crafting the perfect workout routine
Recently I’ve become interested in switching up my gym routine.
I started working out in the gym around the February of this year, and quickly made a bunch of strength and hypertrophy gains in the first few months with a fairly haphazard program—a 4 day split comprising of alternating push/pull days, with interspersed leg exercises based on a combination of whatever I felt like doing and motions given to me by my physiotherapist. In particular, I wasn’t really allowed to squat beyond my bodyweight, since I had undergone ACL reconstruction over the winter and it would take several months for my knee to recover.
My knee eventually did recover, and I gained a few pounds in muscle mass before going on a long cut. Starting in May, I cut about 20 pounds over the summer, going from 155lb to 135lb.
Being able to run again is pretty sweet. I started running over the COVID lockdown as an attempt to lose some weight, but it soon became clear to me that whatever cardio gains it provided were no match for it as a meditative endeavor. When you run your mind is pretty blank and it allows you to really focus on the kind of stuff you’d never think about otherwise—which in my case was the actual music I was listening to while running. It turns out that I have a pretty bad tendency to allow lyrics to fade into the background and simply become another part of the whole experience, and though I can intone songs I’m intimately familiar with, if I’d be forced to sing the actual lyrics the ones I’d guess would be inaccurate, if not made-up. I still don’t think I actually know any of the lyrics on The Replacements’ Let it Be, although I can sonically recreate the whole album from memory.
In any case, I finally went for a run for the first time in three years this July and my fitness had increased to the point where I shattered my previous 5K record. I can now run it in 26:12, which isn’t good, but good enough that sub-20 is now looking like an actual benchmark rather than a long shot.
Most of the losses from my cut were pure body fat percentage—being a newcomer, I was able to retain a significant portion of my gains and also improve my strength in compound lifts like benching and pull-ups. It wasn’t as optimal as I’d like, since I wasn’t able to hit my protein requirements during the cut due to constantly traveling and (briefly) staying in a vegetarian household, but it could’ve been a lot worse.
I’m now at the point where I’m hoping to make some significant strength gains for about a year or so before my knee recovers to the point where I can get fully back into sports. I can finally squat again, and the previous routine has gotten stale.
the split
4 days is about as much as I can muster going to the gym—3 always feels a bit low, and at 5 onwards it starts looking like I’m committing to an entirely new form of lifestyle that is inherently at odds with the do-crypto-watch-movies paradigm that has a firm chokehold on me. This rules out a standard P/P/L, which also has the caveat that 3 straight days in the gym is too tiring.
My previous Push/Pull workouts were also unfortunately too time-consuming; they were fine when I was deloading while transitioning from my Masters’ to my PhD, but at this point I’m not sure I want to be spending multiple hours in the gym—especially because the city of Paris is significantly more exciting than the city of Corvallis.
My instinct, therefore, is a slightly modified 4-day bro split that proceeds as follows: Push, Legs, Rest, Pull, Misc, Rest, Rest.
The ‘standard’ bro split isolates chest and back and shifts arms to a fifth day, but my goals aren’t really to beef up my biceps, and there’s no need to spend a dedicated day on arm exercises. I’d much rather hit spend some time hitting core.
warmup: calisthenics
3x10 push-up progression
3x10 pull-up progression
10 minutes of dedicated skill work
One thing that I’ve been pretty consistent about is spending some dedicated time improving my calisthenics skills.
Push-ups have always been simple for me, and three sets of diamond (or even clap) push-ups is something that I can do without breaking too many sweats. I’m also particularly good at staying in push-up holds for extended periods of time. I’m pretty pumped to transition these to the next level—training one-armed pushups on a staircase, for instance, so it’s a no-brainer to spend some time on these.
I haven’t had similar luck with pull-ups. I only ever did a pull-up for the first time this May, and though since then I’ve steadily upped to 3 sets of 5, I’ve hit a plateau over the past few weeks. I’ve tried to power through this by training dead hangs and negatives to failure, but I suspect the real reason why I can’t force myself to the 3x10 I’ve been craving is because of training frequency. Right now, I do pull-ups about 2 times a week, which I doubt is close to enough to progress at the rate I would like to. It makes sense to double this to 4 or even 5 times a week (provided I can get access to a good pull-up bar—I guess I’ll just have to bite the bullet and buy one instead of gentrifying the monkey bars at the park).
I’ve also been wanting to spend some time dedicatedly training handstands and planches. I’m not terrible at holding a wall handstand, but I’ve never really had the fitness before to maintain it for a significant amount of time. It would be nice to be able to focus on these things during gym time, and not blow off training a handstand in my bedroom before I go to sleep due to arriving home at 3AM.
push day
warmup w/ calisthenics
3x8 incline barbell bench
2xF pec fly
3x8 skullcrushers
2xF tricep pulldowns
First off—no dips. This isn’t an oversight. I’ve been training 3 sets of dips as part of my push day and it’s not that I’m unable to do them, it’s that despite all attempts at form-fixing and even consulting my physiotherapist it’s become clear that there is no solution to the stinging pain I feel in my collarbone after attempting even three, or four. I know that the right muscles are being activated because I can feel it in my pecs and triceps, but the collarbone pain is simply too much to do more than a trivial number of reps.
It seems like the diagnosis is microfractures of the collarbone, which are supposed to recede after a month, but this has not been fruitful for me. Furthermore, I don’t feel even close to the same pain while benching. As much as I’d like to keep doing dips it seems that this simply is not an exercise that was meant for me.
I've also been wanting to limit to two exercises per muscle group, which is enough to make steady strength progress without spending hours in the gym. Since I've also already been doing push-ups, this should maintain a significant amount of volume.
Flat benching seems to have little to no advantages over incline, and I prefer the range of motion on incline anyway.
I'm not the biggest fan of flys, but they are pretty much the best chest isolation I can get without doing another pressing movement. I'm not the biggest fan of training triceps, either, but these exercises are good supplements for the muscles already being worked out on bench.
legs
warmup w/ calisthenics
3x8 squats
3x8 bulgarian split squats
2xF hamstring curl
2xF calf raise
I’m not particularly opposed to working legs, and indeed I quite enjoy hamstring curls and calf raises—they’re pretty straightforward exercises that don’t carry the total exhaustion of exercises like DLs or Squats.
I’ve been wanting to return to squats for a while, and I think it’s proven pretty comprehensively at this point that they’re basically the best full-body pressing movement. It’s also not a motion that causes me significant mental effort—they’re certainly exhausting, but the movement itself is quite natural. This is opposed to DLs. I’ve been told to add RDLs to my leg day, but (a) I can’t do RDLs and Squats on the same day, it’s just too taxing, and (b) I don’t like the deadlift motion whatsoever. This is probably the compound lift I least enjoy doing in general; it’s unfortunately just too strenuous for me, and I really don’t want to risk injury. I also get knee scrapes, which I’ve been told is a symptom of poor form, but since I dislike the movement I just don’t want to train it at lower weights without even reaping the full reward.
pull day
warmup w/ calisthenics
3x8 cable row
3x8 barbell row
2xF face pulls
2xF preacher curls
It’s always nice to deload a good back day with preacher curls, since it’s a pretty easy isolation that can be done as a cooldown, almost.
These are by far some of my favorite exercises to train, especially rows because mentally connecting to your lats always results in the good kind of fatigue and exhaustion that leads to a great sleep at night. I’ve never actually done an upper back exercise, personally—never really felt the need to shrug, or anything—and so it’ll be interesting to test out how these face pulls perform.
misc.
warmup w/ calisthenics
3x8 overhead shoulder press
2xF lateral raises
2xF leg raises
2xF cable crunches
3xF forearm curls
My goal with the final day is to focus on shoulders, core, and the neglected forearms, which are useful for climbing and other calisthenics work.
My shoulders are by far my most developed muscle groups, derived from doing a couple sets of lateral raises to failure at the end of every workout since it’s pretty much the simplest exercise to perform mindlessly. It also feels good in the moment—really hits after a couple reps when you feel the traps giving way and the full strength of the side delts coming in. An unexpected consequence of this training is that I was able to master significant reps on pike push-ups without any great deal of difficulty.
The purpose of this day is to also be a bit of a deload after a strenuous back day, and in case I need to skip a workout it can be this one, since all the muscles have been adequately trained through the other workouts.
closing remarks
I’m interested in seeing what this particular split can do for me.
My short-term goal is to gain about 10lb of muscle over the next few months. This should be achievable provided I’m eating well and am consistent with the workout. This should also (hopefully) translate to better calisthenics gains. My ultimate goal is to have a low body fat percentage at 140lb-145lb, which is essentially the optimal for really maximizing my calisthenics and martial arts capabilities, and is a respectable weight for running long-distance, in case I ever want to.
Ultimately I’m hoping that if by around next summer I’m lean at 140lb-145lb, I can instead focus purely on calisthenics and sports without significant worries about strength. This would involve transitioning to a maintenance phase of about a couple medium-effort workouts a week, leaving aside a significant amount of time for other pursuits. I’m hoping that this split can carry me there. If I do chose to return to the gym regularly, I suspect this would be to train more explosive strength and/or climbing-related upper-body training.
Some good benchmarks to hit include attempting the 225lb bench, which is about 1.6x bodyweight—a pretty respectable benchmark for a seasoned lifter—and a similar squat. These are largely me massaging my ego, however; there’s no reason a good bench translates to being better at the activities I want to do. It’s just a nice number to be able to hit (or to say I’ve hit).
Here's the full workout, in case you're looking for a well-thought out regular split.
// warmup
3x10 push-up progression
3x10 pull-up progression
10 minutes of dedicated skill work
// push day
warmup w/ calisthenics
3x8 incline barbell bench
2xF pec fly
3x8 skullcrushers
2xF tricep pulldowns
// legs
warmup w/ calisthenics
3x8 squats
3x8 bulgarian split squats
2xF hamstring curl
2xF calf raise
// rest
// pull day
warmup w/ calisthenics
3x8 cable row
3x8 barbell row
2xF face pulls
2xF preacher curls
// misc.
warmup w/ calisthenics
3x8 overhead shoulder press
2xF lateral raises
2xF leg raises
2xF cable crunches
3xF forearm curls
// rest
// rest