The majority of our lifters (myself included) train 4 days per week and follow an upper body/lower body training split. It looks something like this:
Day 1: Heavy Bench Press
Day 2: Heavy Squat/Light Deadlift
Day 3: Light Bench Press
Day 4: Light Squat/Heavy Deadlift
This is a common training schedule seen in popular training programs/systems such as 5/3/1 and the conjugate method.
There are a few distinct advantages to training this way compared to training full body 3 days per week, pairing squat and bench on the same day, or your typical 5-day bodybuilding split (e.g., chest, back, shoulders, legs, arms):
1. Alternate Between High- and Low-Stress Days
Anyone who’s trained heavy for a significant period of time will tell you that a heavy squat or deadlift session hits you much harder than a heavy bench press day, even if the intensity is equal.
It’s become trendy for powerlifters to squat and bench on the same day, and then deadlift the day after. This approach is seen in the popular Boris Sheiko programs and often curries favor with the ultra-specific lifting crowd (i.e., they don’t do much in training outside of squat, bench and deadlift).
Although this is highly specific to competition, it’s suboptimal from a recovery standpoint and in my experience, leaves the lifter training the bench press in a constantly fatigued state.
By alternating between upper body and lower body days, and always following lower body days with a day off, you minimize the number of days that you really get kicked in the ass from a fatigue standpoint. This leads to more quality training sessions overall and lets you put more effort into your bench press on two stand-alone days.
2. Less Shoulder and Elbow Stress
Most high-level lifters will tell you that it’s not the bench press that beats up their shoulders and elbows the most. It’s squats.
When you’re big, strong and perhaps not that flexible, lots of heavy squatting take a toll on your upper body joints. And if you squat heavy the day before benching heavy, the joint stress often leads to poor performance in the bench press. It’s better to bench heavy on the first training day of the week, then squat the day after to get the most out of your upper body training AND give yourself extra recovery time (remember, you’re taking a day off after squat day) before training upper body again.
3. Ease into the Week, then Finish Strong
Joe DeFranco was the first strength coach I ever heard say that he preferred his athletes (in this case, college and NFL football players) to bench first during the week instead of squat. He said that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t convince his athletes to “behave” on the weekends and everyone would drag ass through their sprints, jumps and lower body lifts on Monday. Instead of being stubborn, Joe rearranged the training week to put the slightly less intense bench day on Monday. You’re more likely to be able bench heavy and do some curls with a hangover, I guess.
Even if you’re not shotgunning Four Locos every weekend, most of us need some time to ease back into the work week. The stress of getting back to work, school or both can make our first training session of the week less than perfect, and there’s more margin for error on upper body day.
Ending the week with the hardest and heaviest training session (heavy deadlifts) makes sense so you can “empty the tank” knowing you have 1-2 full days off ahead of you before starting the next training week. Often when I’ve tried to put heavy deadlifts earlier in the week, either for myself or for my lifters, we’ve struggled to maintain quality of training throughout the rest of the week as fatigue from heavy deadlifts seems to “hit different,” as the kids say.
Split It Up
Like anything else in training, there are lots of training splits that work. But there’s a reason that so many high-level lifters and so many popular training systems use an upper/lower split. It maximizes recovery between heavy sessions, minimizes joint stress and fits nicely into the logistics of the typical work/life schedule.