Articles

I have a fond spot for Chest Day workouts. I started bulking with absolutely no idea what I was doing. I gained my first 20 pounds while following a workout program that was little more than a push-up challenge.

When I finally started following a real hypertrophy training program, I could bench press more than I could squat or deadlift. As you can imagine, that made me love Chest Day even more.

I soon came into contact with Marco. He’d just gotten back from training under Eric Cressey, the head strength coach for the New York Yankees. He’d started up his own training business, where he was helping professional and Olympic athletes bulk up.

He switched me over to a full-body workout routine, which helped me gain another 40 pounds. However, my bench press soon got stuck at 250 pounds. So I brought Chest Days back into my workout routine, and lo, my bench started moving up again. After a few months, I accomplished my lifetime goal of 315 pounds.

Fortunately, Chest Days aren’t difficult to program. We’ll teach you how to make your own. We’ll also give you a few workouts you can use.

Leg Days work all the biggest muscles in your body, giving you chiselled thighs, round glutes, and muscular calves. They’ll also give you a thicker torso, making you sturdier from head to toe.

We’re coming at this from a hypertrophy training angle. These workouts are designed to help you build muscle. Still, leg training always works best when it’s built on a solid foundation of strength-training principles.

If you understand the basic principles, it isn’t difficult to program a good Leg Day workout. Your legs are full of big, simple muscles that respond well to big, heavy exercises. Unfortunately, those exercises are notoriously intimidating, and the punishment for skipping them is severe: you will come to physically resemble a chicken.

Pull Days can give you a wide back, a sturdy torso, and big biceps. They’re tricky, though. You’ve got a glorious mess of muscles back there, all of them yearning to grow, but each demanding a different elbow position or pulling angle.

Then come deadlifts and bent-over rows, which work your upper back and lats, but also your spinal erectors, glutes, and hamstrings. That makes them amazing lifts for stimulating muscle growth, but they can also interfere with Leg Days.

There’s a system for programming Pull Days. It’s not as simple as our systems for Push Days and Leg Days, but we’ll give you plenty of examples, along with some workout routines you can choose from.

As an underweight beginner, I gained my first 20 pounds from doing poorly programmed Push Days. Only Push Days. No Leg or Back days. The only exercise I knew how to do properly was the push-up. That was enough to bring me up to a healthy body weight.

Another 40 pounds later, I used a Push Day specialization routine to accomplish my lifetime goal of benching 3 plates. My bench press had plateaued for years. What finally got it moving again was having 2 dedicated Push Days every week.

I love these workouts. They’re what sparked my love of lifting. They’re also quite simple to program.

6-day workout splits can be remarkably good for building muscle. With so many training days to play with, you can take several different approaches, ranging from minimalism to total maximalism. You’re training often enough that you can build muscle with short 20-minute workouts. On the other hand, you could use the extra training days as an opportunity to add more volume to your routine.

However, when you’re training this often, it’s easy to wear yourself out. You’re stressing your hands, postural muscles, and joints almost every day of the week. You need to be smart about it. Fortunately, there’s a long tradition of training 6 days per week. All the lumps have been hammered flat.

The two most popular 6-day workout splits are the push/pull/legs split and the upper/lower split. Both can be great for building muscle, but one makes for a better default, especially when done right.