I have a garage gym. It’s got everything I need for the foreseeable future. I prefer training at home, and do not belong to a gym.
I am somewhere in the early/middle part of my novice LP. Unfortunately, this time of year is a busy time at work. Long days. I am starting my workouts around 9-9:30pm and finishing them between 10:30-11:00pm. This would all be well and good, but I have to wake up around 4:45am every weekday (work starts at 6am). I feel like my recovery resources are being pushed too far going like I am. I’d say that I’m averaging 5 hours of sleep after an evening workout.
So…last night, I started at 9:30 (again) and I decided to pull my deadlifting reps (pun intended) from last nights workout, and will do them tonight (by themselves).
The question is…as someone with the luxury (?) of working out at home, is splitting up workouts for the aforementioned reason a good solution? Or…will I run into issues squatting and deadlifting nearly every day of the 7 days? Fatigue? Soreness? Etc.?
At the moment, weight isn’t very heavy right now in absolute terms, so I’m not terribly worried that fatigue will be a huge issue.
Squat: 205x5x3
Press: 106x5x3
Bench: 155x5x3
Deadlift: 235x5 —I’ve reset this once to work on form/technique. It seemed like I’m always smoked after a long day of work + squats/pressing beforehand.
Any other thoughts on arranging workouts for someone who has trouble doing a long workout due to time constraints, but CAN do everything they need at home (without the issue of going back and forth to a gym several times)?
I spend about 5 minutes moving things around in the garage and putting on my shoes.
I spend between 2-5 minutes on the rower (500m-1000m+) for general warm-up.
I average around 4.5-5 minutes in between work sets. Virtually none for warm up sets.
Last night, I was in the garage for right at an hour. I HAVE done all three (squat, press/bench, and deadlift) in 50-60 minutes before, but I generally feel like I’d be rushing things if I wasn’t waiting at least 4 minutes in between work sets.
135x5x2 (usually my first warm up set is done in between sets 2 and 3 of pressing/benching)
185x5
235x5
These don’t take that long, but they usually feel terrible (I presume based on my energy level). Once or twice, I have broken away from the plan, and would do 2-3 sets of 185x5 in the above example to try to make up for the lack of intensity with volume.
Those warmups seem reasonable. So if you need to crunch things down even less, then sure, you might split the work up and distribute it across the week. There are a variety of ways one could do this, and it may require some experimentation to find one that works well for your schedule/recovery situation.
We generally like preserving rest days when we can, but you’ve also gotta do what you gotta do.
Another thing I’ve thought about…I should be dropping deadlifting down to once or twice a week pretty soon, so hopefully that helps with resting better too.
Will definitely be playing around with different splits.
Is there any benefit being lost, or a downside to splitting the day’s training into two sessions? Say Monday is 1@8 and 5x5 comp squat,1@8 and 5x5 comp bench and 10@8 pendlay rows. What if you did the squats in the morning and the other 2 movements in the evening, or a few hours later?
I’m not disagreeing, but can you expound upon the reasoning why that is not the best idea? Just trying to get a better understanding of the logic/mechanics of that decision.
I missed this thread and posted something similar - feel free to s-can that one, Austin. I gather experiments are in orde. Gonna try upper/lower split across 6 days.
I did this last summer for a couple months when I was doing TM style training. I was curious if it would give me an edge because PPST contains a brief reference to a Keijo Hakkinen research paper that suggested splitting work between AM and PM session might be beneficial under certain circumstances… that I probably did not meet, but hey.
Maybe it has to do with fatigue setting in after a few hours? I did 3 sets of squats in the morning and 2 more at night along with a set of deadlifts (basically all done @ 9.5-10). It’s a shocking feeling when you begin warming up that second squat session and 185 feels like 365.
There are differences in fatigue that is accumulated intraworkout than those in a longer period of time, e.g. a second session. The response to either protocol is variable, but I would expect someone who is not used to training multiple times per day would accumulate higher fatigue than one who does everything in one session. This may not be appropriate for someone immediately post novice, but might be a good strategy for someone who has been training for awhile.
Got it. Thanks for the extra detail. Seems a little counter intuitive, I thought it might actually be less fatigue as it’s basically a real long rest after some sufficiently difficult squats or deads, and you’d feel nice and fresh for the movement(s) following. Though, I guess that may cause you to go a little heavier on the remaining two movements, thus more fatigue.