Practical Programming mentions that splitting up routines is fine and can be beneficial, so it should be fine.
Volume day takes forever, I hear ya
btw, I do my deadlifts on volume day and powercleans on my 3rd day. It could save you some time
I didn't want to waste Rip's time so I'll see if you guys have experience with this. I'm doing the basic Texas method and the volume day takes forever. I'm a working father with limited time. Probably like many of you. My basic routine:
Tue: Squat 5x5
Press/Bench 5x5
PC 5x3
Thurs: Squat 80% 2x5
Light Press/Bench 3x5
Back Ex
Pull Ups
Sat: Squat Heavy 1x5
Press/Bench 1x5
DL 1x5
I also play rec. ice hockey on Sat nights. Anyway, does anybody see a problem with doing the Tue squat at 6:00am, the Tue press and pc Tue 7:00pm. Thurs, Sat sessions 6:00 am. Sat night ice hockey. Just wondering if anybody has tried to split up the volume day.
Thanks
Practical Programming mentions that splitting up routines is fine and can be beneficial, so it should be fine.
Volume day takes forever, I hear ya
btw, I do my deadlifts on volume day and powercleans on my 3rd day. It could save you some time
Last edited by stronger; 12-11-2009 at 12:59 PM.
Elite weightlifters have trained like this for years, i.e., splitting up the training day. I don't have any personal experience with this, but I don't see any reason not to try it.
When I switched from SS to the Texas Method I also ran into a time problem with volume day. At first I cut my rest time between squat sets to 3 minutes, but I had to really reduce the weight. As the weight increased again I was forced to increase the rest time and as a result I kept running out of time before I could to my deadlifts. (I do squats, presses, and deadlifts on volume day). Anyway, I decided that I would have to split up volume day or never deadlift, so I moved the DLs to Tuesday. I still do the rest of the program as prescribed with Recovery day on Wednesday and Intensity on Friday.
I also decided to do one other tweak a couple of weeks ago - I'm now alternating between Intensity and Dynamic Effort on Fridays. I felt that at my age (57) that I needed to reduced the max effort days a bit. I'm going to continue this for the next month or 2 and see what happens.
My volume day takes 2 to 2.5 hours including about 15 to 20 minutes warm-up and I do:
Squat 5x5
Bench press / press 5x5
Power Cleans 3x5
Is this about how long it takes every one else?
Only have to take about 5-6 minutes between sets so far (a little less on cleans) so I imagine this will end up closer to 2.5 to 3 hours in a few more weeks...2 hours or so is not bad, but 3 hours is a bit much...though only lifting 3 days a week helps out even if it is a long day in the gym.
I think the volume day is acknowledged to be the longest gym training scheduled day in the Texas method. For a lot of people, Saturday or Sunday is a better day to do Volume day - for other people, where ever you have a free chunk of time which isn't competing with other priorities/duties. You don't want to be antsy seeing if you can beat the clock before the gym closes on a volume day, though I've been put in that situation before and it wasn't that bad.