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Originally Posted by Ozzi
Either way gains are possible.As long as the muscles are being forced to adapt I don't see a problem with either.
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Of course there's gains either way. The main idea of the post was about which is more OPTIMAL. Optimal meaning doing less to achieve more. This is especially true with natural lifters. Damn, I just realized that NONE of the good stuff is posted in this thread, so I'll post everything individually down bottom....
* The rest of this post isn't directed towards you Ozzi.. Just an open rant to add to the massive amount of info in the thread.... 
If I asked a hundred people why they do a split, they'll say they either saw it in a magazine or state that all the pro's do it.
(which is false) But, if you go back to the first half of the century when all they were was natural lifters, you'll see every one of them doing full body routines. Splits and isolationism only reared its head in the 70's and 80's when steroids entered the picture. And to add to that, when most people were watching guys like Coleman witnessing the gigantic amount of volume for a muscle in a session (such as back), they thought he must only do one muscle per day... Which is wrong. He uses a 3 day split, 6 days a week thereby working muscles twice a week (not once). Dorian Yates and Mike Metzner are two that use extremely low volume and a lot of days between muscles. I gotta include here that Yates was THE most injured lifter as well.
Additionally, depending on how people constructed their "split", they could create a great overlap of muscles worked. One such example is doing close or reversegrip bench on "arms" day, which is also great for pec development. Or even doing a few sets of heavy weighted underhanded chins for "back" day which is also excellent for biceps.
The problem with only working out a muscle once a week is two fold:
1. Doing one muscle in a day usually means you hit it with a variety of angles, all of which isn't necessary or optimal.. But does it work? Sure it does. Refer back to all the long winded posts that talk about how you CANNOT isolate your muscles in sections. (such as incline flyes allegedly working your "upper-inner chest" which is simple minded.) Supporters would speculate that they "felt" it and are sore in the "upper-inner" pecs, but the muscle works as a WHOLE, not in seperate, mapped out sections. If that was the case, then I'll go ahead and tatoo borders on my chest and be sure to color in each little piece to be sure I got it all..
Additionally with this point. As your "chest day" for example progresses, the weights drop significantly. By the end of the hour, you're doing 40 lb cable flyes. In my opinion, the second half of that workout using 'pussy weights' isn't going to build the muscle the initial (and heaviest) exercises will. So why bother? My point (and the point of many others) is to do your heavy exercises for chest, then move the fuck on.. The only once a week program that circumvents this is Max-OT, which is a very low volume, heavy weighted routine.
2. The growth response from a bout of heavy lifting lasts up to 36 hours. This means you're basically growing for 3 days, then maintaining your gains for another 4 days. Again, what does this mean? It means that YES, you grow from once a week, but NO it's not anywhere close to optimal unless you can EXTEND those growth factors such as increased protein synthesis, IGF-1, through "chemical enhancement" a la steriods or some more accessable brands such as Superdrol and Phera-plex to name a few..
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2) Acute vs. Chronic Stimuli
In order for the loading to result in significant hypertrophy, the stimulus must be applied with sufficient frequency to create a new "environment", as opposed to seemingly random and acute assaults on the mechanical integrity of the tissue. The downside of taking a week of rest every time you load a muscle is that many of the acute responses to training like increased protein synthesis, prostaglandins, IGF-1 levels, and mRNA levels all return to normal in about 36 hours. So, you spend 2 days growing and half a week in a semi-anticatabolic state returning to normal (some people call this recovery), when research shows us that recovery can take place unabated even if a the muscle is loaded again in 48 hours. So true anabolism from loading only lasts 2 days at best once the load is removed. The rest of the time you are simply balancing nitrogen retention without adding to it.
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I think everyone here has grown from doing the basic 5 day split. But, if I compare doing 15-20 sets per day once a week to what I'm doing now, the word optimal once again comes to mind. To be honest, when I'd do a muscle on Monday (example chest), I'd feel good to go by Thursday, sometimes Friday the lastest.
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Now, it's been a few years since I've been a member here, and I've STILL never got an answer to one of my questions:
* Why 7 days rest between muscles being worked? Why not 3?.. 12?... How exactly does anyone know specifically WHEN to time there workouts to the Supercompensation Wave?
