Frank Zane’s Favorite Training Split
Zane cautions us against training the upper body two days in a row because that will only serve as an invitation for shoulder injury. He’s right when he says that you will probably get away with it for a while, but it will eventually get to you. As he says, “You might get away with it when you’re young, but it will eventually get to you.”
In fact, the one thing he would do differently if he was to go back in time is avoid training excessively heavy before a competition, as this strategy earned him many injuries that he still suffers from today. “There are two kinds of lifters: Those who want to get big fast and those who want to do it slowly so they last longer. The latter is a far smarter choice.”
To build his amazing physique, he mainly used three-way training splits. The one that worked best for him was a split where day one involves upper body pulling movements, day two is all about legs and day three focuses on pushing exercises. “You should do this in train, rest, train, train, rest format”, he explains.
Stretching is an often neglected part of bodybuilding routines, but Zane is quite rigorous about it. According to him, regardless of which body part you’re training, you should do about ten different stretches that target it, each lasting 15-20 seconds, during the rest periods between your sets. “After a set, you want to rest and drop your heart rate. This is the ideal recovery tool as you relax into the stretch; it saves a lot of time and keeps you warm”, he adds.
And how does his routine look like today?
“Nowadays, I train twice a week. I do upper body one day and legs the other day. I also walk a lot and shoot archery, while training little bits with clients.”
Stay Motivated Through Success
New Year’s resolutions can be very easy to make, but incredibly difficult to follow through, and this is perhaps nowhere as true as it is in the case of training goals. At the beginning of every year, millions of people get the primary impulse to improve their shape and condition, but their motivation tends to dwindle by late March and then they return into the cycle of overeating and guilt-tripping.
Zane seems to think that people lose their motivation mainly because they never get true feedback on their progress, and also because they’re typically motivated through deficiency, constantly thinking about everything their physique lacks and how terrible they look.For many people, focusing strongly on their flaws can be useful for getting through the first phase of the training process, but this attitude will usually fail to propel long-term lifestyle changes. The motivation to start and the motivation to keep going are two completely different things.
In Zane’s opinion, if your motivation comes only from awareness of all the things you hate about your body, “you will always be unhappy and you will go backwards; you’ll be worse, not better.”
So how can we keep our motivation stable and long-lasting so that real gains can be made?
To him, the only answer to this problem is to become motivated through success. That’s a powerful attitude shift that can immediately push you in the right direction.
