menu
any questions
share

Should I schedule my weekly lifts by body parts or by movements (push/pull)?

It depends on your goals, schedule and availability when deciding whether to schedule your weekly lifts by body part or movement push/pull.
 
Transcript: "Hi, Sam, I'm just reading your question here. It says should I schedule my weekly lifts by body part or by movement push/pull? I think that's a tricky question. The way I like to set things up is depending on your goals and your time, and what your schedule allows you and dictates. So, for instance, if you has a very specific goal where you're saying to yourself, hey I've got two weeks to do as much as I can, then I might say, hey, let's go by body parts. You can really break each body part down. But if you're saying, hey, I'm in season and I really have three days to lift a week, then I'm looking at a movement, push/pull, upper and lower together, some core work. So I really think that the way you dictate the workout depends on your schedule, your availability, and how much time you really have to dedicate to working out. I hope that helps, Sam."
6 Answers
Question thumbnail
Expert

Bryan Doo

Strength & Conditioning Coach
Hi, Sam, I'm just reading your question here. It says should I schedule my weekly lifts by body part or by movement push/pull? I think that's a tricky question. The way I like to set things up is depending on your goals and your time, and what your schedule allows you and dictates. So, for instance, if you has a very specific goal where you're saying to yourself, hey I've got two weeks to do as much as I can, then I might say, hey, let's go by body parts. You can really break each body part down. But if you're saying, hey, I'm in season and I really have three days to lift a week, then I'm looking at a movement, push/pull, upper and lower together, some core work. So I really think that the way you dictate the workout depends on your schedule, your availability, and how much time you really have to dedicate to working out. I hope that helps, Sam.
Question thumbnail
Expert

Matthew Pendola

Olympic Champion Strength Coach
Should you schedule your weekly lifts by body parts or push-pull movements? Well first we want to know what is the end goal for you? What is your why, right? But stick with me here. I think that everyone's an athlete and really what we're talking about whether we want to get on the podium or you just want to be able to chase your grandkids around the park one day. Really we want to train like athletes. So I tend to move towards the Movements and stead for the training. But why? I also want to look at is if I do a specific body part training, regiment. I miss one day there for some reason, I miss a lot, right? So I'm not going to do it for another week. Whereas when we're training movements were touching on those muscles each time. And so there's more frequency there and I think that compounds to a better effect. Anyways, okay. Now the other thing is as Former competitive athlete myself. If I did a leg day, that might really take away from the quality of my track session because I cooked my legs, right? So let's just talk about specific push-pull session here. That might help you. Right? So let's just say that we want to run faster. Well, that means that we want to be able to put more Force into the ground. So I want to program around that. Okay, so, So typical push-pull day, of course, we're going to warm up. We're going to start sweating, then we want to just look at getting in some say postural pulls. So face, pull a parts or great and I just do maybe 20 reps or so just enough. Not too much to fatigue me, then I'll go into something like Spanish squats. Same idea. Just getting good, lubrication around the joints, getting the ankle Mobility going. Those type of things and then maybe just say, jump rope. Get good stiff Springs going for say 20 seconds, three sets. Not a lot. Then we go into that main movement with a lot of technical coordination and control. So ninja box jump. Now, I'm really gaining that ability to put Force into the ground. All right, and then, I could finish off with say some good relative strength options. All right, so I could do a poll a deadlift. I could do a push, so I can do a push-up, Alright. And then maybe, We get in a little bit of dynamic trunk control. Course, we had a lot of that in all of these movements anyways, but something more specific. So I feel like just doing something where we're getting in a pull-up which is going to actually help with our arm rating for faster running but also really recruit and emphasize more of the lower abdominals to help to hold our position. And we could always finish off with an accessory. Type of movement. The Soleus is often times neglected. So that deeper calf muscle. If we go with a bent knee single leg calf raise, now we're working on that stabilizer. And it also that Soleus will pump blood back up to the heart so that can really help with a lot of things. So that's how I would do a session like that. Now sometimes with athletes I'm working with they say to me. Hey, I love all this but I Want to just bring my arms up. I feel like those are weak points in mind. I just want my arms look better. I give them what I call five minutes of fun. So at the end there's your reward for five minutes. Have at it. You can do bicep curls and tricep extensions. That's fine. I feel good about it. They feel good walking out, you know, so that's something you could do at the very end in just doing some body parts because it's okay to say. Hey, I want these Aesthetics to be better. To write. So those are just some examples. I'm sure there's a lot more questions. Let me know if you have them. Thanks a lot.
Question thumbnail
Expert

Erin Carson

World Champion Strength Coach
Hi Sam, Aaron here strength coach. Great question, you know, there has been so much good research done when it comes to strength training and performance. My first question, back at you, is going to be what is your desired outcome? Because there's always a place there's really not a wrong answer when it comes to strength training. There's just a better strategy. So when it comes to separating The Body by Body Parts, as very bodybuilder, it allows you to train more often with Fatiguing a certain muscle group and potentially grow that muscle and create muscle hypertrophy. When we start to talk about time with as a runner, or as a triathlete. We want to start looking at movements push-pull legs, and we also want to incorporate it in conjunction with your other training in the other things that you're doing. So ask me another question and let's keep going with this topic and see if we can get you exactly where you want to be and make sure you're not wasting your time. I'm or your energy.
Question thumbnail
Expert

Danny Kennedy

The Fitness & Lifestyle Podcast
I typically prefer to program movements. Not so much body parts, you know, going from the bodybuilder bro, split where you doing one muscle group per day and all that type of stuff that does work for some people. But in my opinion programming movements where we're trying to Target each muscle group at least twice per week, in terms of frequency, and then being able to substitute certain exercises out for different movements as well. Keeping in mind that it doesn't take you a full week to recover from one training session. Unless you're doing an absurd amount of volume with absurd amounts of loads, so, Breaking you awake down into certain movements, whether it's push-pull legs upper body, lower body, full body, whatever. It may be. In my opinion, that's going to be a lot more effective going to be able to train each muscle group and Target it more frequently. So seeing better results over a longer period of time and you're going to recover a lot quicker. The quality the sessions is going to be far greater as well. We survived go in and do chest. For example, after say two or three exercises of three to four sets on that same muscle group. The, the quality of my training is going to decrease as the session goes on. Whereas if I break my Chest movements down across multiple sessions per week. The quality is going to be higher. The amount of volume on lifting is going to be higher. So the results should correlate with that and be a lot better.
Question thumbnail
Expert

Jess Racz

WNBA Performance Coach
I'm really big on movement training, I think for General athletes. And even the athletes that I work with. I work with as high as NBA D-League. All the way up to the WNBA, all the way down, D1, D2, D3, Collegiate High, School Youth. And I pretty much do a three days a week lifting and its movement, so it's full body. So, it's Single Leg. I get, make sure that I get a squat in of some sort, usually, a single leg, squat. A hamstring movement, Igloo movement, a adductor movement. So, like side lunges for example, or I like a Copenhagen plank. Those are those Target the adductors. I make sure I get an upper body vertical, push, an upper body vertical pool, a horizontal push, and a horizontal pool, and then some core work in all play. And so, I make sure at the end of the week that I have all of that, and I've taken care of everything, and that's kind of how you can structure your workouts if you're working out. Like more than three times per week and it's like five to six times per week and it's all lifting. You can definitely go that split where it's like lower body one day, then upper body the other lower body, upper body lower body, Etc. That's definitely fine for like general fitness, but for the most part, three days a week, three to four days a week, a full body lifting is going to be
Question thumbnail
Expert

Paul Talty

Head of Physical Preparation, Swim Ireland
My son is a good question. The, the answer, I guess, will depend on a number of factors. Including the, what your training goals are, whether you're training for a particular sport, or with you just training for Aesthetics and was pointing a training cycle. You might be as you move towards a particular training, goal training outcome and typically speaking with the Summers. I work with a stick with whole body workouts. But then with football team, oh I work with. I will quite often just do upper body. Push, Pull sessions with them depending on the point of the week in the point in the season because if it's if it's in season and if we got a lot of games common ground and you know, we might only do one small lower body hit in the week and then we still want to maintain some and and indeed gain some mass and size and strength to the upper body School. When we schedule a little bit differently that in that way, we had you can you can I would say that one is necessarily superior to the other. It just depends on what you're training. A mango always.