4-day split: upper/upper vs. upper/lower

[Caleb H. M.]

I've been curious about this the more I think about it. The four day heavy/light split is often presented in the format of having two upper body days and two lower body days. PPST3 doesn't delve too deeply into the 4 day split, as far as I can tell because it is a template, not a program. That said, what is the reason for that default organization instead of doing upper/lower each day, i.e. something along the lines of this:
Mon. Heavy Squat/Light Bench.
Tues. Heavy Press/Light Pull
Thurs. Heavy Bench/Light Squat
Fri. Heavy Pull/Light Press?

It's been a while since I've read through the book, so sorry if I'm missing something here. Is the given format just for preference or common tradition, or is there a benefit from a training perspective?

[Michael Wolf]

You're on the right track, and I'll use this as a thinking opportunity. The 4 day split is a template, not a program. What you wrote out above would be a perfectly reasonable way to use a 4 day organization for someone who is deeper into the intermediate stage, though it wouldn't be called a 4 day split, because that implies you're splitting upper and lower (I realize you could say it's a split because you're splitting bench and SQ on one day and PR/DL on the other but that's just not how it's colloquially used and would confuse people).

But I prefer the way it's written with the upper/lower split for people who are coming right out of LP or a relatively short time on an early Intermediate 3 day HLM, for example.

Why?

[Caleb H. M.]

I see, "Split" refers to upper/lower specifically. In my mind, I guess I had come to think of it as splitting the work of 3 days into 4.

Asking out of planning ahead, curiosity, and preference. It seems more appealing/less monotonous to me to do one upper/one lower per session. And, along the lines of your comment about its being more appropriate for a later intermediate, doing even light squats after heavy pulling (or vice versa) seems to make a very high stress lower body day. It just seems psychologically more manageable to me to do upper/lower per session. I'm currently running 3 day HLM and doing that (heavy/light lower body lifts in one session) is beginning to be a handful as the weight goes up.

Per the topic of my last post regarding training with a new baby, once I get my bearings, I'm initially shooting to just do each of the four lifts once per week with 3 work sets (probably only 1 or 2 for deadlift), spread out or grouped as necessary over 2 to 4 workouts to remain flexible and keep training times short. Eventually, I hope to add the light work as a bonus to slowly get my volume and weekly training stress back up over the months. I think this will eventually normalize into a 4 day routine, and I'm just thinking through it looking ahead.

[Michael Wolf]

The answer to your personal question, wherein you're trying to fit some reasonable program into a suboptimal (for training) life situation is completely different than the paradigmatic model we use to explain programming in a general sense. The term "situational intermediate" has been used a lot, but your case may be a "situational late intermediate." This is a good example of why you need to understand principles and not just memorize or copy templates.

The normal early intermediate makes progress on a short timeline, normally pretty reliably every week. How is this done? By providing adequate stress and recovery within the week to drive and display adaptation. If you are doing each lift twice per week, the stress won't be high enough if one of them is light. For example, in the classic HLM, the light day is often the press, but you press as heavy as you can - it's "light" in that the press is a self limiting variant, not because you press at 65% of your actual press.

So in your version of the 4 day split, an early Intermediate is only getting 1 real squat, 1 real DL, 1 real bench, and 1 real press stimulus per week. The lighter ones, at this stage in an undeveloped lifter's career, are not robust stressors. Now, depending how light you go, you could design it so it's still a stressor, just a lessor one - and that might lead you to make progress every 2-3 weeks instead of every week. That might be a viable solution for a "situational late intermediate." But paradigmatically, we want to make progress every week and even a 3 day HLM program with only three pressing slots per week will probably do that better than the 4 pressing slots in your program, because at this stage in the game, with his strength relatively undeveloped, 3 hard pressing slots per week with a day of rest between are probably more effective than 2 hard and 2 easy when one of those is always done that day after the other, when recovery processes are taking place and some stiffness, soreness, and fatigue have settled in, whereas within the same session they have not.

If you have more trouble deadlifting heavy after squats, or pressing heavy after bench, within the same workout, it's probably due to inadequate nutrition or inadequate rest between sets. Because fatigue from the recovery processes don't set in till later.

So: an unimpeded early intermediate needs enough stress to drive weekly adaptations, and that won't happen as well from your set-up. He needs 2 heavy squat sessions, and 3-4 heavy press/bench sessions per week, to drive that progress. And doing a lighter press sessions the next day, when he's maxed out his bench the day before, will have a pretty profound effect on the lighter day's press.

So why is this OK for a late intermediate? How long a period does a late intermediate accumulate stress? How many workouts are pushing him to the limit, vs more routine volume accumulation with maybe just 1 truly hard set out of 3-6 total sets, or maybe even none? How relatively consequential is any single one workout if the accumulation of the stress before which you see a new PR is 12-16 workouts vs 2-3 workouts? How does this relate to why a late intermediate's light pressing day is perfectly fine to be done after a heavy benching day, but why that's not the best way for an early intermediate to set things up?

[Caleb H. M.]

Leaving behind my personal "situational late intermediate" case, I would like to see if I'm understanding this correctly just for some fun...

A novice makes progress (SRA cycle) every workout, an intermediate makes progress weekly, and an advanced makes progress monthly. However, an intermediate may be beyond the ability to make precise weekly progress, but not yet to the point of making progress only monthly. This is where the delineation of an early- or late-stage intermediate comes in. (Similar to a late novice making progress every other workout, but not yet switching to weekly)

Working with relatively lighter weights compared to his ultimate potential, an early intermediate both needs and can handle more high-stress (relative to current development) work in a week than his late intermediate counterpart.

With respect to arranging the training on a 4 day template, the early intermediate gets more of this weekly stress with the orthodox 4-day split than the upper/lower organization listed in the first post. This is because his "light" work immediately following a lift of the same half of the body will be heavier than "light" work done while sore and fatigued from a day or two prior. The program structure allows for 4 pressing slots, two squat slots, and two pulling slots total per week, which is the time frame to accumulate stress.

A late intermediate accumulates stress to drive adaptation on a time frame longer than a week, but shorter than a month, say two weeks for an example. "Heavy" work on a given lift is more taxing overall as the lifter is working closer to his ultimate potential, and thus it will be more difficult for him to do the same half of the body twice in a workout than it is for the early intermediate. Using a two week time frame, this lifter has eight pressing slots, four squat slots, and four pulling slots in which to accumulate his stress. This makes each individual slot less important than for the early intermediate. More of his slots are routine volume accumulation than our early intermediate, rather than heavy, hard work.

Also, "light" work moves farther away, in pounds, from heavy work the stronger one gets. I think (not sure) this makes it easier to do the prescribed light work in a degraded state since it is relatively easier compared to current developmental level.

So the alternative organization rather than traditional 4 day split can work for the late intermediate because: 1. The heavy sets are done closer to ultimate developmental potential and are more taxing than early intermediate. This makes the lifter less able to do two lifts on the same half of the body in a workout 2. The light work is relatively easier to perform in a degraded state since it is farther away from heavy work in loading (for a given set/rep scheme). 3. The late int. has twice as many (in this example) sessions per lift to accumulate his stress and can afford for his light work to be relatively lighter in each session than before since he is doing them twice as much for a given stress block.

Is that reasonable at all or am I way off?

[Michael Wolf]

You more or less got it so either I'm a good teacher, you're a quick learner, or both. The only thing in there that I don't think I implied, and if I did it was unintentional, was the second half of your last paragraph #1 above, that the lifter is less able to do two lifts on the same half of the body in a workout. I actually think the original four day split set-up works fine for a later intermediate lifter who, for time or prioritization/life reasons is going to stay at 4x/week with 2 bench and 2 press slots in a manageable workout length. You can squat and DL, press and bench, on the same day just fine - typically one will be a higher stress than the other, often with one more volume and the other heavier but for lower reps. Or, a very typical advanced lifter set-up has Mon and Thurs bench with supplemental lifts (we might make one day press priority and use more press supplemental than typical PL programs, but the concept here is the same); Tuesday Squat with DL supplemental; and Friday DL with squat supplemental. That's not an issue at all.

The main reasons you'd move to your 4 day style could be either a) boredom with a split routine and desire to keep things fresh by going back to a total body style workout, that also works just fine at that stage or b) as preparation for increasing frequency of the lifts as a late intermediate/advanced lifter, when you just have to do some lifts the day after a similar lift/similar muscle groups are worked, in order to increase the frequency. So you get used to it with a minimum effective dose change - you keep 4 days, and you keep the actual frequency the same, but you get used to doing, i.e. DL the day after squat and PR the day after BP for the first time. Then later on you might add a 5th pressing slot, or a 5th day, or a 3rd squat slot or whatever - but you're adjusted to doing overlapping lifts on back to back days because you switched to your version first.