Pushing and Pulling

One of the standard ways to go about organizing your weight lifting is Push, Pull, Legs.  That is, you operate on a 3 day cycle where you focus on exercises that involve pushing with your arms, pulling with your arms, and then leg exercises of all sorts.  For my entire eighteen month workout career I have been trying to do all of my upper body exercises in a single day and it eventually became a problem.  As my weights went up the amount of time it took to do everything kept increasing and my state when I was done kept deteriorating.

Over the past little while I would finish my upper body day in about 90 minutes and just collapse in front of my computer for an hour.  I was stunned, unable to do much of anything.  My muscles were strong enough to handle the new weights, but the amount of energy I was outputting had become a problem.

I decided to split up my exercises into two rough Push / Pull groups and see if I could get them done faster and feel better afterwards.  When the weights were smaller I could get the whole routine done in an hour so I assumed breaking it up like this would mean I could do my 90 minute workout in two 30 minute chunks over two days.  Heck, with doing half of the work on any given day I felt like maybe my weights or reps would go up.

It turns out I can't, and they didn't.  I get through it in 30 minutes no problem but I can't do the same number of reps I was before.  Even though I am doing half the work in a given workout I am compressing my exercises much closer together and this is a problem.  I do circuit style training where I do a single set of every exercise and then do another single set, so my sets of dips, for example, would be about 30 minutes apart.  Now that I am doing dips 3 times in 30 minutes my dips sets are only 10 minutes apart and I just can't keep up my rep numbers.

I certainly found that the 30 minute workouts leave me feeling more energized.  Instead of feeling like I need to just stand there like a zombie for an hour I need only a few minutes and I can get back into whatever it was I was doing before. 

I find it funny that I am so bad at predicting my body's limits.  I would have thought that after all these years I would have developed some kind of decent ability to know what tires me out and how, but apparently even something simple like figuring out whether splitting out my pushes and pulls will tire me out more or less is beyond my ability to know.

I suppose it is an opportunity to know myself better.  I could just spend a full 90 minutes doing my pushes and see where my reps numbers are at, obviously with a huge amount of resting in between each set.  Then try it at 45 minutes for the full workout.

Time to do some more science.