There is no perfect exercise. The Squat is often held up as the ultimate leg developer, sometimes nicknamed the King of Exercises. It is a great lift, but it does not develop the hamstrings and one of the four quad muscles is basically asleep during the Squat as it is the only one of the four that crosses two joints; the knee and the hip. So the Squat is basically a great movement to develop 3 of the 4 quad muscles.
The Deadlift is held out as a great mass builder because it’s the most weight you can lift in any given movement. But the Deadlift is not the best lift to develop any of the muscles used to complete it. You can actually develop all the musculature the Deadlift trains very effectively without ever doing a Deadlift.
There is also no perfect way to set up a training split. I’ve chased this unicorn for my entire lifting lifetime, which has spanned over two decades.
In the old days, the common method was to train each muscle once a week, but this has been found to be sub-optimal. You end up doing more work than needed to stimulate the muscle in that one session, and then wait a week to train it again. In fact, you’re more likely to do too much volume for the one or two muscles you’re trying to train, causing muscle damage which is counterproductive to hypertrophy.
Doing an upper / lower split is popular, but there are so many muscles in the upper body that those sessions become too long to properly train every one.
Legs / Push / Pull is also popular, but it’s hard to get enough volume in in just two weekly sessions for each group.
Ideally, you would do about 5 sets per muscle group in any one session, and do 2-3 sessions for that muscle group in a week, so that you get somewhere between 10-15 quality sets in total. That equates to about 3 sessions per muscle group. That makes it sound like 3 full body sessions per week would be ideal, but what I’ve found is that truly training every muscle in one session makes for long and somewhat tedious workouts. Imagine doing Squats, Stiff Legged Deadlifts, Leg Extensions and Leg curls, Calf Raises, Ab work, Pull downs, Rows, Shrugs, Bench Press, Lateral Raises, Tricep pressdowns and Bicep Curls all in the same workout.
I’ve tried all manner of configurations, and I’m usually excited when I’ve finally “figured it out,” but after a week or two I find the weakness in the setup and go back to tweaking.
I’m currently trying daily training, keeping the workouts fairly short so I can put maximum effort into each workout, spread the volume out over multiple sessions each week, and not have the dreary off days that create such boredom for me. I’m trying not to train the same muscle on back-to-back days and getting at least 3 workouts per muscle each week.
None of this would matter as much if one were just trying to get some exercise in to stay healthy and maintain one’s current level of muscularity. Three full body sessions hitting just the major exercises would be good enough. That just doesn’t work for me. Sure, I toy around with the idea periodically, but not trying to improve is just not a thing my mind can bear for very long.
So the chase continues, knowing full well that I will likely never find the perfect setup because like King Arthur’s Holy Grail, it doesn’t exist.
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