Did the first day yesterday. I did flat bench, lat pulldowns, squats, smith shoulder press, seated DB curls & weighted crunches. I did 3 sets of 12 on each.

Honestly wasn't sure it would be enough - reading it, it doesn't look like much after being used to a split focusing 4 or 5 different movements on one body part per session - but by the time I was through with squats I was pretty pooped. I think shoulders suffered a bit from my being tuckered so I'll have to remember to bump them up the ranking in another workout this week.

Day 2 tomorrow. Which order I do it in depends on how busy the gym is, but I plan on doing some seated rows, lunges, incline DB press, bent over shoulder raises for rear delts and tri's and calves for isolation. I'm shooting for 5 sets of 5 on each so I can go a bit heavier.

Thursday I'll probably switch it for dips, bent over rows, deadlifts, upright rows, traps and a little rotator cuff work - not necessarily in that order - for 4 sets of 8.

Jay

3 days a week, so I'll be resting 2 or 3 days between each session.

The idea is to hit each area with low volume but often rather than high volume and only once a week. So on back day for a regular 4 day split, I'd probably do 3 or 4 back exercises for 3 or 4 sets, totaling about 100 reps. With this routine, I'm only doing one back exercise per session but in 3 sessions a week I'm hitting it with roughly the same volume over the week.

Same with chest for example, I'm hitting it from 3 angles on 3 different days whereas my old training split I'd hit all 3 angles on one day. Shoulders I'm hitting the 3 deltoid heads on different days.

Some research I've read (primarily HST style training) suggests that the muscles only need about 48 to 72 hours to recover rather than the traditional week. The theory is that you're convincing your body that the overload is chronic (all the time) rather than acute (from time to time) and therefore it needs to adapt to the overload to better handle the weight being regularly moved.

For weight, I'm not really concerning myself with the actual numbers on the plates, just how it feels within the rep range so that I can just about reach the full amount of set/reps that I'm shooting for. Of course, the plan is that every other week or so, I'll be able to add some weight to the bar and still reach failure at the end of the rep/set range - progressive overload being the key. We'll see how that goes though.

Jay

Thanks bro.

Nutrition's pretty much in check. Just finishing off a cut at the minute so it's very clean foods at a moderate deficit (except Saturdays when I eat a bit above maintenance because I just aint got the discipline to go 7 days a week!). In the new year, I'll start a fairly clean bulk in an effort to grow a little while keeping within the realms of fairly lean.

Did day 2 of this plan yesterday. I started with some seated rows, then some lunges, followed by incline DB press, facepulls for shoulders (focusing on rhomboids), and for the isolation moves I did some overhead tricep extensions and some standing calf raises.

On Thursday I plan on starting off with deadlifts, then jumping shoulders up the ranks to second and hitting the rear delts, dips for pushing, bent over rows for pulling (or I might use the iso-lateral hammer strength Y row thingy if it's free), and finish off with some shrugs for traps and a couple of different rotator cuff exercises to strengthen up that weak area.

Seems to be going well so far. I'm getting that nice achy feeling that means something's worked.

Jay

Thanks dude. That looks good - not far from what I'm doing except bi's every session and quads/hams split out.

The avatar's about a year old (know, I need to get a new one desperately!) and I was just under 11 stone there (154 lbs or just shy of 70kg). I'm about 13 stone now (182 or 82.5kg) with a bit more fat. All told in the last year I probably gained 15lb good mass and 10lb fat left to be re-trimmed.

I guess the goal is to mix it up a little running up to Xmas while I finish the cut. I'm a 4 day split kinda guy, but work's been eating into my gym time lately so I wanted to:
a) drop a day's training without losing anything I'd normally work in my 4 day split (with a bit of cardio in the day 4 if I do manage it)
b) try and work full body in every workout so that if I do still manage to let life get in the way here and there, I'm not missing a whole body part until the next week, just move onto the next full body day.
c) keep my workouts under 90 minutes if possible.

I'm also kinda trying this out to see if it's a style of training that suits me. In the new year, I plan on lean bulking for a while, see if I can't pack on a few more pounds of muscle.

I'm starting to learn a little as I go about what exercises work well together so I get a full and exhausting workout each time and don't end up doing all the shattering exercises together at the beginning so the muscles at the end of a workout end up getting submaximal effort.

Appreciate all your feedback guys.

Jay