints. In accordance with the rest time, after a week off, you are able to approach the next workout with a new sense of motivation and energy, eager to hit the muscle again.

Full-Body Splits

Full-body workouts are the higher frequency brother of split routines. A typical full-body workout suggests exerting nearly every muscle group during a single training session. This means performing one exercise per muscle group for all target areas each time you step foot into the gym. What's a common regiment?

Full-body: Squats, seated hamstring curls, flat bench press, pull-ups, seated military press, standing EZ bar curls, skull-crushers.

At first glance, sure, this looks intense and maybe even intimidating. However, that is a comprehensive example. The beauty of full-body workouts is that they are slightly more flexible as you can manipulate exercise selection, sets, and reps to your liking. If necessary, you can even create an upper body day and a lower body day or modify which muscle groups you prefer to exercise first.

What are the advantages you ask?

Frequency
You just crushed your combination back and bicep day and leave the gym with a huge grin. Phew, no more back and biceps for an entire week! Although on the surface this appears to be an advantage of split routines, there is something to be said about how often you hit the same muscle group per week in the full-body routine. "In a recent research study exploring this question, well-trained men were to either perform a split-body or full-body routine. After eight weeks, the group performing the total-body workouts showed greater gains in both upper and lower body proportions. 16 of the 19 individuals who participated reported strictly using split-body routines prior to the study" (1). These findings are most likely due to the increased testosterone and growth hormone release, muscle fiber recruitment, and protein synthesis through several days of exerting the same muscle groups per week.

Greater Caloric Expenditure
Working not only more muscle fibers, but a vast combination of muscle fiber types will inevitably promote a higher level of energy usage. Imagine you adopt the plan I have outlined above this, by the end of the day's workout you have exerted yourself to an extreme and have burned an immense amount of calories as compared to exercising just shoulders for instance. This does not come without reward. Since you are combining compound movements, isolation exercises, and increasing your heart rate, you can expect to lose weight as well. Therefore, the benefits of full-body routines are two-fold as they encompass hypertrophy as well as fat-burning through increased metabolism and a caloric depletion.

Conclusion

At the end of the day this is something that you have to analyze and decide. Maybe you're a student on break and have four days to devote to the gym, in which case a split-routine may work best for you. Or you're a law student with only two days to sincerely devote time to the gym so you prefer the total-body system. It's possible that you've been utilizing total-body routines your entire lifting career and want different stimulation after finding that you have hit a plateau, so now you move towards the split program. I personally started full-body workouts recently after years of abiding to a split-regimen and am thoroughly enjoying it.

There is no absolute winner in this competition. Both are great options. Consider what I have listed, take into account your hours of availability and make a decision. The best part? No one says you have to stick with it! Do as you please and share your results!

As always, thanks for the read! Your engagement matters immensely to me so please comment below what you think!

Bibliography
Schoenfeld, Brad. “Chapter 3.” Science and Development of Muscle Hypertrophy, Human Kinetics, 2016, pp. 58–59.