FITNESS, PROGRESS

Complimentary Splits Part One: Chest and Triceps

It is important to remember that a workout program isn’t simply what I like to do and when I like to do it. What we do and when we do it has as dramatic an impact on our results as anything else.  Today we are going to talk about one of my absolutely favorite splits: chest and triceps.

Beater Fan Frank Zane Always Worked Chest Together With Tris

If you do a Google search and look up whether or not you should work chest and tri together a lot of sites will tell you not to. The reason they give is because it will wear down your muscles. How have we got so far away from the core of bodybuilding? Wearing down the muscles IS THE POINT.

What’s more, there is a reason that working the chest along with the triceps wears down the muscles. The triceps assist you when you try to do movements that hit your chest. By wearing the triceps down alongside the chest you remove them as an assistant muscle group. This will mean that you can’t lift as heavily on your workouts, but that is fine. This is Massive Volume. The ability to bench press 405 pounds a couple of times is not something we find impressive here. We find a fit, strong, healthy and muscular physique impressive. Save your “dude, i used to bench 500” stories for your orthopedic surgeon.

Without your triceps to help you lift you will be lifting lighter and the isolation will be greater and thus you will break that muscle down more resulting in much better gains.

In my programs I tend to emphasize supersets and often superset larger compound movements with isolation movements. The goal here is to make the split work in such a way that the two (or more) lifts of the superset work together by isolating and breaking down assisting muscles like triceps leaving the larger compound movements to hit larger muscles like pectorals which will have to bear the brunt of the weight on them alone.

If you have triceps and chest DOMS the next day that will be the perfect time to hit your deadlifts. You won’t have to remember not to try and hit those deadlifts with your arm muscles…your body will do it for you. However, playing around with DOMS in workout programs will be for another article.

So today I will finish off by giving you a challenge workout. It is a Chest/Triceps Burn-Out to be done BEFORE you start chest day. Aim for a weight that will leave you at 9 RPE for the 20th rep. The rest period between each workout, as in all supersets, is zero. The rest period between sets is as little as possible but never more than 40 seconds.

Giant Set 3×20

Dumbbell Bench Press Horizontal

Seated Dumbbell Triceps Extension

Dumbbell Chest Press Vertical

Dumbbell Skull Crushers

 

When this is done go into your normal chest routine (hopefully it will also include triceps). You might have to lower your weights a little bit, but the impact on the muscles will be significant. Let me know below if you tried it and how you liked (or hated) it.

WB FITNESS

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4 Comments

J.Nyx

“The ability to bench press 405 pounds a couple of times is not something we find impressive here. We find a fit, strong, healthy and muscular physique impressive. Save your “dude, i used to bench 500” stories for your orthopedic surgeon.”

This whole quote is savage as fuck. But I dont follow?

So what you’re saying is if my current bench press is the curb weight of a German 1930s compact car for the people that I should up the reps and lower the weight to say, that of a harley davidson?

Consolation_of_Philosophy

This breakdown superset got me to thinking: any recommended warmup for massive volume? Or is warmup pointless— just lift to the neighborhood of failure off the jump?

WB Fitness

Stretching for warm of of course, but in terms of grabbing a weight and doing reps before your set….not really. Sometimes I will do one or two reps just to put the motion on track but when we are talking about sets that range between 10-20 reps the idea of a warm up is kind of out the window.

That said, I do, for the most part, dispense with the idea of 3 sets and opt for 5. I suppose the first of 5, while identical to the others, could be considered a warm up set mostly because you will be gauging your RPE for the lift on that day and adjusting weights accordingly for the remaining 4 sets.

In the program I am currently designing I am thinking about (though haven’t decided) to add drop sets to the end of each one and so there will be a burn out rather than a warm up.

Consolation_of_Philosophy

Makes sense. I have been naturally doing something like drop sets just to figure out where RPE is for each exercise, and it feels very consistent with the method.

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