When it comes to strength exercise a common question is what body parts should be trained together each work out and if it is better or worse to train all your muscles in the same workout.
First of all the short answer is neither is technically ‘better’ because better is goal dependant. If you are learning new movements or targeting difficult perhaps previously injured areas you may want to do so during a split routine. This would allow you more time to focus on the specific needs because less areas of the body will be addressed.
As always we recommend keeping your workouts short and intense, drawn out sessions are full of diminished returns. Your best exercise stimulus comes short and sweet (intense being the sweetener of choice ;n). Thus if you need extra time for learning etc a spilt routine is good.
Full body workouts with little rest between sets are excellent for strength and stamina and efficiency. Furthermore, your body gets to recover as a whole unit between workouts instead of going into the next session with part of your body still fatigued.
In our niche of H.I.T. (High Intensity Nautilus style exercise) the debate has raged for years. The funny thing is – why not do both? Why not work a split say upper body one day and lower body the next for one month then switch to full body the month after?
Really it is goal dependant but it doesn’t hurt to vary things to keep it interesting. In fact we would go as far as to say that variety itself is a good part of the exercise stimulus…but we will cover that in a future post.
Be well, be strong
Andrew and Tierney
wefit.ca 