My hand shot up immediately. Which probably shocked no one more than me.
But I could see that it took my first grade teacher, Ms. McLean, by surprise as well.
At 6 years old my main goal was to avoid attention. I was painfully shy. More comfortable spending time alone in my room or hiding behind my Mom on elevator rides than I was drawing any type of attention to myself.
So I could understand why Ms. McLean, with her short, salt and pepper hair, was somewhat shocked to see my hand thrust above my head. Plus I was scared of Ms. McLean and she knew it.
She put down her piece of chalk and immediately acknowledged me.
“Yes, Danny. What do you need?”
“I’ve got an eraser stuck up my nose,” I replied somewhat freely given the circumstances and my typical resistance to communicate. But I was, perhaps understandably, in a bit of a panic that the pink end of my trusty number two pencil was lodged into one nostril. And I had no idea how to get it out.
She called me to the front of the room for a quick look and an even quicker recommendation that I head directly to the nurses office.
But the nurse wasn’t much more of a help. She examined my predicament, attempted a few half-hearted attempts for extraction and determined that what I required was medical attention.
“They may need to take a needle and pull it out,” which, even if true, is not something you should tell a nervous first grader.
To make the problem even worse, my mother wasn’t home. So they called my grandmother, Ami, who lived equally close to the school to come get me.
As I shamefully walked with her towards her two-tone Chevy Malibu, Ami asked what they tried to get the eraser out?
I wordlessly shrugged.
Ami was from what most people would call “The Old Country” having been born in Hungary in the early part of the last century. And, given this, she often had unusual homeopathic remedies for nearly every potential problem.
Got hit in the eye? Put a warm tea bag on it.
Have an infection on your toe? Soak it in a mixture of vinegar and tomatoes.
Ami took a breath and sized up my situation. She pressed her finger on the outside of my opposite nostril.
“Danny, blow out of your nose as hard as you can.”
Without thinking I followed her orders and within one second the pink eraser showed itself on the gray sidewalk below.
We got in the car and went straight to her house where she fed me Hungarian-style crepes covered in cinnamon and sugar.
It’s amazing what solutions you can come up with when you take a different perspective and this is as true with it comes to the medical “emergency” of a little boy as it does with strength training.
I’ve been speaking to a lot of people on the phone lately - particularly ones who work with personal trainers - who are very attached to a style of training most commonly called “body part splits”.
This is simply a technique where you choose one large or one large and one small muscle group (for example, back and biceps or quads) and just focus on training only those groups for the entire workout.
And there is good reason that this style of training is often utilized.
For one, it’s been around for a long time.
Secondly, it’s remarkably effective.
But, for most people I talk to, I recommend they try something different.
“But why, oh bald sage of strength,” you may be asking yourself. “You love things that are effective and have stood the test of time. Why would you not recommend body part split training.”
This is a great observation and I’m glad you are paying attention. Allow me to explain.
Body part splits are really great if you a) are looking to really add muscle mass to specific body parts and 2) you can train with high frequency - like 5 or 6 times per week.
Because you are going to need to train that often, in most cases, to hit muscle groups frequently enough to get adequate adaptations.
Which is why so many trainers program this way.
“But that doesn’t make sense, my follically challenged guru!”
Again, great observation by you. I’m going to let you in on a dirty industry secret. Most trainers don’t enjoy or want to spend time on programming. So they often will simply program for you the way they program for themselves.
And since most fitness pros are in the gym six to seven days per week and typically have time between clients to train themselves on the daily, body part splits make perfect sense for them.
But, unfortunately, that doesn’t really work for most people. In fact, most people are struggling to get two to three strength workouts in per week.
Which is why I almost always recommend total body training.
Total body has several advantages if your training time is somewhat limited.
Firstly, it allows you to hit muscle groups multiple times per week. Which, research has shown, can be better for muscle growth than less frequent training even with equal volume.
Secondly, it allows you to focus more on compound movements (these are more complex, multi-joint movements such as squats and bench press) as opposed to single joint movements such as biceps curls or calf raises.
And compound movements tend to increase overall strength and muscle mass when compared to single joint exercises.
The metabolic demand of total body workouts tends to be greater which is very helpful for weight and fat management.
Total body workouts tend to lend themselves better to athletic development. So if you are looking for in-gym training to enhance your running or tennis game, total body is a good choice.
And, lastly, focus and effort can be higher for each exercise in a total body routine because you just haven’t accumulated as much fatigue in one muscle group by the end of any workout. Thirty minutes into a chest workout and your chest is smoked and you find yourself hanging on for dear life trying to get through your cable flys and sets of 20 on the pec deck.
There are definitely times where body part splits make sense. If you only care about growing your arms or your glutes or another specific body part it can be very effective. If you want to train for competitive bodybuilding body part splits are absolutely the industry standard (they are often called bodybuilder splits as well). And if you want to strength train 5-7 times per week, hitting total body that many times might just be too demanding. Like I said, the metabolic demand of total body is just so high that it would be tough to recover from with that frequency.
But for most people who are balancing regular jobs and families and want to get the most out of their two to four hours in the gym each week, total body is going to be what I recommend almost every single time.
My other core (and far less embarrassing) memory from Ms. McLean’s class were something called “Gold Star Dittos”. A “ditto” for those of you under 40, were what we called photocopies prior to the popularity and proliferation of copy machines.
Gold Star Dittos were just coloring assignments. And if you met the subjective nature of the assignment to Ms. McLean’s standard (staying in the lines? Color choice?), she gave you a gold star.
And this has absolutely nothing to do with total body training, but I so vividly remember after many weeks of no gold star getting my first one and so proudly showing it to my Mom in the parking lot of that school. A six year old trying to prove his worth.
And my Mom showed remarkable enthusiasm for my accomplishment.
"That's so great, Danny," she exclaimed.
But looking back on it she, like all good Moms, likely assessed my actual value with an entirely different perspective.