There are so many practices weight lifters accept as fact.  5-7 reps for power lifters/8-12 for hypertrophy/13+ for endurance, working out for the pump, eccentric motion is where the muscles break down, too much cortisol after 40 minutes of lifting to do any good .  Some of these are disputed here and there but generally 80-90% of lifters assume they are the only way to train.  However, a workout plan with bodypart splits, such that each bodypart is trained once a week directly, is probably the most mainstream idea of them all.

While most bodybuilding begins with whole body workouts, it doesn’t take long before you read that you are going to get to a point where you can’t sustain 3 days a week of full body workouts.  The reasons given?  The loads you are using are going to be too  high to recover quickly enough, the amount of sets per bodypart required for continued growth are too high and would take too long to train a full body workout, etc.  These all seem like great reasons and we all go along with the plan.  We start training back and biceps one day per week, chest and triceps another day, legs still another, etc.

But what happens when you’ve trained for about 8-12 months or so?  You start hitting a point of diminishing returns.  Your measurements go from big changes to small changes to barely noticeable changes.  Your friends who commented and noticed that you were getting all swole are not saying anything any more, and your weights don’t go up in most of your lifts half as quickly as before.  In fact, you may find that week to week you haven’t gained any real strength in certain lifts.

The response from the fitness community is that this is par for the course- you  have taken all the low hanging fruit off the tree when it comes to muscle building and now your gains are going to be much slower and less noticeable.  So you have to start varying and periodizing things like rep ranges, exercise selection, rest times between sets, etc to keep from hitting permanent plateaus.  So you start changing up things to see if you can kick start that new growth again.  Others tell you you’re not eating enough, so you bump your calories by another 500 a day.

These sorts of changes do sometimes cause some new growth, but often times the result is that your switch from squats to deadlifts caused you to detrain in squats, and you’ve now lost strength and size from the fact that you’re not doing squats.  You changed from 3 minute rest periods to 60 seconds and found yourself exhausted after each workout, but your lifts are going down as you can’t recover enough between each set in 60 seconds.  And you may gain some weight from the extra 500 calories a day, but I assure you it’s not all muscle you gained!!

Consider for just a moment your recovery capability.  The recovery cycle generally works like this- we do the muscle damage through lifting, we recover eventually to the baseline of where we were and then hopefully super-compensate (ie, grow in strength and size) and then repeat the process.

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