Muscle Up to Tradition for New Mass Gains

Looking for a muscle building solution? Try going back to basics for new muscle mass. Sometimes, the best muscle mass methods get lost and buried under all the new weight training tips, techniques, innovations and 'breakthroughs." A great example is the traditional four day upper body, lower body split. It used to be quite popular but you hardly see it recommended anymore. This four day split has you training four days a week on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. You perform an upper body weight lifting workout on Mondays and Thursdays. You train your lower body on Tuesdays and Fridays. Some people find it very difficult to keep progressing when they have to hit the weights five or six days a week. Yet, they stall out if they don't work a muscle twice a week. So what's the solution? The four day upper body, lower body split of course. You're only in the gym four times a week. You don't workout with weights more than two days in a row. And yet you still get in work for each muscle group twice per week. In addition to all that, you eliminate most of the overlap problems you see in other splits. There's a lot of overlap when working various muscle groups. For example, both the back and chest require working the shoulders. The back hits the bicpes and the chest also hits the triceps. So even those splits that divide muscles over 5 or 6 days find themselves working the same muscle group two days in a row which is a surefire prescription to the overtraining land of no gains and no new muscle mass. So what's a weight training program utilizing this split look like? Here's a great example. Monday and Thursday (Upper Body) Decline Bench Press 3 x 6-8 Dumbbell Bench Press 3 x 5 Chins 3 x 8-10 One Arm Dumbbell Rows 3 x 6-8 Seated Dumbbell Press 4 x 8 - 10 Standing Dumbbell Curls 3 x 8 - 10 Tuesday and Friday (Lower Body) Leg Press 5 x 10 - 15 Squats 3 x 8 Leg Curls 2 x 12 - 15 Stiff Legged Deadlifts 3 x 12 Standing Calf Raises 3 x 15 Weighted Crunches 5 x 15 Your muscle grow when you are resting, not when you are working out. You need to give your muscles enough rest and recuperation to allow the building process to take place. If you head back to the gym too soon, you won't build muscle. Eventually, you'll get weaker, lose muscle mass, feel like crap, and stop working out. And you definitely don't want that to happen. Your whole body needs rest. Working back one day, chest the next, and legs the day after that may give your individual muscles some rest but this is definitely not how to build lean muscle. Why? Because each workout puts a systemic stress on your entire body, no matter what muscle groups you are working. Your kidneys, etc. don't understand or care that you are working different muscle groups each day. So get out of the gym, get some rest, and grow! This is why you can struggle to make progress working out five or six times a week, even when you are splitting up your body parts. Give this four day split a try and you'll be rewarded with new muscle mass and strength.