Why Bodybuilding Splits Are Failing You in Your 40s (And What to Do Instead)

Why Bodybuilding Splits Are Failing You in Your 40s (And What to Do Instead)

If you’re in your 40s, still training hard, but feeling weaker, stiffer, or more injury-prone than you should be… this episode is for you.

In this solo podcast, I break down why traditional bodybuilding splits stop working as you get older, and why so many fit, driven men end up stuck in a cycle of soreness, stop-start training, and recurring injuries.

This isn’t about motivation.
It’s about training structure.

You’ll learn:

Why training a muscle once a week isn’t enough to drive real strength or resilience

How excessive fatigue is killing your progress, not accelerating it

Why full-body training is far more effective for men in their 40s

The three questions every training session must answer if you want to keep improving

A real client example showing how less fatigue led to more strength

I work with men who still train, still care, and still want to perform — but don’t fully trust their body anymore. Ex-athletes. Busy professionals. Dads who refuse to accept “athletic decline” as inevitable.

If your training feels like it should be working better than it is, this episode will help you understand why — and what to change.

🎯 Want help structuring your training properly?

I offer a free 20–30 minute training audit where we:

Review your current training

Identify what’s holding your progress back

Build a clear plan you can actually recover from

👉 Book your call here: https://calendly.com/razorperformance/30min

🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on:

Training in your 40s and 50s

Injury-free strength and performance

Rebuilding confidence in your body

Smarter programming for busy, driven men

What is The Razor Performance Podcast?

Hosted by Andy Reay, former professional rugby player and strength and conditioning coach, this show gets straight into what really matters for long-term performance: staying injury-free, building serious strength, and competing at any age. You’ll hear the methods, principles, and beliefs behind Razor Performance, shaped by years of coaching driven, time-poor and often injury prone men, back to their best. If you want to know how to rebuild confidence in your body, stay injury free and strong, and know what actually works, this is your new weekly listen.

Andy: 00:00

Welcome to episode six of the Raised Performance Podcast. This podcast is for men in their 40s and 50s who still train hard. They still really want to achieve something, but they just don't fully trust their body anymore. Men with a long injury history, who feel like something's always just about to go when they ramp up the intensity. And my job is to rebuild unbreakable confidence back in your body.

Andy: 00:26

I want people to be able to train pain free again. And then I wanna redefine what performance looks like in your forties and beyond. Now, today we're gonna be talking about one of the biggest problems I see from a programming perspective, and it is why bodybuilding splits are failing you in your forties. Now, before we start, when you think of a program, there's three questions you wanna think about and answer before you start. Number one, is this what I actually need right now?

Andy: 00:59

Is it solving a weakness? Is it solving an injury? Is it solving some sort of limitation? Or is it just something I enjoy doing? Am I doing it enough to get me strong and to make a difference?

Andy: 01:12

K? So, usually, training a body part once a week just isn't quite enough. And then thirdly, can I recover enough from it to improve? K? Now, if your recovery is poor, which it normally is when you've got kids, you've got a busy life, then you need to be able to do enough in the gym to create a stimulus, but then you need to be able to recover enough to make progress.

Andy: 01:41

And that's where I see such a lot of people going wrong. So, obviously, bodybuilding splits will fail you on at least two of those questions. Okay? So is it what you need right now? That was our first question.

Andy: 01:55

Well, do you wanna be a bodybuilder? Probably not. Do you wanna look like a bodybuilder? Probably not. Do you wanna move like a bodybuilder?

Andy: 02:03

Probably not. So is it what you need right now in order to be functional for life, for your sport and to be a good dad if you've got children? Then probably not. The second question, am I doing it enough to make a difference? Well, probably not if you do a bodybuilding split because how they're usually set up is you will do one body part one day, one body part the next day, one body part the day after or, you know, a mix of those things.

Andy: 02:33

Now, that for me, challenging one body part once a week isn't enough. And then our third question, can I recover enough from it to improve? Well, probably yes. But if you completely smash your legs one day, it's gonna take a lot of time for you to recover. And then even when you've recovered, there's not another stimulus or there's not another challenge to make your legs grow again.

Andy: 03:02

So let's dive a little bit deeper into that. So when we strength train, it causes a stress, it causes a stimulus, and that causes our body to grow. Now that stimulus will last between twenty four and seventy two hours, and after that it fades. So therefore, training a muscle once a week, you will get a huge stimulus, but then after two days or three days, the stimulus wears off and there's no growth for the rest of the week. So you're missing essentially five well, four to five days of the week.

Andy: 03:38

So you have one big spike, you have a very long drop off and that's it. Now, here's what I would suggest as a better option. With all of my clients, I use much more full body training. So we won't cover off all of the body in one session, but we will cover off, we will make sure we hit the legs at least twice a week and we will hit all of the important body parts that we wanna hit at least twice a week, ideally three times a week. But here's the other thing.

Andy: 04:17

If you are to do for example, say in one session you were going to do a set of leg press and one other leg exercise, you would get a stimulus, not a massive, massive stimulus, but you would get a stimulus. You would it would take you a little bit of time to recover. You would recover. You would get better, and then you would use the legs again, and it would be the same process. K?

Andy: 04:42

So in the week, we're getting bits of stimulus, bits of recovery, and then get better. Then we do it again. A bit of a stimulus, not too much recovery, and then we get better. But if you were to do that with a bodybuilding split, you would completely destroy the legs on day one, you would have a huge recovery, which you may not actually get enough recovery, and then you wouldn't hit your legs again until a week later, which just doesn't benefit you at all. So I see lots of people, whenever I ask people what do you do?

Andy: 05:24

What's it look like? It's bodybuilding split. You know, legs, push pull, shoulders and arms or whatever split that might be. Now, I wanted to just give you a bit of an example of a lot of people would be listening to this thinking well, I've always done that, That's always the way I've been told. That's what all of the people on Instagram will tell me.

Andy: 05:46

And that's what I believe is the right way of doing things. So I'm just gonna play you a very, very quick clip of one of my clients who I just spoke to about this. Two clips, in fact. And, essentially, what we're what he's saying is he's been training three times a week. He feels like maybe he's not actually training as hard as he was.

Andy: 06:11

He's eating more, but actually because he's recovering and because he's hitting the body parts a couple of times a week, the strength gains have been completely different to what he was doing before. So if you just hear this out, just bear with me. It'll be two short clips.

Daniel: 06:28

Kind of amazing. I'm really, like, enjoying enjoying I feel like I'm not doing enough. Like, a, I'm only training three times a week. And b, like, in the session, I'm coming out thinking, oh, did I work hard enough? I get to always, like, leave.

Daniel: 06:42

I'm thinking, did I work

Andy: 06:44

hard enough? No. No. You're not you're not alone. And and if I could if I

Daniel: 06:47

could bottle this up and say to people, look. Just Well, actually, it's quite it's quite it's quite amazing. That's why it's kinda nice to follow a program where someone's going, know what I'm doing. I know what I'm talking about. You do what I tell you and you'll be fine.

Andy: 07:03

That's clip one. So he's doing three times a week. He's not working as hard as he was before, but he is seeing unbelievable changes in his strength. And then the second clip, again, and this is really on the recovery point.

Daniel: 07:17

Training now, I'm like I'm thinking I was probably, like, slightly undernourished, slightly overtraining.

Andy: 07:23

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And look. Exactly that, essentially.

Andy: 07:29

Exactly what you just said. And I think because you're undernourished, it's not just the training thing. It's the recovery thing. It's the recovery piece. And I think a lot of the time, what people focus on is almost destroying one muscle group completely.

Andy: 07:42

And it you know, so say you were doing your chest and you did whatever, you know, a whole chest session. Your chest is you just it's fatigue, fatigue, fatigue. It is this much to get back. Do know what I mean? Whereas if you can do it consistently, it's this much to get back, a little bit of growth.

Andy: 07:56

This much to get back, a little bit more. You know? And that's and that's the key. It's kind of amazing.

Daniel: 08:01

I'm really, like, enjoying and I think.

Andy: 08:05

So I hope that makes sense. I know this is a podcast, but what I was saying is if you completely destroy a muscle group, it takes a long time to recover and actually a lot of the times you don't even get to the point where you recover enough to grow. If you hit the muscle group with less of a stimulus and you give yourself a chance to recover and you eat a little bit more surprisingly, you will tend to find that your strength will go up. So why does this matter and how would I suggest you do this? Okay, so I think personally that full body training will reduce injury risk, You will be able to target exactly what you need more times in a week.

Andy: 08:50

It won't completely destroy your joints and your tendons if you have a leg day which absolutely smashes the life out of your legs. I think if you continue to train like this year after year and you'll find that you'll just continually get injured, you probably need to think about, right, is this right? And again, go back to those three questions at the start. Is this what I actually need right now? Am I doing it often enough to make a difference?

Andy: 09:22

Can I recover enough to make an improvement? And if you're using bodybuilding splits, you just won't. So, here's what to do. Have a look at your program. If you're doing a bodybuilding split, have a think about how can I make this much more full body?

Andy: 09:40

So what I tend to do with a lot of my clients is I will have three sessions a week. They will have a full body. They'll have another full body. Now, they will be they will both be different. And then we'll have an upper body section.

Andy: 09:54

Now, within that, we will have a good warm up, we will have some strength work, we will have some injury prevention work, and we will normally have some sort of a bit of fun at the end. But within that, it will be full body and you will be unbelievably surprised, just like my client was, if you could hear that, on how much that changes. So this is what I do inside the Razer Rebuild. Okay? The Razer Rebuild is my program.

Andy: 10:22

It's a structured program around injury, recovery, real life and getting people really strong so they can enjoy their training again. And they can feel good as a 40 to 50 year old and not worry about what should I be doing from someone who is 42 and someone who's done this before, who's trained a lot of people back from injury, and frankly trained myself back from injury. But I really feel I really hope that was helpful. If you're doing bodybuilding splits, I really would recommend having to think about doing something different. If you need help with it, reach out.

Andy: 10:58

There will be links to, how to contact me, on this page. And if you've got any questions, please feel free to reach out. I'm happy to chat to anyone. Hope you enjoyed the podcast.