I’ve got time to go to the gym 3x per week for about an hour. I cycle commute to work about 3 days a week (on average when it isn’t raining) and go for either a long bike or hike on a weekend day.
I’m wondering how I split my gym routine. I can’t seem to handle doing 3x full body workouts and fitting some core work in there too due to time and fatigue.
So I’m thinking, should I do 2x upper body + core workouts and 1x lower body workout per week or the alternative 2x lower body + core and 1x upper body workout per week.
My goals are to get overall strength, some muscle tone and just overall strength for daily life. I’m not concerned about maximal athletic performance. My thinking would be to do 2x upper and 1x lower per week as I’m working out my lower body a lot already due to cycling and hiking.
I have done 2 upper body and 1 leg session per week for a few years while I was just a runner. Then started cycling and swimming, so now I do 1upper/1leg per week because I still play semi competitive hockey and don’t want to look like Chris Froome.
3 full body workouts is certainly overkill. If I were to go back to 3 workouts a week I would do 1 weight leg workout (Squats, lunges, etc), one weight upper body workout (chest, back, arms, etc), and then one lighter workout that is about 50% legs and 50% upper body. Plyos would be the legs, and various other body weight leg strength exercises (split squats, etc). Upper body would be an abridged version of the upper body workout I did before (subtracting things like arms).
Right now I my upper body workout is about 45mins, and I try and hit all the major muscle groups twice. My lower body workout is about an hour, about 30 mins of which is doing weighted exercises, and 30mins of which is plyos. Core I usually just do after runs/rides.
I’ve been doing plyos since I was about 14 (23 now) for hockey, so if you don’t have experience with them then just start them gradually, and wait for several months before you start doing difficult/dangerous ones like box jumps.