96 MD musculardevelopment.com July 2019
THE GROW YOUR GUNS
FAST SPLIT
Until there is a chill in the air and
you are forced to start covering up or
else look like a douche, here is the
split you should follow.
Day 1: Arms
Day 2: Legs
Day 3: Chest, Back, Shoulders
Day 4: OFF, repeat
You’re going to be pulverizing
your arms without mercy twice every
eight days, aft er a full day of rest
when you should strive to get plenty
of actual rest and eat up. On Day
3 when you hit your entire torso,
your biceps and triceps will also be
gett ing solid residual work from the
heavy presses, rows and chins/lat
pulldowns you do for chest, delts
and back. This sets your arms up for
a phase of accelerated growth. We
will be going over the arm workouts
in detail, so allow me to off er a tip
for Day 3. Do not att empt to train
your chest, back and shoulders with
the same volume for each that you
ty pically would. If you do that, three
bad things will happen. The fi rst is
that you’ll be stuck in the gym for two
to three hours, which isn’t a tragedy
if you’re unemployed or otherwise
have ample time on your hands, but
most of us have shit to do in life. The
second reason not to maintain your
usual volume for all those muscle
groups is that whatever you train
later in the workout will suff er due
to your being partially fatigued. You
only have a fi nite amount of energy
and mental focus to apply to any one
workout. The fi rst body part will be
OK, but once you get to the second,
you will be starting to drag. By the
third body part, you’ll just be going
through the motions. The third and
fi nal compelling reason you must not
try hitt ing full-volume workouts for all
three of those body parts at once is
that you will almost surely overtrain.
I’m not talking about overtraining the
individual muscle groups; I’m referring
to systemic overtraining. You will
burn out your CNS, or central nervous
system, and lower your immune
system. One day off the weights, as
in the suggested training split above,
won’t be enough time to fully recover.
Do about half as much for chest,
shoulders and back as you normally
would. Focus on just a few basic
movements for each. You can still train
chest, shoulders and back hard and
make improvements, but you need
to keep those workouts shorter and
distilled to just the meat.Once the weather
heats up, short sleeves
and sleeveless shirts
become not only
the norm, but fully
acceptable. This is the
time of year to show off
your biceps and triceps
in all their glory.
GREGORY JAMES