Common Mistakes With Upper/Lower

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This Week’s Healthy Discussion

1. Common Mistakes with Upper/Lower

2. Attention to Detail

3. Catch the Recent Video

Common Mistakes with Upper/Lower

Upper/Lower workout splits are incredibly popular right now, so lets talk about some mistakes that I’ve been seeing.

• Not resting long enough between working sets.

  • This is incredibly important. We are trying to be as productive as we can be with each set. Because there isn’t that many working sets for each muscle in general when dealing with UPPER/LOWER or FULL BODY. We need to be resting at least 3-5 minutes between working sets to be the most productive.

• Doing too much UNILATERAL work.

  • The majority of your exercises should be bilateral because of our fatigue accumulation over the time of our workout. Unilateral exercises build up more fatigue than just doing bilateral work. It’s okay if you’re programming a unilateral exercise to fix a weak point (which I do for my triceps), however you need to be precise with how your program them.

• Understand RIR

  • If you’ve never trained to failure, it will almost be impossible to know what 1 rep shy of failure actually is. So make sure you understand RIR first before just guessing if you are 2RIR for a working set. Our minds can easily trick us into thinking we are 1-2 reps shy when we actually had 4 in the tank. So practice training to failure and correctly judging each of your working sets to learn RIR

• Nutrition/Sleep/Intensity are VITAL

  • With doing a split like this that is so low in volume but high in frequency, you need to be perfect with everything else. When I made the switch to UPPER/LOWER, this truly solidified the focus I needed to have when getting my food in. Sleep, Nutrition, and Intensity are the factors that will make this workout split so valuable.

Attention to Detail

This is where attention to detail is going to be needed. You’ll want to be watching how you’re progressing and feeling during these types of workout splits.

If you aren’t seeing that much progress, one of those four things could be the issue and if you aren’t paying attention, it is easy to go months without seeing actual progress.

So pay attention and keep an eye on your lifts, nutrition, and recovery.

Catch the Video

If you’re curious how one exercise can be incredible for one specific quad exercise, be sure to catch the most recent video: