Black Finch was built on the concept of healthy, life loving medical professionals who need slim fitted scrubs that show off their physiques.  Team Black Finch wanted to produce scrubs that aren't boxy and accentuates a physically fit individual.  Therefore, this blog is dedicated to gaining or maintaining a healthier lifestyle while look gosh darn good in some evolved scrubs.

We start today’s blog with an assumption.  I’m assuming you are in some way shape or form involved in the medical field.  Whether you’re a nurse, medical doctor, dentist, or veterinarian, I assume you know certain things.  I assume you know all the benefits to cardiovascular exercise and strength and resistance training.  Therefore, I don’t need to spend this time preaching to the choir. In fact, I’m sure you’re lecturing these facts to your patients day in and day out to help their BP, diabetes, cholesterol etc.  Unless you’re a veterinarian, in which case you are limited in your verbal communication to your patient. Outside of Dr. Doolittle of course.

All this being said let's talk about how to find time to practice what we preach.  This is also a good time to place a disclaimer.  This is just general advice from a guy who is a fitness enthusiast.  I have worked in a gym as well as a personal trainer.  By no means am I an expert but I do a ton of research into kinesiology and exercise science.  I have tried so many different work out regiments that I've lost count.  I've done everything from the Keto diet to intermittent fasting.  But let’s face it we all need more exercise and some of us, me included, are in a seated position 80% of the day and get no physical activity unless we purposefully seek it out.  Now, we all can agree we need lead active lives and find time to participate in physical activity three times a week. At the same time as doctors and nurses we have our long shifts, families, and extracurricular activities that we can’t give up. Therefore, I propose 45 min to 1 hr workouts three times week.  Be warned, this article is slightly geared towards men but ladies can use the same advice. Just take out the body parts that you ladies are less interested in and put in more favorable body parts.  The principles still hold true.  Gains are gains, and everyone can be healthier.

Yes, I understand this is nothing revolutionary but I’m talking about effective, regimented, and planned out 45 min workouts, three days per week.  Yet still encourage a flexible schedule that can adapt to your temperamental schedule. Keep reading, it gets better. The only way to truly make gains (in muscle) while not spending a zillion hours in the gym and potentially sacrificing random events that are a must attend, i.e. daughters recital or girlfriends work party, you must ditch the “bro split.”  What’s the BS? Just that, my friend, BS. When you first started lifting weights and getting into the gym to impress girls, you were taught by your cousin or older brother about leg day, chest day, arm day, back day, blah blah blah. It’s become a staple in conventional lifting wisdom to the point where Monday’s are considered International Chest Day.  Disneyland lines form in every gym around the bench press. Bro Splits dictate that you spend an entire lift session doing chest, annihilating every single fiber and then wait an entire week before you work out chest again. Raise your hand if that’s what you do.  Let me mention that I do agree that there are pros to running a bro split type regiment but the sacrifice is time.  Something none of us, in medicine, have extra of.

So what’s wrong with this picture?  To begin, let's discuss how Bro Splits are backed by Bro Science.  Cousins and brothers tell their understudies who in turn tell their friends and so it propagates.  Therefore, if you want to work out your entire body in one week you end up doing 4 or 5 sessions a week but only getting in one workout per body part, putting that body part up on the self, and bringing it back down again next week.  STOP THAT! Seriously, quit it. You’re muscles need more stimulation throughout the week to get optimum gains that are continuous and quality gains.

Hence, I propose the full body sessions, 3 times a week and 45-1 hr each session.  Actual literature supports training each major body part multiple times a week in order to make optimal gains.  The reason being muscles only grow for 1, 2 maybe 3 days (for large muscles) after a workout session. So why put them away when you can keep coming back to them multiple times in a week and make gains in, say, your chest all week, or arms all week.  Keep in mind large muscle groups like your quads or chest can really take a beating due to their ability to push heavier loads, so they do take longer to recover. For parts like those you can do, around, two times a week. Parts like deltoids and arms, you can literally work them out almost everyday if you wanted to, granted you don’t annihilate them.  As the legendary Flex Wheeler suggests, we want to stimulate not annihilate.

Here’s my workout session suggestion.  Each workout, you dedicate 1 to 2 exercises to each bodypart you care to grow.  The ones that are resistant to training, air towards the 2 exercise side. Within the three days, alternate between a heavy day and two light days per each body part.  Don’t get confused and make one day all heavy exercises for all body parts. You’ll end up hating that day. Sprinkle the heavy exercises throughout the 3 days. Thoroughly confused?  That’s understandable, but don’t worry I’ll give a sample split later. Now, because everyday you workout is arm day and chest day and leg day it's ok to shift workouts around in the week to fit your busy schedule.  So let's say you usually workout Mon, Wed, Fri but, darn, Fri night your lady wants date night. Don’t stress out, hit Friday’s workout on Thurs. Since you didn’t annihilate your muscles Weds you can gladly hit a effective workout Thursday.  Finally, if you’re serious about making progress, seeing increases in muscle mass or strength you need to put yourself through a cycle with deload weeks and proper fatigue management. More on deloading and fatigue management later in the article.

You might have questions like “if I’m not insanely sore the next day am I working out the muscle effectively.”  Yes, absolutely, delayed onset muscle soreness is not a goal it’s an unwanted side effect of annihilating a muscle group and it keeps us from training again which holds us back from gains.  You might also ask “but if I’m only doing a couple of exercises at around 3-4 sets per exercise am I getting in enough volume to grow.” Absolutely, if you’re trying to grow your shoulders and you’re doing 2 exercises per workout 3 times a week.  That's 6 exercises x 4 sets which means 24 sets a week. That's crazy high volume! I would suggest not doing that much on your first week and ramping up to something like that by adding 1 set a week to your routine. Again, that gets into having a solid microcycle and mesocycle system. I'll cover that below with my discussion on fatigue management.

Let’s take a look at an example to clear up any confusion.

Chest and shoulder focused routine: (Because who doesn’t love big shoulders and big chests)

Mix and match exercises to your taste but this is just an example.  Then rinse and repeat. You can always add sets to whatever body part you covet more.

After going through the routine illustrated above, you have just gone through what is considered a microcycle.  A microcyle is a workout routine that usually last about 7 days or a week.  So in our microcycle we worked out 3 days in the week.  The next week we would start the cycle over.  However, on the next microcycle we need to increase the workload slightly to increase the taxation and demand on our bodies to renew our bodies response to the stimulus that is working out.  This way we can continue to progress in the gym, either by muscle hypertrophy or by strength.  This will help prevent plateauing.  You can increase your workload in many different ways.  You can increase the weight that you lift, the number of repetitions in a set or increase the number of sets per exercise.  You can also do a combination of all three.  Be careful, to not over due it.  It helps if you make note of what you do each week and how hard it was to do it so that you make intelligent increases.  Pick the exercises and sets that seemed easy in the previous week to make them slightly harder.  Again, don't go to crazy because we have to increase your workload again next week.  

After completing several microcycles you will eventually get to a point where increasing weight, reps, or sets is impractical or impossible.  That would be a good time to stop your current mesocycle.  A mesocycle is considered to be 1-2 months worth of microcycles.  So say you performed 4 microcycles and at the end of the 4th microcycle you were demolished.  That's when you will want to take a deload week or two.  Deloads are utilized for recovery and fatigue management.  Over the last 4 weeks you've built up stress and fatigue both in your muscles and your central nervous system and now you need to hit the reset button.  During your deload period, you have to decrease your workload/volume significantly so that you maintain the gains that you have made but simultaneously resting sore and overworked muscles.  It can be as simple as taking the workload you did in week 4 and halving it.  It can be more complicated than that but for our purposes that will suffice.  Deloads also serve another purpose as fore mentioned.  It serves as a reset button and it desensitizes your body to high volumes and high workloads so that when you start a new mesocycle your can start at a low volume again but still make gains.  This is key to continuous progress in the gym.  Moreover, deloads help you keep gym time intense and motivating because by the end of deloads you'll be itching to workout again. Without them, you end up on an infinite chase for more volume and high workloads and eventually working out is not only a chore but dangerous.

So in summary you can make amazing gains even with the most intense work schedules.  Whether you are a ER doctor always on call or in my case a dentist who works 50 hrs a week, has a 2 y.o. daughter, and owns his own scrub company, you can manage to look pretty darn good and lead a healthy/active life.  Give it a try, let me know how it goes and if you want further information straight from the source look up Dr. Mike Israetel and Eric Helms.  Leave a comment below and share this post with a friend who needs to find the time to hit the gym. Also let me know if there are subjects about fitness, life-balance, modern medical professionals you’d like to read about.