How Would This Work In My Current Situation?

[Vanchatron]

I'll Start Off With My Stats:

Age - 21
Height - 5,10"
Weight - 252lbs
Bodyfat - 17-18%
Experience - 6 Years
Insulin Dependent Diabetic
Goals - If I could wake up tomorrow looking like Jay Cutler, I'd jump at the chance.

My Current Situation:

I've been out of work now for around 6 months & probably will be for another 6 months due to complicated reasons I won't go into here (nothing to do with injury by the way), which means that during the week I spend most of my time sat down at my PC or infront of the TV. The only times I am active are the 3x a week I use my home gym in my garage (Power Rack, Bench, Weights etc) for around 1-2 hours. This means that during the week I am hardly burning any calories, as I'm not working & I'm basically dormant apart from the days I work out. This coupled along with the amount of food I'm eating to try & gain muscle has me gaining a little extra fat than I'd like to.

What I Propose To Do About It:

I was thinking that due to this, I could increase my activity levels by working out 5 times a week instead of 3. These days would be from Mon-Fri with the weekend as rest. I know most 5 day splits are something like the following:

Mon - Chest
Tue - Back
Wed - Legs
Thu - Shoulders
Fri - Arms

But I was thinking of using the following split:

Mon - Chest/Triceps
Tue - Back/Biceps
Wed - Legs/Shoulders
Thu - Chest/Triceps
Fri - Back/Biceps

This allows my muscles to be trained twice per week as opposed to just once & also the activity level is increased so I'll be burning more calories, which will hopefully work in accordance with my just sitting down infront of the PC/TV most of the week. I increased the frequency also because I've heard a lot of good things about hitting a muscle twice per week as opposed to just once. A quote I always remember hearing said something like this - "you hit a muscle hard one day, then it recovers in 2-3 days, which means that for the next 4-5 days it's just sitting there doing nothing, hardly optimal for growth". I figured this wouldn't be overtraining due to my experience & the fact that like I said above, I'm just sitting down for most of the week. I've always been told that Bodybuilding is a "journey" and "not everything that works for you works for somebody else" so even though this looks weird, it may "hopefully" work for me. Although I'm not quite sure about only hitting legs once per week and the rest twice per week. I know shoulders will be fine once per week as they get hit indirectly on Chest/Triceps days, but yeah I'm not sure what I'm gonna do about legs. I don't want to be training 6x a week just to add another training session in for legs.

But I just thought I'd get some opinions on it first anyway, just incase I didn't think of anything.

What do you think? Thanks in advance.

 

[SCREW]

is there a reason why you are training legs and shoulders only once a week?

 

[Vanchatron]

Shoulders are actually getting hit 3x a week (twice indirectly on Chest/Triceps days, directly on Shoulders day). Any more would most probably lead to overtraining. And as for legs, I figured with squatting & hitting them hard, once a week would be enough. I don't really want to be working out 6x a week.

 

[SCREW]

o ok i see

what are your goals?

 

[Vanchatron]

Let's just say if I could wake up tomorrow looking like Jay Cutler, I'd jump at the chance... But obviously that's not a realistic goal so I'd say my goal is basically like many others here - to get as big as possible whilst keeping bodyfat to an absolute minimum, but obviously that's not gonna happen if I'm sitting on my ass for most of the week

 

[Vanchatron]

Bump

 

[Big_BK]

Sitting on your ass all week is not a bad thing. All i really do is go to class and sit in my room doing work all day and work on the weekends. So besides the gym i dont get much activity. Gotta conserve those calories!!!! haha

 

[Vanchatron]

Anybody else willing to comment?

 

[ExtraMile]

Ever considered any type of cardio throughout the week?

 

[Vanchatron]

I do 15 mins of HIIT 3x a week after my workouts.

I'm just a bit concerned that with the second split, I may not be leaving enough time for my Triceps to recover due to them already getting hit twice a week (Chest/Triceps day) and once on Legs/Shoulders day.

I'm also not sure which day to add in work for Traps. I used to do it along with Chest/Triceps, but if I was to add it to Chest/Triceps in THIS routine, it'd mean by traps get trained 4x a week (twice directly & twice indirectly when doing deadlifts).

Although I'd only be training traps using a single exercise on Chest/Triceps day which would just be 3 sets of Shrugs, so this "may" be OK. I'm not quite sure how hard deadlifts actually hit the Traps, so I don't know how much of a big deal it is. The same goes for Triceps being involved in Military Pressing on Legs/Shoulders day along with being trained directly on Chest/Triceps day.

 

[SaiBoT]

Well HIIT do it like this 40secs with high speed and resistance, just making it faster ain't getting anywhere... and 2 minute medium intensity for a total between 7 to 9 intervals, so that would be more than 15 minutes plus start with 5 minutes warm-up and 5 minutes for cooling down.

As for the workout... just do it instead of just saying you will, know what I mean? See if it works for you, give it six weeks, then let us know how did it went!

Cheers