 Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. This is the Barbell Logic podcast. I'm Scott, you know Matt, and today we're going to kind of dip our toe in intermediate programming and talk about the four-day splits. Yep. Four-day split. So when we do our linear progression, there ain't no split. Nope. We squat every day. We deadlift every day. Three times a week. Yeah, three times a week. Every session we squat and every session we pull until it gets heavy. And then we, you know, alternate our pressing motions. Well, when we do the four-day split, we'll change it up. Yep. So we start squatting volume, we squat every other session, but we increase our pressing volume. Like in linear progression, you press, let's say you press on Monday and Friday this week. Well, that means next week you're just going to press on Wednesday. So every two weeks you have three press sessions. You'll have four in a typical four-day split. At least, yeah. So your pressing volume goes up, we end up increasing the rest period between sessions with each motion. So you squat on Monday and you won't squat Wednesday, probably squat Thursday. Yep. So we add a day's rest and we get it all done in a one-week period. Yeah. So one of the ways to think about the four-day split is it really moves when you're moving from a late intermediate or mid-intermediate three-day split, like a Texas Method old man, Texas Method heavy light medium, one of those, to a four-day split. It's actually in the beginning, it's like the same total amount of work. It's just spread out over four days. You get six work reps for the squat. So think about it this way, essentially you've got three squat slots in Texas Method old man, Texas Method heavy light medium, you're squatting Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You've got three versions of presses, press or bench press, right? So you're going to do say press on Monday and Friday and bench press on Wednesday or vice versa. And usually at that point you're at two deadlift slots, you're deadlifting on Monday and Friday, you're instance for a barbell row or chins or something that cleans on Wednesday. So you have a total of eight slots for the main lifts total. So three squats, three presses, two deadlifts, eight total. When you move to a four-day split, you get two squats per week, two deadlifts per week and you squat and deadlift on the same day. And you bench press and press on the same day, two bench presses per week, two presses. So you still have eight total slots. It's one less squat slot, so you lose the light day squats. And it's one extra press heavy set, heavy day. And so what you end up with is a four-day split. One day will be heavy or squat intensity, followed by deadlift volume. The other lower body day, which would come three days after the first day. So if that's first day is Monday, on Thursday, then you would have squat volume, deadlift intensity, very easy. One day heavy, one day for reps. Yep, bench and the press are the same thing. So maybe you bench heavy on Tuesday. Press volume. And then on Friday or Saturday, you press heavy bench volume, right? So you're always benching and pressing on the same day and you're always squatting and deadlifting on the same day, which allows for more frequency per workout perspective and less frequency from an exercise to exercise perspective from a major muscle group, major movements being used. So we like that. It also tends to make the total amount of workout time per week be the same. Pretty close. Pretty close because you go from at the end of your omen, takes the method, heavy, light, medium. Your workouts are running about an hour and a half ish, maybe two hours even, but hour and a half. And when you go to four days split, you can often get the workout done in an hour, just over an hour. So the workouts are shorter, but there's more of them. Yeah. Sorry, guys, with the home gyms, not a big deal. But if you're actually traveling to the gym and you got like travel time and all that. Yes, sometimes it's hard to sell them on an extra day, an extra workout day. And then we will often introduce the concept. We've talked about this before on the podcast of the supplemental lift in a four day split. Now, in the beginning, we don't. In the very beginning of a four day split, we usually will just do a four day split where we'll keep running four day splits and we alternate the rep ranges between sometimes five sets of five, especially for upper body lifts, three sets of five, five sets of three, three sets of three, five singles across. And we can kind of wave something in that ballpark. Periodizing. Periodizing. Yeah. Yeah, because the idea is at this point. So here's the way I'd look at it. Rarely when I go to four day split, am I on a weekly program anymore? Can you do a weekly program on four day split? Yeah, it's basically it's Texas method. There's no light work. It's all intensity, volume, intensity, volume, just like I explained a minute ago. And you could just keep making the weight go up every week. Yeah, that's okay. That's not hard at all. I've got a young guy, Thomas. He's out there. He's 19. He's been on a four day kind of Texas variant split like that for 13 weeks. Yeah, works awesome. And he just keeps going on. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that at all. But it's also really easy. I'd die. It's really easy to make a four day split into a two week program where you make sure that the weight goes up every two weeks instead of every one week. So we know that we're making actual strength adaptive responses. We've got the metrics where we know that the barbell weight is going up every two weeks instead of once a week. And you can also do things like month long programs or like a five, three, one or a version of five, three, one. Five, three, one is a four day split program. You have the five, the three and the one for the kind of the rep schemes. That's exactly right. So it's basically, yeah, sets of five ish on week one, sets of three ish week two, really heavy on week three, deload on week four, do it over again. But then you can also do a longer program, you know, a 12 week long program with block training where you have three separate blocks that are four weeks apiece, where it's an accumulation block, where it's high volume or higher volume, five sets of five, four sets of five somewhere in there for lower intensity, intensity in the 70s, 70% range. And in the 70s, a transmutation block for a month where the volume is moderate. Four sets of four, four sets of three, three sets of four, things like in that rate, 12 total work from like 10 reps to 16 reps work. And the intensity is in the 80s, right, 80% of your 80% range, 80% of your one rep max range, right, from 80 to say 89, like in the 80s. And then a third block of realization phase or peaking phase where the intensity is really high over 90%, but the bottom drops out of the volume, right. So the thing about the four day split is the four day split is the first place where we can actually apply early intermediate programming all the way to very advanced programming all along the same split. The split is the same. And how often do we make progress on the lifts is based on where your training age is, right, whether you're a novice intermediate, what's you're not a novice, but intermediate, late intermediate, early advanced, late advanced, so on and so forth. So I like the four day split. I think the four day split is fun. I like to be able to focus on either the lower body lifts or the upper body lifts. And so the other two concepts that we introduce in the four day split that we haven't introduced up to this point is supplemental lifts, which is where we will start to do variants on the lifts based on our weak points. So we've talked about those in the past there. So you can go back and listen to a previous episode about supplemental lifts. We have certain ones that we like, things like in deadlift to be like a deficit deadlift or a rack pull for presses. It'd be like pin presses or press starts, maybe seated presses for bench presses. We like pause bench presses, pin pause bench presses, floor presses. Bench presses with chain. If you've got a chain, which a lot of people don't have, I like chain, you know, for squats, pause squats, box squats, tempo squats, pin squats, those are usually four. And you can add chains, some of those if you've got chains or not. So all of those are pretty specific. I don't do a lot of things that aren't. So I don't like things like Romanian deadlifts and straight leg deadlifts for deadlift supplemental lifts, because I don't think it makes you stronger because I don't think it's specific enough. I would actually call both those accessory movements or just heavy accessory movements that can directly beat you up. But we're going to introduce that supplemental lift and the supplemental lift would be introduced as the second movement of the day. So if Monday is squat day and I'm going to do my squat intensity day, my competition sort of squat, the straight up low bar squat, then the movement that will follow will often be a deadlift variation. So it'll be a deficit, deadlift or a rack pull, or, you know, there's some other ones that we could use, but those are kind of the primary ones we use. And we're going to get some volume there. We're going to get a little volume, you're going to get some work in because we're trying to build some strength and some muscle in a range of motion where the lifter struggles with a week. We go off the floor. We're going to focus on the floor week at the tibial tuberosity. It's a kind of mid shin to high shin. We're going to focus in that area as well. So we're going to do some overload type stuff like rack pulls, floor presses, press lockouts where we can get more weight in our hands or on our back than we're used to. If I can press lockout, if my best press is 200 pounds and I can press lockout 225, then when I take 205 or 210 out of the rack, it doesn't feel that heavy because I've already had 225 in my hands and I press it over my head. I just started at my forehead. I could do it. It works really well. The last thing that we introduce with a four day split is we'll start to introduce the concept of the accessory movements. And these are additional slots of work that are put in on upper body days or lower body days to get additional volume needed to disrupt homeostasis to give us the stress needed to drive the adaptation without beating us up. So a lot of times we put accessory work in. So on upper body accessory work, that might be like chin ups, pull ups, dips. It might be standing barbell curls. It might be LTEs, tricep push downs. A lot of times we can do that thing to get additional volume, some additional hypertrophy work in. We need to get extra volume in to be able to get enough work in to drive homeostasis to drive the adaptation. If I just got that volume from the barbell lifts, then I often would beat me up too much. Yeah. So we use accessory work there. Now, the hard part is lower body accessory work. What do you do for lower body accessory work? I don't know. I mean, there's tons of upper body stuff you could do lunges, but lunges tend to be tough on the knees and tough on the interior hips, right? You do kettlebell swings, which tend to pump a bunch of blood in your back and make your back sore, right? You can do sit ups, which are mostly worthless or other ab exercises are mostly worthless. You do leg press, which if you have leg press access to leg press, I actually think leg press is probably one of the best ones you could do. You can do a heavy prowler push, heavy sled push, heavy sled drag, which, again, if you have access to go for it, right? But most of our clients don't have access to these things. And so we often have to get a glued ham raise. I actually like a glued ham raise. This is an accessory move. A glued ham raise is the only exercise that moves your. I don't know how important this is because this doesn't actually occur in normal human movement, but a glued ham raise is the only exercise that takes your hamstrings through a full range of motion. So at the bottom of a glued ham raise, your knees are in extension and your hips are in flexion. And so your hamstrings are fully stretched, just like they would be at the bottom of a straight leg deadlift, right? So the bottom of a straight leg deadlift, you often get really sore from a straight leg deadlift is because your hamstrings are being stretched to their maximum capacity under load. So they have eccentric, eccentric, lengthening under load to their maximum stretch potential, right? The maximum length glued ham raise does the same thing. Only a glued ham raise finishes with the knees and flexion and the hips and extension, which is like in a lying leg curl position. Full, full. So it goes from fully stretched to fully shortened, which makes sense that it could make for a generally good accessory movement. We get lots of extra work in. We work the muscle through full range of motion and the glutes work as well. So because the hips go from flexion to extension, then the glutes get their work done. Since the knees go from extension to flexion, the calves get work done as well. So you really kind of work the entire posture, your chain, but it's primarily a hamstring movement back there. And you can load them up. You load them up, you put bands over your head. You can jack up the back end the more you raise your feet up and make your feet higher in relation to your knee. They get harder. You can also do the opposite to make it a little easier in the beginning when you're learning how to do it. So a glued ham raise works fine. You know, reverse hyperextension is probably OK. A hyperextension or a 45 degree back raise is probably OK. We just want to be careful. If you're somebody who struggles with back injuries, we tend to want to not do things that takes your low back, your lumbar through flexion and extension, right? We don't want to round your low back, straighten your low back, round your low back, straighten your low back. We basically want to teach you to never round your low back. We just want to keep it in extension all the time. There are lots of people that similar. I had a couple this past weekend that as they bent over to grab the barbell on a deadlift, they super rounded their lumbar. Yeah, just the lumbar. It's so weird looking. Right. It's weird, right? When I go down and grab a deadlift, my lumbar is in perfect extension. It's just my thoracic that's rounded. And then I go down and squeeze my chest up and I try to put my thoracic in extension poorly. But I do. So it's weird. It's hard for me. I have to really think about how do I put my low back in flexion? It feels so foreign to get there. So, yeah, four day split questions. I don't know. Well, yeah. So we just told us what it is. Well, why would you do it? Yeah. So, you know, I think the primary driver is that we want to give some people a little more rest between their squad sessions, more rest between exercise frequency. And the other one would be we need to introduce more slots. We can't come in three days a week and just continue to pile in movements on those three days a week. Correct. You end up having to pack a lunch. That's right. It's too long. You know, those seem to be the main drivers for when I pick it. It's also then the easiest weekly split to go from intermediate, weekly progression to middle intermediate, bi-weekly progression, bi-weekly. The word always throws me off. Every other week, every other week, progression, right? The monthly progression, the theoretically two month progression, the three month progression. And most programs are not going to be long and three months. You might have something. It's a four month advanced sort of program. But for the most part, you're going to have that. And all of those can be done with the same four day split. Right. So it's very easy from a programming perspective. If I take my time and I'm patient as a coach, when I first put somebody on a four day split, they're on a weekly progression or they're on a bi-weekly progression. One of the two, depending on whether I've milked the old man, Texas Method or Heavy Light Medium for all I can get. If I do, I'm probably going to start them on a four day split in a two week progression. And then after I've milked two week progression as long as I can and they can't keep making progress every two weeks, then I'm moving to monthly progression. When I might do something like the Reynolds 531 program, right? Which again, I wish I had a better name for that, but I stole the first chunk of it from Wendler and then all the rest of it is mine. So I don't know what to call it, but whatever. It's a tribute. It's a tribute. It's fine. And so my brittle old ass, we often will have be due to the four day split. But instead of cramming them all in in seven days, I'm getting them in in like ten. Right. So the four day split is often something like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. Yep. Well, I will often have older guys or ladies do Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then Monday. Yep. When they get more advanced, that's just not enough stress. Yeah. But for a lot of the earlier, earlier mid eight inmates, is that a thing? Yep. They can make progress like that for a long time. Yeah, that's a good point. So you can do a four day split on a longer than a seven day week. So you can put a four day split on an eight or nine day cycle so that you're doing a mezzo cycle. Yeah, no, it's not a mezzo cycle. I don't it's I don't know. So it's not a micro cycle. No, I don't know what it is. Yeah, I guess it's a mezzo cycle and it's not a macro cycle. One other adjustment that I've found really over the last year that I've started to make that I really like. And I definitely like it if you do that, what you just said. So if you are an older person who's gone to a split program, so it's upper day, lower day, upper day, lower day, back and forth. But you're only training three days a week. The thing I don't like about that is especially on upper body, the weeks that you have two lower body workouts and only one upper body workout, I feel like your upper body detrains. One of the things that I've done, even with people who do four day splits on a regular week, so they're doing four workouts a week, is on one of the lower body workouts, I add either a press or a bench press. And the way I choose whether it's a press or a bench press is by this time, most of my clients that get to a four day split are at least considering competing at some point. Right. And so if they're going to consider competing in powerlifting, it will be a third bench press movement for the week. And if they're going to do strength lifting and they're going to press and they're going to do a third press movement for the week. So I just did that with charity. I just built out a program for charity that's built on where as three bench press days. But starting next week, because she's prepping for nationals for strength lifting, they were pulling one of those bench presses and were replacing it with a press. So it's very easy. You just think of it this way, Monday on Monday, rather than just doing squat and deadlift, you're going to go squat and press and deadlift. And then Tuesday or Wednesday, two days later, will be bench and press. And then Thursday is just squat and deadlift. And then Friday is bench and press again. So you actually end up getting five press slots per week, two benches and two presses and one extra either or. And that works really well. If you put somebody on a four day split, but they're only training three days a week, then one of those lower body days, you can throw one extra press in. It doesn't kill them. It, you know, it elongates the workout by a little bit, but not very much. And I usually make that lift of the presser bench on short rest. So it might be like a like six sets of two, six sets of three, five sets of three, five doubles, things like that. And then short rest, like every minute on the minute or every 90 seconds or something. We're just trying to get some additional volume and some additional form work in. And it's never like RPE nine or something like that in that ballpark. It's always stuff in like the 6.5 to 7.5 range. And so it works pretty well. You haven't been doing all those doubles, like on the minute to build work capacity, or are you just trying to get them to knock it out? I'm just trying to get them to knock it out. Yeah. Yeah. I hate it when a client reaches out to me. It's like, Hey, what can I do to shorten my workouts? They're taking three and a half hours. Like, ooh, they shouldn't take three and a half hours. Why are they taking three and a half hours? Well, because, you know, I'm supposed to be taking nine minute rest periods OK, so let's actually add this up. How many warmups are you done? All right. Like, well, now they're doing too many warmups and they're taking five minute rest periods between the warmups. They're taking nine minute rest periods on their work set. So like, man, it took an hour and 10 minutes to get through your squats. It shouldn't do that. You just get in there and knock it out real quick. And so if you're not quite totally recovered from warmup set to warmup set, it doesn't matter because they're just warmup sets. Yeah. You just bang through those until your last one. That's right. And when you get to your work set, if it takes you nine or 10 minutes to recover from a work set and you're not a super advanced lifter, like you're a guy and you squat 600 pounds and you want to take 10 minutes between your 545 and 600, that's fine. Take it. But if you're a guy and you're taking 10 minutes between 315 and 345, that's six and a half minutes too long or six minutes too long or something like like more than five minutes. It's a lot of diminishing returns there. Right. The longer you wait, it doesn't really get that much better. Yeah. You could potentially benefit, but we got to get this done. We still have this right. We have economic concern. We're going to get in and get out. Right. So I love four days split, squats and deadlifts, two days a week. Bench presses and presses two days a week. Potentially a fifth press or bench press in there on one of the lower body days. An introduction of supplemental lifts. Those supplemental lifts are going to be very close variants to the main lifts. So like we've talked about in the past, they're going to be a shortened range of motion usually overloaded at the top like a rack pull or they're going to be a longer range of motion, which is going to do us a little more stress. It's going to be a little bit lighter, but it's going to work that range of motion where it's hard. If you can pull like 92% of your best deadlift from a deficit deadlift, you will not believe how fast your actual deadlift max will come off the floor. I hate them. I hate them too, but they carry over really well. Yeah. They carry over great. And if you have chains, you know, chains are something that works well there. And of course, you know, we'll work with people with whatever they've got. So so that's four days split. That's how the split lays out. Four days split is a powerful tool that we end up using. Would you say that you've probably in the last 10 years? I bet you've spent 90% of your time in a four day split for sure. The only time in the last 10 years that I haven't done a four day split is when I've done DUP or come back from injury and do an LP for like a month. But otherwise, DUP is the only other daily undulating periodization, which we'll talk about it later on the road as well. That's just a high frequency program. That's where you're doing all the lifts three times per week. It's a lot of frequency. You've got to be real careful with the volume. The volume is not too high for any given lift in any given day, but you're doing three lifts per day, four days a week. Yeah. So that's 12 slots, which right now we're talking about eight slots. And there's a time for that. Yep. But not until we have to. Because if I can make progress with eight big lifts a week, I make progress to eight of those or I can add that extra press and go to nine of those. Why would I do 12? I'm going to automatically go to 12 when I don't have to. Because I'm exquisitely lazy. All right. Or you're just obtuse and you're just going to stick to it. So four days split. There you go. Thanks so much.