Transcription
What is up guys? Welcome back to the education series on YouTube. Did you fall for the slightly click-baity title? Um, if you did, sorry, no sorry—uh, it's funny because, for those of you that haven't watched the first two videos, if you check back, video one, there's me hopping on saying that there is no best training split, and there is absolutely no best training split. But, however, what we're going to cover today, probably most likely, is the best training split for a large majority of people, and it's also going to be the training split that I would hazard to guess that the majority of you haven't tried, and that's full body training.
I understand, for a multitude of reasons, why you may not have tried it. I believe it to be the hardest style of training; it's quite demanding mentally, it's quite demanding physically. There's no arm day, there's no fun day, there's not even a push day—even a push day for me is like, that's an easy day. Um, even a pull day, really, although I, I enjoy training equally, so even for me, leg day's like, yeah [ __ ] bring it. Um, are you meant to swear in the first few minutes of a YouTube video? Apparently, you are. I don't know, I think I just swore in the first three minutes, so um, I understand my full body, for some people, is, is not going to be the one, but I am going to explain now why you really should give this training split a go, and then you can make that decision for yourself if, right now, in this period of time, it is the best training split for you.
But before we get stuck into that, something that's important for me to do, that we very, very rarely see when people do these kind of content videos, is actually just taking a moment to thank those that allowed them to have the educational content that they, that they do have. Because everyone learns from somewhere, that doesn't it? It doesn't just happen that you come to these ideas. But sadly, we very rarely see people give others credit for what they've learned, and I always wonder why that is. Um, because, to me, giving credit is a strength. I think it, it shows that you are able to say, hey, firstly, I don't know it all—because if anyone has that perspective, quite frankly, they're an idiot—and secondly, it shows that, that you're very aware that without those people, you wouldn't be where you are. And I think that's really, really very important, and I would say it's the single most important thing that we do not see in the industry today. And there are, there are two people, first and foremost. So this isn't going to be some big long thank you, but it's important for me to do this because I know, for a fact, that without these individuals, I wouldn't be sitting here, um, on this content box giving you the information.
Um, Dante Trudell, firstly, I, I started reading Dante's work when I was 16, 17. I was obsessed with it; I still am. Um, Dante, to me, is, is the GOAT of training methodology. I believe that he was so far ahead in his thinking, and the information that he was able to put across was so phenomenal that it changed bodybuilding. Um, I was entirely obsessed with this content; I still am. Um, and he's one of the very few human beings that, when he speaks, whatever he has to say on any topic, I'm just going to listen and just absorb and just take a moment to, to consider his opinions on things. Um, so for those of you that aren't familiar with Dante, which, which could be some of you, I would advise heading over to intensemuscle.com and finding all of the content that you can find under the username dog crap—that's Dante's uh, handle at the time—and read all of it, just all of it. When I was on that forum, I never used to post; I just used to read, read, and read, and read, and read, and read. And then the second person that I would say taught me—I have, whenever I'm asked, I would say this person taught me everything I know when it comes to bodybuilding physiology—and that's Dr. Scott Simison, um, who I was fortunate enough to have as a coach for a very long time, and also I'm extremely fortunate to, to call a friend. Um, ah, and again, a fantastic individual that, um, that really further advanced our understanding of bodybuilding. And between the two of them, I utilize all of their training methodologies, and I took what I felt was incredibly useful for me, and then I applied it to kind of my own processes, and then formulated my own opinions, which is now what I'm putting, putting forward to you guys. And then that's one of the things that I'm encouraging you to do—to take what is useful, because I don't agree with everything Dante says; there are some aspects that I just don't like, and I don't agree with everything Scott says, so I, but largely I agree with their, their outlooks and their perspectives entirely, but there were just little bits here and there, I'm like, okay, we're through, like my own training and, and coaching my own clients, that I then came to think, okay, that could maybe be adjusted. Um, and that's what I'm encouraging you guys to do.
So that was an important thank you, and what I, in doing that, what I encourage you guys to do is to have the kind of the, the respect for those that you learn from, to consistently kind of pass that praise forward. I think it's important, um, because what I would love, in 20 years' time, is Dante and Scott to still be recognized as individuals that have made that difference, because I know without them my content wouldn't have come about, and hopefully I can make a dent in people's kind of knowledge in the same way that they were able to. So it will start somewhere, and they will have individuals that they will kind of thank and acknowledge too. Um, I actually don't know who they are, because those two were such incredible thinkers, um, that, uh, I think that they were, they were pretty ahead of the curve.
So right, that's out of the way. Hopefully you haven't clicked off the video because, um, we're going to get into the important part. So, the best training split ever? Question mark. It's a good question. Full body training. Why could this be the best training ever? So I talked about it in the previous video that, when we think about the opportunities that we create for hypertrophy, that when we train in an every-other-day fashion, we create a stimulus that we recover from and we grow, that we then set up seven opportunities for growth over a two-week period. I've said that's because three and a half opportunities for growth a week just sounds weird, so seven opportunities over a two-week period. So when we actually equate that to a year, I did work it out this time, it's 182 opportunities for growth. If we train a split body part, are we going to train once a week? That's 52 opportunities for growth at the end of the year. If an individual has done something 182 times versus 52 times, I believe the difference is going to be stark. I used that word in the last video; I, I think that that's an appropriate description. I think it's going to be very, very apparent. And for that reason, and that reason alone, I want this to be a training split that you consider and try, because if you do, I can guarantee that, in six months' time, and you stick to it in the kind of the manner that we're going to outline in this video, you will have made—especially if you've been kind of fluffing around with your splits and whatnot—you will have made more progress in six months than you probably have done in the last two years. That I can assure you. And that's been consistent feedback from those that have kind of been a little bit lost with their programming, when they've kind of got stuck into the full body idea, they've then stepped forward unbelievably. So that's, that's what I, that's what I really want you guys to do, because it, it hurts my soul when I see people a little bit lost and confused because they're potentially following the wrong advice, in the sense that they're, they're looking at what the pros do, and they're trying to emulate that, whereas it's just not applicable whatsoever, because you're leaving so much progress on the table. We want 182 opportunities of growth per year, so how do we make that happen?
Um, through lots of trial and error, uh, testing out different volumes and combinations of rep ranges, I settled on just the idea that, for each exercise that we do, we only do one working set—that is it—which is going to seem really low. However, what's important that you guys do in this process is that you logbook your training. So the set that you take to failure, you write down the exact weight and reps that you do. When you come to repeat that exercise, prior to the session, I want you to look at your logbook and look at the weight and the reps that you did, and before you go into this session, you're going to know that you're going to beat that in some fashion. You're either going to add a very small amount of weight, or you're going to increase it by a rep, or you're going to do both. And in the beginning phases—when I say beginning, for the first six months of this—that's going to occur session on session without fail, provided that you focus on your recovery, your recovery needs appropriately, and we touched on that a little bit before as well. So that's just been consistent with your sleep, consistent with your hydration, consistent with your minerals, managing your stress levels, and eating appropriately. Focus on those things, logbook your sessions, and progress your lifts. If you can do that, the progress is going to be unbelievable, and you're going to not waste any time, to the point where, in six months, everyone is going to be saying to you, holy [ __ ], like, what are you doing? Like, and they're going to want to then jump on board with what you're doing.
So how do we set this up? Grab a pen and paper as well, by the way, guys. So day one, we're going to do heavy upper body and light lower body. Now the reason why I favor that approach is that, as we move from session to session, undulating the rep ranges in that way, so heavy and light, I feel like creates a greater amount of longevity for progression because we're not just sticking in one rep range all the time, and, um, I believe that undulation of rep ranges just allows you to then stretch out the effectiveness of this training program. So we're going to do heavy upper body, light lower body. How does that look? We're going to pick one chest-focused movement; we're then going to pick one shoulder-focused movement, one tricep-focused movement—these are all compound movements, by the way—we're then going to pick one lat-bias movement, one upper back thickness-focused movement, and then we're going to add one side delt isolation movement, which is, is one that I pull in and out of this bit, and I'll explain why, pronouncing, and then one bicep isolation and one tricep isolation. After that, we then do one hamstring curl, one quad compound, one leg extension or quad isolation, and then one calf raise. That is it. It's going to seem like extremely low volume, and for a lot of you, you're not going to understand how the volume can be so low, but I'm telling you now that, when you aren't advanced, you do not need much stimulus to make progress; all you need to do is consistently expose yourself to new loads at new reps. It doesn't have to be multiple sets. This is key. The current literature about minimum volume requirements per week for training is absolute junk; it is useless literature, like, and please take this from someone that isn't just a meathead, because yes, I'm a meathead, but equally I have an undergrad in sports science from the best sports science university in the world, which is Loughborough University, and a masters in exercise physiology from Manchester University. So understand the science as well, and I'm telling you now that the volume literature is garbage. And the reason for that is because it entirely disregards the idea of someone that trains hard consistently, because if you are able to consistently progress your logbook over a period of time, you're going to expose yourself to loads that you have never done before at reps you've never done before, consistently over a six-month, year period. And every single time you expose your body to that novel stimulus, there will be an equal and opposite reaction in regards to muscular hypertrophy—that is fact. So with that in mind, we don't need multiple sets; all we need is a novel stimulus. So please, please understand that the novel stimulus is key. How do we hold ourselves accountable to the novel stimulus? We logbook our gym sessions, and then before going into that gym session, we look at our logbook and we say to ourselves, okay, that's what I've got to do today. And that's the hard part, because over six months you're all of a sudden going to look at your logbook and you're going to think, [ __ ], but the moment you do that, yes, good, I loved that moment, because I knew that I am then getting into sessions that really changed my physique, because I could look at it and think, holy [ __ ], I've got to do that leg press today, and I've got to do that chest press today, and that shoulder press—holy smokes, this session is going to be hard. And I assure you that, when you are in that spot, these sessions are going to be so physically demanding that you're not going to want to do more than one set per body part.
Now the important thing again to focus on, before we get into more specifics of the session, is the standardization aspect of your logbooking. So yes, we're focusing on new weight for new reps, but that cannot ever be at the sake of altering your form. Again, I can't stress that enough, guys. We aren't just trying to increase our logbook for the sake of being able to write a new number in it; what we're trying to create is a constant novel stimulus. So that means that the weight on the bar creates a new internal stimulus; so the external stimulus creates a new internal stimulus; they have to constantly equate, which means there can never be an altering of your form, which means standardization is key. So between session to session, and essentially rep to rep, every single one must look the same, and you must hold yourself accountable to that. It is not a win in terms of your log work if you alter your form. Let me repeat that: it is not a win; you have not successfully nailed that training session if you come away from altering your form. A win is one more rep or a slight increase in weight, even if it's just a 0.5 kg, one-pound increase with standardized form—job done, great set, tick off on to the next. How does the training, how does the training split look? We're going to run through it quickly, uh, through pieces that we have in the gym. So for my chest movement, I would pick a prime incline; for my shoulder movement, I would pick a high incline Smith or a high incline dumbbell press; for my tricep movement, I would pick a dip or a narrow Smith press; for my shoulder isolation movement, I would pick a cable lateral raise; then for my tricep isolation, I'd pick a single-armed tricep push-down; and then for my bicep isolation, I pick a cable curl. And for my leg work, I pick a seated hamstring curl; for my quad compound, I'd pick a leg press; then I would put a leg extension for my quad isolation; and then I finish with the, a standing calf raise. After that, I would then pick a cable ab crunch. So jot all those down. The upper body work, all in the six-to-ten rep range; the arm stuff, you can increase the rep range on that slightly—maybe we could just go eight to twelve; we don't need to be doing citrap online, just from an elbow joint health perspective—and then for the leg work, the lower body work, I want you to focus on working in a 15-to-25 rep range. Every aspect is that. So we, we wash out our upper body work, and then we move on to our lower body work. Warming up is important—that your body is extremely ready to do the work, but you do not waste energy. So how does that look? Let's say that, for our 10-rep chest press movement, I can do—we just say, just for ease—I can do five plates aside on the movement. So I'm going to hop on, and I'm going to do just one plate for 10, 12 reps. I'm then going to do—depending on how I feel that day—let's say this is a day where I feel a bit tight and a bit, a bit at risk—and then I'm going to do one and a half plates; I'm going to jump by half a plate, and I'm going to do six or seven reps; then I'm going to do two plates, and we'll do four or five reps; then I'm going to do two and a half plates and do two or three reps; then I'm going to do three plates and again just two or three reps; three and a half plates, one or two reps; four plates, one or two reps; four and a half plates, one rep. I have warmed up now. Lots—the total amount of warm-up repetitions I've done is a lot more than enough, but I have wasted absolutely no energy, and I've taken 90 seconds to two minutes, and probably 90 seconds between warm-up sets. Don't rush that part because you're going to create too much fatigue. Then five plates, ten reps to failure—that's my first work set. Now, because I've done all of that pressing movement, I'm now extremely warm for what would be my Smith press. So the amount of warm-ups I need to do on that are now a lot less. So let's say, for my high incline Smith, I do three plates aside for 10 reps; again, I would do one, I would do one plate, and I would probably just do three or four reps; I would then go straight to two plates and just do one or two reps; and then I'd probably then just do two and a half plates, and I'd just do a rep. So I haven't done three warm-ups on that one; I'm ready to work again. Now we move on to the dip. For the dip, I might only need two warm-up sets, because again, everything I've done so far has fully prepared me that I then don't need to waste much time or energy. So let's say, for my dip, I'm going to dip with two plates hanging off me for the chain with the belt for 10 reps; um, I'm going to do body weight for just three or four reps and be like, yeah, everything feels great because I've done a ton of warm-up; I've done a couple of sets to failure; I'm ready to rock; I'm then just going to do a plate for again just one or two reps; yeah, everything feels good; I'm in the groove; let's work. So I've only done two warm-ups for that one. When it comes into the lateral raise, I'd probably do one warm-up set; uh, I probably literally just do three or four reps on maybe one or two pins down from what I'm about to work on; and also the same for the tricep and the bicep movements; um, like, again, it would just be one or two warm-up sets. For the back work, I'm probably going to start again with my warm-ups, um, because yes, and very, very warm, but I haven't then specifically contracted those muscles. So for the lat-focused one, I'm probably going to do the same amount of warm-ups as I did for my chest work; I'm probably going to do maybe five or six warm-ups and just creeping up as I go; but then for my back thickness, I'm probably only going to do two or three warm-ups because it feels very good and I'm ready to rock. So just bear that in mind with your, with your warm-ups. So again, just to recap how that, how that upper body day looks: so we go chest move, shoulder move, tricep move, lateral raise move; then where you put your arm work is going to be a bit personal-dependent, but I quite often like then going lat move, back thickness move, then coming back to a tricep move, then a bicep move, and then moving on to my leg work—that's kind of one of my favorite ways to do things—but you can equally put your triceps before your back work and your biceps at the end before going to your legs. Anyway, and then when you do the next training session, I want you to flip the order which you do things in, that you will now do heavy lower body and light upper body. So the rep ranges are six to ten, we can say for the heavy work, and we can do 15 to 25 for the light. So we're going to do heavy upper, light lower on a Monday, and then we're going to do heavy lower, light upper on a Wednesday, and then on the Friday we're going to flip it back around again. I want you to pick entirely different exercises on the Wednesday that you did on the Monday, and then again I want you to pick entirely different exercises again on the next session that starts heavy upper, light lower, and then again entirely different. So we've got four entirely different training sessions, so you've got full body A, B, C, and D, or one, two, three, and four, whatever you want to call it. Once you've completed all four sessions, that's when you go back to session one, and you beat your logbook numbers for that exercise. I guarantee, without a shadow of a doubt, that you will progress your lifts. If, for some reason, you don't, you haven't efficiently focused on the things that influence recovery. If you don't focus on those things, even with the most optimally thought-out training like we've kind of just gone through, you will not make progress. They are very, very, very, very important. Focus on those. As you get further along, your ability to make progress narrows, which means then your flexibility in terms of errors with your recovery factors becomes even narrower. Again, as a beginner, you could probably eat pretty poorly, sleep fairly averagely, etc., and still make progress, but for some of you, you will need to be accurate from the word go. Again, there is inter-individuality to that; some people are freaks and they're just going to make progress because they're naturally more athletic, they're naturally more robust. For others, you're going to have to be very accurate—suck it up, that's just the way it is.
Now I went back through some of my old content when I made these videos previously, and I just kind of skimmed over some of the questions I was consistently asked, and I thought I'd cover some of those now. One of the common questions was, how do I know if this split is suitable for me? In 2016, I did a variation of this training, um, and it was under Dr. Scott Simison's coaching, and it was called Fortitude Training, but it is full body training. I trained, I trained full body three times a week, um, and that was a very advanced stage of my own personal bodybuilding. I competed that year at 248 pounds. We can put a picture here or here, I don't know, at some point, for that, um, and there's 248 pounds at five foot six, so my level of development there was pretty high. I was able to make progress the whole way through that year; that was a six-month prep on that training split; it worked perfectly. I wanted to go back to that split to then further allow myself to understand that training; despite being an advanced trainee, I didn't care whether it was right or wrong going into it; I just wanted to learn, and it was a really important year for me, and I learned a lot about training by exposing myself to it. I've trained full body before when I was 16, 17, when I was playing rugby, and it was under, um, the supervision of strength and conditioning coaches, because that was just the most efficient way for us to train; we trained full body or we trained upper-lower splits, so it was very used to that way of training, but it was also extremely small when I was 16, 17, and the specificity wasn't for building muscle, it was for just increasing strength and responsive power. But nonetheless, I thought if I'm going to learn, really learn, I'm going to do full body training, because if I don't expose myself to it at this level of musculature, how can I then do these content videos? If I didn't do that training for six months, how could…
I then talk about it with any real understanding, and that I believe if you take your training seriously, and if you’re a coach, is a very, very good reason to consider this split. What where I would kind of potentially rule some guys out is because you don’t have to be as obsessed with the learning aspect as I was. Um, for me, the learning part was, was the, was again, it was everything to me because I just wanted to understand every component of training as I possibly could because I didn’t want there to be any gaps where I couldn’t answer a question that was training related. Um, so for a very long time, it was just a pure obsession of mine.
For some of you, you might not have that level of obsession, which is totally fine. Um, and if you already have a really advanced level of musculature and you need quite a lot of detailed, focused work, this is where I wouldn’t advise trying to revisit that full-body training. Um, it’s just not going to be necessary for you, and in that instance, you will regress. But for that, I’m talking really, really high-level guys and girls; ones that are already pros; they already understand their own training needs. That’s the difference. For a lot of you watching this, you aren’t going to understand your own training needs. If you even have the question in your head, “I don’t know what the best way for me to train is,” I’m telling you now that you need to do this split. Okay, and that’s going to be probably 90% of you watching this content; you aren’t going to have that certainty because you haven’t explored all those things in your mind yet to reach that level of musculature. Try this split; you will be very, very pleased that you did, and this could very well be the best split for you. But equally, if it’s not, you’ve then understood the recovery requirements for the split, and it’s going to allow you then, as a coach or someone that offers further advice—which for a large majority of us now, we’re all doing some kind of coaching to some extent; I think every bodybuilder that does bodybuilding is coaching someone else at some point—so then you’re going to gather knowledge and information that then allows you to share, which is a good thing.
Try this bit, guys. This is, this is a very, very useful way for you to make training progressions. I think I covered everything in terms of questions there that you might possibly ask. If I missed anything, please ask me specific questions to this topic. Like one of the things that’s popping up a lot in the comments section is, um, “what do you think about such and such,” and that’s probably going to be something that I cover in five or six videos’ time, and it’s entirely unrelated to this topic. Keep it narrowed down on this topic, and then you’re going to help yourself a lot more if you can think of relevant questions for this. And then if you get stuck into this training and you get a certain period through, and then you have a question, come back and comment on it. I’ll be in the comments non-stop, and I’ll make sure that everything is, is covered appropriately, and that you guys are not left in the dark when you have questions. Because I’m not just going to put out a split like this and then not follow up and make sure that anyone that is using it doesn’t have the appropriate help. It’s like I said to you guys, this is essentially a paid service that we are doing for free, so if you need help, you’re going to get it.
I hope this was helpful. Um, as always, all that jazz; like, comment, subscribe; whatever else notifications you’ve got to do, turn them on, and yeah, we’ll keep these coming, guys. Cheers