Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Menno Henselmans on the Benefits of Full-Body Workouts

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

It’s time for another contentious topic, my friends. No, not volume, frequency, or intensity. Today, we’re talking about workout splits. Specifically, full-body training. Full-body and higher-frequency training has become more popular lately. And if you’ve followed my work over the years, you know I haven’t been a big proponent of full-body workouts. In fact, in previous editions of Bigger Leaner Stronger, the workouts had typical “bro-split” names (even though the workouts themselves were more like a Push Pull Legs split with added accessory days). So, it’s not too surprising that I frequently get asked for my thoughts on full-body training versus body part splits and the “best workout split” in general. Well, full-body workouts can definitely work well in certain situations—like when you’re a beginner or when you can only train one or two times per week. But for this episode, I decided to bring in a big proponent of and expert on full-body training, Menno Henselmans. Menno has been a repeat guest on my podcast, but in case you’re not familiar with him, he's a bodybuilding coach, writer, and published scientist who’s also on the Scientific Advisory Board of my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics. In this episode, we chat about … Why you should use a full-body split if you training infrequently The primary benefits of full-body training (optimizing volume and work capacity) How to properly program "supersets" without hurting performance (and actually improve it) How to program an effective full-body routine Saving time in the gym, inter-set rest time, and exercise order considerations Periodization and why you shouldn't change exercises too frequently Situations when full-body routine wouldn’t be the best choice And more … So, if you want to learn all about full-body training and whether you should give it a shot, listen to this episode. 8:03 - What qualifies as a full body workout versus something else? 17:32 - Does full body workouts give you more high quality volume? 19:02 - What is a superset? How would you implement supersets without impairing your performance on the exercises? 28:05 - How do you like to program your full body workouts? 31:04 - Is that your exercise or is there another component to it as well? 32:08 - How do you like to order your exercises? 35:45 - How do you like to periodize this type of training? 40:30 - Do you do your heavier workouts earlier in the week after a rest period? 41:39 - As far as volume, what are you shooting for? --- Mentioned on The Show: Menno Henselman’s Website: https://mennohenselmans.com/ 
Menno Henselman’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/menno.henselmans/ Books by Mike Matthews: http://legionathletics.com/products/books Beyond Bigger Leaner Stronger: https://legionathletics.com/products/books/beyond-bigger-leaner-stronger/ --- Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: www.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hello, hello, and welcome to a brand new episode of Muscle for Life. I'm your host, Mike Matthews. Thank you for taking the time to listen to today's interview with Menno Henselmans on full body training. And this is something that I have been getting asked about more and more, especially over the last six months or so, as full body training has become the split du jour. So back in 2012, when I first published Bigger Leaner Stronger, the first edition, bro splits, body part splits, were the most popular way to lift weights. That's how most everyday gym goers thought about weightlifting. And the program, BLS 1.0, was a body part split of sorts. It was more like a push-pull legs with a couple of body

part days on top of it. So it was a push day, a pull day, a legs day, and an arms day and a shoulders day, right? So it's kind of a hybrid between PPL and the body part of the traditional bodybuilder body parts split. Fast forward to today, BLS 3.0, and the program is similar to 1.0, although it is now, let's say, push-pull legs with some upper and lower mixed in. So I would say it's more of a hybrid now between PPL and upper lower. And I've spoken about this in previous episodes and I've written about it as well, that the split that you are following isn't nearly as important as what you are doing in the gym, particularly in terms of volume. So number of hard sets per major muscle per week. And frequency matters to a degree as well. It's

mostly a tool for volume. It's mostly a way to make sure that you are getting in enough volume. And then of course you have intensity, making sure that you are lifting heavy enough weights. So anything over 60 to 65% of one rep max is where it starts to get fun and it starts to get effective. And you can go all the way up to 95% or even 100% of one rep max, depending on what you're doing. That said, when you program your training properly, it is going to resemble one type of split more than another. So you might take an upper lower base and add a full body day. So you might have upper, lower, upper, and then do a full body workout. And then you might do a body part workout. Maybe your arms really need some work.

So you have your final day of your fifth day of the week, an arms day, or you might start with a push pull legs base and add an upper body day in addition to it, or a lower body day in addition to it, or a full body day or two full body days and so forth. And all of that can work just fine in terms of bottom line results. You might prefer one setup over another for mostly subjective reasons, but anyone who knows how to program effectively would agree that you don't have to stick to just one type of split. You can create a mashup that gives you the volume that you want for each major muscle group and allows for the exercise selection you want and allows you to

prioritize the muscle groups you want to prioritize in your training and so forth. And today's guest would agree with that. However, when does it make sense to mostly do full body training or even exclusively do full body training? So where every workout is a full body workout? Well, that in particular is what I talk with Menno about in this episode. And in case you're not familiar with Menno, he is a repeat guest here on Muscleful Life. I've had him on several times and he's one of the more requested guests that I get for repeat interviews. But in case you are not familiar with Menno, he is a bodybuilding coach, writer, and published scientist who is also on the scientific advisory board of my sports nutrition company, Legion. And in this episode, we discuss quite a few aspects of full

body training. You'll hear from Menno on why he thinks you should use a full body split if you train infrequently. He goes over the primary benefits of full body training as they relate to volume and work capacity in particular. He talks about how he likes to properly program supersets. And I put those in air quotes because as you will hear in this episode, they're not, he doesn't do it the way that many people do it. And by doing it his way, it allows you to get your workouts done faster without hurting your performance on the different exercises that you got to get done. Menno also shares his thoughts on how to best program a full body routine and more. So if you are currently doing full body training

or if you have been considering it or if you would just like to hear about what it may be able to do for you, then this episode's for you. Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best-selling

weightlifting books for men and women in the world bigger leaner stronger and thinner leaner stronger as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook the shredded chef now these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best body ever and you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes and Noble stores. And I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account.

And this is a great way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning, more interesting prepping, and cleaning more interesting, entertaining, and productive. And so if you want to take Audible up on this offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, just go to www.buylegion.com and sign up for your account. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you want to learn time-proven and evidence-based strategies for losing fat, building muscle, and getting healthy, and strategies that work for anyone and everyone, regardless of age or circumstances, please do consider picking up one of my best-selling books, Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women,

and The Shredded Chef for my favorite fitness-friendly recipes. Hey, Menno. Welcome back to my podcast, man. Thanks for taking the time to do this. Hey, my pleasure. We got great feedback on the last ones, especially the one we did on muscular potential. So happy to be back. Yeah. I heard from quite a few people about that one as well and asking, when are you going to come back? So here we are. Excellent. I heard from quite a few people about that one as well and asking, when are you going to come back? So here we are. Excellent. Let's talk. Yeah, let's do it. Let's talk about full body training, which is something that I spoke briefly about, I want to say a couple of months ago. I do a series of episodes that I call Says You. And basically I ask really just on Instagram, I ask people who follow me to tell me what they disagree with me about. And then I pick some of the things that people say

that I think would just make for interesting discussion. And I turn a few of those points into just kind of like monologues where I address each of them. And one of them was regarding splits and an upper lower versus a full body. And so I shared some of my thoughts regarding full body training as well as some of my personal experience, but it's not something that I've gone into in too much detail. And I know that you have written and spoken a lot about full body training and have more experience with it than I do really. So I thought you'd be a great person to have that discussion with. Yeah. I have a lot of experience with full body training or in general with high frequency training. Yeah, exactly. So I think we could just start with a definition so people understand what

we're talking about here. Like what qualifies as a full body workout or a full body split versus something else? Yeah. I mean, when you talk about full body training, mostly it just refers to literally training every muscle group in the body, every major muscle group that you want to train, you're training it basically every time you're in the gym. And it's good to, to i think talk about training frequency mostly because you know when you say well full body training that can mean you're training twice a week and two of those sessions are full body which i think that most people would agree with that if you train twice a week or even three times a week you should probably do full body because if you do a split

then you're going to hit every muscle group very often only once a week. That is most likely based on almost all the data we have, not going to be optimal once you're past the novice stages. And just to clarify there, I'm curious your take on it, but is that mostly because of the issue with volume where you just need a certain amount of volume after your newbie gains are exhausted to continue gaining muscle and strength. And let's say it's 15 hard sets per major muscle group per week. And you can't do that in one training session because after nine or 10 sets or so, you hit that point of diminishing returns. And so you have to split them up. Yeah. There's basically three reasons why that doesn't work well, neither in theory or in practice. And that's's a there seems to be a

fundamental limit on how much muscle growth or how long you can stimulate muscle protein synthesis like after a session you're going to grow but you're not going to grow for like a month you know you're not going to be able to do if only yeah you can do like 50 sets and then just spend the rest of the month on the couch getting jacked you know so clearly there is a limit to how long you can grow after a single workout and especially based on data muscle protein synthesis and if we reconcile that with like training frequency literature and strength trained individuals that's probably gonna be less than a week more like three days for like advanced individuals for a little bit less advanced individuals and maybe up to a

week or so probably not uh not really more than that and then problem b is uh even if you can grow for that that period it's going to require very high volume and as you already touched on most or there are several lines of research based again on muscle protein synthesis and also in direct training frequency studies that point to there being basically a maximum productive session volume so that's gonna lie it's not very clear where that lies and it depends a bit on whether you regard the the very contentious and um how you say it there have been concerns about the data validity of some of the work of some Brazilian researchers, namely Paulo Gentil and the Bravalho studies.

But depending on how seriously you take those, the limit is probably going to be around 10 sets, roughly, maybe 15. Based on like NPS data, it's probably going to be more like 10 sets. If you exceed that threshold, you're not actually going to stimulate much more extra protein synthesis, it seems. That's basically just the cap. You know like your body gets the hint it wants to grow but there's just a limit on on how much you can stimulate it to grow in one workout you know and then three let's say that volume is all you need so you know maybe you don't need more than

say those 10 sets in your case even if you that, it's quite hard to do 10 productive sets, like actually very productive sets for one muscle group. It's also going to take a lot of time because you need several minutes rest in between all of those. Whereas with full body training, you can train with much shorter rest periods because you can do bench press

and then you can do a set of chin-ups and then you can do a set of squats. You don't need a full five minutes between each of those. But if you do 10 sets like bench press, fly, normal bench press, and then machine, pack fly or whatever, then your work capacity is going to tank pretty hard by the time you get to like over five sets. Really? Do you?

I mean, I would say that I actually, I haven't experienced too much of that personally. And having worked with many, many people over the years, a lot of new people, a lot of people new to proper weightlifting, I would say that my personal experience, my experience working with many others is that a workout of nine or 10 sets is they definitely, they have worked out by the end of it. But even in the case of lower body, it's not too bad. It's not too grueling.

And maybe 10 sets of bench press might be a bit obnoxious for the final few sets. But where you're starting with a compound movement, maybe even heavier weight on the compound, and then you're working maybe in a higher rep range with some accessory exercises toward the end of the workout has seemed to work fairly well. You know, I'm talking about work capacity in the actual objective sense of the words literally work outputs so mentally it's can be uh easier often i mean if you do in general if you like chest workouts that's easy compared to like squats you know like you can do 10 sets of chest and still going to be probably easier than two sets of hard squats so they're basically you know if you're hard training there's basically no such thing as a hard biceps exercise it's something you can do like in your sleep basically so work capacity though in the sense of the physical definition like work output reps times weights times sets that's gonna tank like there's just

basically some women can tolerate high volumes very well that way but your performance is gonna decrease like basically you can say if your performance is not decreasing then you really have to question your training efforts if you've done 10 sets your performance is still the same as it was before those 10 sets then you know you're simply not training hard for a lot of people it doesn't really feel that way if you have multiple exercises because if you always do like chest day and your fly is always your last exercise and you're used to using you know 30 pounds or 40 pounds whatever on, on fly sets of 15. And then, you know, it's going to be maybe 15 reps, 14 reps, 13 reps. Then you think, oh, that looks fine.

The work capacity for that is okay. But now put those flies on a separate day on Friday instead of Monday. And suddenly you see, hey, now I can use, instead of those 40 pounds, I can actually use 50 pounds. So that's a 25% increase in work capacity and total weekly training tonnage lifted just for moving that exercise to a different day with exactly the same effort. So that's what I mean by my work capacity. You're going to do more volume for the same amount of sets, but spread out across the week. Because in essence, training frequency is basically the same effect as a rest interval.

Right. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I guess I was looking at more from the perspective of bottom line results. Like you could take, and I'm sure, I mean, you know this, you've worked with so many people over the years as well. You could take somebody who's new to proper weightlifting and you could put them, not that it's necessarily optimal, but you could put them on a simple body part split where they're doing 10, 9, 10 hard sets for one major muscle group in a workout. And let's say it's chest and then it's back and then it's shoulders and legs and arms. And that person can do quite well for probably the first year or so, I don't know, eight months or a year or so, just simply because they're so hyper responsive. so, I don't know, eight months or a year or so, just simply because they're so hyper responsive. And if you could take a guy and if he can gain his first 20 ish pounds of muscle that way, well, then I would say that you're probably not going to beat that no matter what else you do,

right? You're not going to take that guy and put 30 pounds on them by getting fancy with the programming. Yeah, for sure. There's, there's now a lot of research, I think 12 studies on untrained individuals that look at training frequency. And there are two that find benefits, but 10 that say, you know, it doesn't really matter what your training frequency is. For an untrained individual, at least over the course of the first couple months, you can train once a week, you can train three times a week, which means, you know, you can do like three times full body or just one chest day, and you're going to get basically the same results. For a lot of training variables, in untrained individuals, it's basically the case that you're still so sensitive to anabolic stimuli when you're untrained. There's even some research, for example, that shows that in the first weeks of training, bicycling, some relatively high intensity bicycling, actually also maximizes muscle growth. If you do that over somewhat longer study durations, then strength training

generally wins out. But the first few weeks, you can also see this if you look at molecular signaling studies. The training stimulus of squats and bicycle ergometer workouts are very similar in an untrained individual. The squat is also going to stimulate robust endurance training adaptations, and the bicycle work is actually going to stimulate significant muscle growth. Within a course of a couple of weeks, that difference majorly changes. But the problem is that we don't know how long that discrepancy keeps going and how much more important many of these variables become once you get you know not

not like intermediate but like 10 years of lifting because there we have very little research but if we look specifically at that group interestingly kruter had a study on rugby players the norwegian frequency study norwegian frequency project was in national level powerlifters hakinan from finland i believe has two or three studies on like powerlifters body Hakkinen from Finland, I believe, has two or three studies on powerlifters, bodybuilders, and Olympic weightlifters. There's also one study on female athletes from, I think, that same research group. And they all find significant benefits. So if you look at the highest echelon of training advancement, then the training frequency research becomes a lot more positive. Whereas in untrained individuals, like I said, there is basically a consensus that training frequency really doesn't matter much.

Yeah, that makes sense. And bringing it back to full body then, so would you say that one of the main reasons to do full body training is to get in more high quality volume? Yes, definitely. And so when I started promoting high frequency training, the literature was far more compelling in favor of high frequency training. But now it seems that most of the benefits, if not for beyond when you're training at least twice a week,

most of the benefits, if not all the benefits, comes from your higher total work output. And then some people say, well, it's just that you're doing more work. You can also say that for rest intervals. You can say that for most advanced training techniques, they work because they allow you to do more work. No pun intended. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, that's the mechanism,

but it is a real benefit. And I'd say it's also very practical because like I said, full body workouts can help you take advantage of circuit training and tagging in supersets or just stringing up exercise together, which I call combo sets, which are not strictly doing a superset. You do rest in between, but not as much as you would need between like two sets of bench

presses. So it's very time effective. You can take advantage of many of those techniques. And also in a crowded gym, you can see like, oh, if I can't do this exercise, I'll just do the other one. Whereas if you have to do the bench press before chest flies, then if you have to do chest flies beforehand, that's a bit of a different topic. But pre-exhausting is generally a bad idea.

Let's talk about some of those details just for people wondering. So if you were going to do a superset, although the antagonist paired set is a better term, what do you mean exactly and how would you do that so you're not impairing your performance on either of the exercises? Yeah, an antagonist superset is when you're doing two basically opposite movements back to back. And then performance does not only not decrease, it actually increases because of antagonist inhibition. There seems to be some fatigue in muscles. It basically makes the

muscles with the opposite function perform better because they are less inhibited. So basically, whenever you're flexing your biceps, for example, your triceps also co-contract. So it's also flexing, of course, to a much lesser degree, but it's needed as a stabilizer. And the dynamic between those two muscles determines how much effective force output there is. Now, it appears that some kind of fatigue in, say, the triceps makes your biceps perform better. And it's not because the triceps is just contracting less hard. It's also been looked at. So there's no reduction in antagonist co-activation, to put it formally. The triceps is still doing the same thing.

But there actually seems to be some neuromuscular improvements, which is still debated what the exact mechanism is, in the biceps. So if you do concretely, the order matters here. If you do bench presses, and then immediately after, you do a set of cable rows, which is, if you think about the opposite movement pattern and train sort of the opposite muscles, then your performance on the rows is actually going to improve. And some research even finds that if you do this across multiple sets, then your performance on the bench press might also increase, but it's mainly the second exercise. And it seems that it's slow twitch muscles that you have to do seconds to get the most benefit. Because if you do, interestingly, if you do leg curls and the leg extension straight after, you're going to get a pretty significant benefit.

But if you do leg extensions and then leg curls, the leg curls don't seem to really benefit from that. Interesting. And when you say immediately after, you mean immediately? Not even like a 60-second rest period in between? Let's say it's the bench press and it's the rows? Yeah, 60 seconds actually is all the money. You need to be within 60 seconds to actually get the potentiating effect. The muscle spindles or whatever the exact mechanism is seem to basically be in an altered state for about 60 seconds. about 60 seconds. Now, if you miss that window, it's not the end of the world because you're, you know, you're still going to have the same performance as normal. It won't be impaired,

but you won't get that extra performance. And so when you're doing it, do you like to put some rest in between those exercises just to let your, I don't know, heart rate come down a little bit or do you just go straight into it? Yeah. I mean, in practice with these things, I don't implement them very strictly because unless you own the gym or like one of the only ones there or you know the leg extension and lacro are like right next to each other this is actually one example where the gym that does often that is often quite the case or quite often the case but for most exercises like the bench press and the cable row they can be quite far apart and you may not be able to confiscate both them you know that's what that's what a gym bag is for you one of those people you drop your bag on the yeah

or you just cough these days and then everyone's gone and uh in white margin yeah just you just go and quickly cough on whatever you're going to be using loudly but yeah even i mean if you stop bench you get up, you walk to the cable row, then you put in the weights, maybe someone moved it, you know, that's already... So by the time you've started, yeah. Yeah, then you're probably talking about realistically 30 seconds anyway before you're actually starting the next movement. So if you actually rest in between, then you're probably going to miss the window of actual antagonist potentiation. Makes sense. And, you know, it's interesting.

of actual antagonist potentiation. Makes sense. And, you know, it's interesting. I've used that method of supersetting usually with smaller muscle groups and just to save time, you know, if I'm doing some arm stuff or some shoulder stuff, but I haven't done it. I mean, I did it in the past.

I just haven't done it in a while with bigger muscle groups, but now I'm interested in trying it for the purposes of progressing. Now I understand if you're kind of just doing maintenance workouts and that's a lot of what a lot of us have been doing. Like I don't have a proper home gym setup. I have some Bowflex dumbbells and some bands. And so more than enough for maintenance. But when I was in the gym, not that I don't have much muscle and strength

left to gain really particularly muscle I can get my strength back up to I was getting back up to previous PR levels but beyond that like I was getting to the three four five right three plates on bench four on squat five on deadlift and as far as natural weightlifting goes I talk about that as like that's a good benchmark I think for most guys to strive toward and I had gotten there close to that in the past, and I was getting back to that. And so in those workouts where I was really trying to, I was working pretty hard and I was being very particular with my programming and deloading and everything. I wouldn't have thought to do something like this because in my mind,

it would have been more something that's suitable to again i would call it maintenance training where you're you're pushing yourself and you're working out and but you're not expecting to progress per se but it sounds like i'm probably wrong in that the interesting thing is that it's harder to do your shots this way with antagonist super sets or in general with like combo sets yeah and there's been mean, I used to do the chest back workouts many years ago and it's hard. Yeah. And especially if you're seriously strength trained, you are basically by definition highly advanced because I agree that we're both basically at 90 max. Then there's also research actually showing that perceived exertion increases. And I think almost everyone can attest to this.

When you're new, you're a novice, you can basically bounce from exercise to exercise if you're like really motivated. You don't really fatigue yourself that much because you're weak. And, you know, your body basically, if you get stronger, it doesn't make it easier to lift the weight.

It just allows your body to expend those resources. But it's still just more weight being lifted, which causes greater metabolic disturbance, et cetera. So you also feel more fatigue. And then if you take a highly advanced individual and you have them do, you know, in some studies you see crazy things like Romanian deadlift followed by squats. That's something that basically no advanced individual will actually be able to do because, you know, the level of effort that requires, if you're talking not just maintenance, but

like actual, you know, one rep to failure workouts uh that's just grueling and even if some people can do it something you probably don't do every single training session sorry to interject but like squatting and then deadlifting after you can do it but it's yeah it's hard if you're fairly strong it's hard yeah and also injurious because just the fatigue will impair your concentration your technique you're just a little likely to get sloppier and a little sloppier is fine if you're doing biceps curls but a little sloppier on the deadlift can be the difference between you know back injury and back injuries also not like knee injury where it's just like i'm not going to train quads for a week but it can be debilitating for a long time. But yeah, I think with isolation exercises, this is very doable to implement and also aim for progression for sure. It's

the big compound exercises. You do see that. It's actually funny to think about this because it illustrates one of several scenarios we see in literature where perceived exertion and neuromuscular fatigue differ. So how fatiguing you feel the workout is does not correspond and actually is the complete opposite of what's happening in reality. So if you do an attack in a superset, you feel weaker because you're doing your rows right after your bench press. You're still out of breath. You're still panting, but your performance objectively is better.

And you can achieve that better performance. It's just going to feel really hard. Exactly. It's a bit, um, a bit like I was going to say sleep deprivation, but that's, that's a little bit different,

but it's, uh, it's also a point where acute sleep deprivation makes you, your workouts feel a lot more effortful, but it doesn't actually impair performance. If you think about it, you know, because you haven't slept.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I've experienced that many times. I think if it runs on too many nights, definitely. Yeah. Because it's going to impair because you haven't slept. Yeah. Yeah. No, I've experienced that many times. I think if it runs on too many nights, because it's going to impair your recovery, but that single night. Yeah. That single night we've, I'm sure you've experienced that. I've been a lot of people listening. I'm sure they've experienced that where you go into the gym and you didn't sleep well, you're tired and you think

it's going to be a shit workout. And then it actually turns out to be okay. It's, it's a bit harder, but you hit the lifts you need to hit. And you're like, oh, well, I guess I had it in me. Yeah. Because if you think about it, your muscle tissue is not damaged or fatigued or anything. It's just, it's a mental issue. But when you have that chronically, then your recovery is actually going to be impaired. Then it's going to be a chronic issue for your progression and your gains. your progression and your gains. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best-selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world, Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger, as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef. So then how do you like to

program your full body workouts? What are your rules of thumb in terms of the exercise choices? And so, you know, you were just talking about, okay, you would maybe just to save time, if nothing else, you might do an antagonist, you might pair antagonist muscles or even just irrelevant muscles. Like you might do your bench press and then do some calf raises or something or whatever. But you wouldn't necessarily do that with two big compound exercises. So how do you like to build your full body training? I do it flexibly. So I'll string a couple exercises together depending on someone's equipment and their goals.

They have to be unrelated because you don't want overlapping musculature. You don't want to string together the bench press and the overhead press because those are definitely going to interfere with each other. If those don't, then you're not training hard. That becomes like a press workout, basically. Yeah, and then there's borderline cases like deadlifts and overhead press.

It's like, you can string them together. You probably don't want to do them right back to back though. So you have to pay attention to that, what kind of exercise they are. And then often I like to do, just as an example of a program that I just had for clients, it's like leg curls, squats, and that's actually an attack in a superset,

but flexibly. So I basically say, well, you can do your leg curls and then do the squat right after you feel up for it, and it's logistically possible, then go for it. Otherwise, you know, feel free to take a bit of extra rest. It's not going to make or break the program. And then after that, you can do like a set of chin-ups after catching your breath, making sure that your heart rate is somewhat back to normal, but also, you know, not rushing it, but not taking as long as probably the full

five minutes you would otherwise take between sets of squats. Maybe two minutes or so probably would be for me after a squat. Exactly. You can do it that way. And then just doing that, basically cuts your workout time in half. If you do the math, you write it down. For some people, it's like it doesn't click, but basically you're spending time exercising that you would otherwise just be resting. So it would be sort of wasted time. And now you're spending some of that time exercising. And as soon as you strength at least two exercises together, you have overlapping rest intervals.

So you basically use your rest, not just to rest the thighs and the back for your squats, but you're also resting your lats, your biceps or the chin-ups. So it's majorly cuts down your training time. And so that would be a trio, just some understanding. You would do the leg curls, and then if it was an empty gym, you might go straight into your squats. You might rest 30 seconds or so, do your squats, rest maybe a minute and a half, two minutes, do your chins and repeat. Yeah, exactly. So there's actually no word for this in the literature because it's sort of

circuit training, but there is rest in between. And it's sort of an antagonist superset because the first part is an antagonist superset. But after that, it's just what's sometimes called a pair set. But some researchers also call that a superset. So there's not really a word for that in the literature. I call it combo sets. You're just combining exercises, but you're not actively trying to do a superset. So that would be your workout.

It would be X number of sets of each of those exercises, or there would be another component as well. Yeah. Many of my workouts, full body workouts, at least look like usually two combos because with one, sometimes it's just one, like some workouts you can actually design. Like you just have one good exercise and all of your exercises are non-overlapping, especially if you do a lot of isolation work, which you can also do back to back really well you know you can do if you have like a cable pulley you can do lateral raises biceps curl tricep extension maybe while

you're at it you you pick up a dumbbell you do the unilateral calf raises you can do all that pretty much back to back and that's fine most workouts you have like a lot of borderline cases if you do romanian deadlifts i don't really want to string that together with chin-ups, so I'll put those in the next combo. But yeah, it can go either way. And some ruling workouts, it may be more than two combos, but I actually don't have that often with full body workouts. Okay.

Yeah, I'm sure that'd be difficult. And then you also, that workout is going to get a bit long as well. So if the point is time savings, you're going to lose that if you put too much in it. Exactly. And what about how you like to order your exercises? You gave the example of starting, which would be probably counterintuitive, or it's not what a lot of people listening would expect. They would expect you to say, I will do your hardest stuff first.

But I'm guessing that's still generally how you like to put your workouts together. Like, I don't think you'd, you'd want to start with some chins and then end your workout with heavy deadlifts, right? There are a couple of principles and the general rule of thumb to basically start with like the most technical, heavy, hard, effortful kind of workouts. It generally pans out that way, but there are some exceptions like attacking the supersets. This is actually something I first learned from john meadows and then very finally started experimenting with it and he said yeah this actually works doing leg curls before your squats and the reason they liked it is because people with knee injuries it generally feels better and the knees at least they aren't as painful i'm not sure if it actually does anything

for the tissue but at least it reduces pain. And I combine that with the Listeron antagonist supersets. I actually tried to cut down the rest period as well. And you see that it actually can enhance performance in the squat. And it also feels better for a lot of people. I've never tried that before, but I'll have to try it when I'm back in the gym. Yeah, a lot of people overestimate quite dramatically the role of the hamstrings during the squats

because muscle activation is like 20% of MVIC compared to like 100% for the quads and the glutes. So the hamstrings really aren't worked effectively by a squat. They're mostly stabilizers. Yeah, I know that makes sense. And then you just use that to your advantage to, I guess, theoretically to enhance your squat. Yep. And you just use that to your advantage to, I guess, theoretically to enhance your squat. Yep.

And some other useful principles are lower body first before upper body. Because there's some research, like this is not very hard data, but like some acute data on the measurement of neuromuscular fatigue suggests that lower body muscles, at least the quads, because almost all the research is on the quad, they're easy to study, suffer more from central nervous system fatigue. And that's probably not going to be a major concern in most workouts. But it's possible that near the end of the workout, they suffer a bit more. And especially exercise like squats and deadlifts, anecdotally definitely suffer a great deal when you put them at the end of a workout.

So I like to put those first. Good general principles also to go heavy first, because then you can actually take advantage of post activation potentiation. Whereas if you do light work first, not only do you lose that benefit, but you also induce more fatigue. Because a lot of people intuitively, you may think that going heavy, heavy weights, like given the same training effort is more fatiguing, but going light is actually more fatiguing. So the best way you can think about this is... Just do a set of just even 10 or 12 reps of squats,

one to two reps shy of technical failure, and then do a set of three, same effort, one to two reps shy of technical failure, and that's it. You'll experience it firsthand. Exactly. And there are a lot of power lifters that still say, yeah, but there's nothing as fatiguing as the 1RM.

But no, it's simply not true. Just try high rep squats and lower rep squats. And the difference is readily obvious. There's lots of data that shows it as well. rm squats you did like 30 reps or so you know how fatigued are you you cannot even lift your 50% of one remedy like after the one rm it just means you can't get the one rm anymore but if you take off five pounds you can probably lift that still yeah so the difference is logically and empirically much much greater you can like you said you can easily feel it for yourself so it really pays off to to start heavy and do like your higher rep work later in the workout. And how do you like to periodize this type of training? And again, I'm assuming that you're speaking mostly to intermediate and advanced weightlifters at this point. I think we made that point clear earlier, right? So, because periodization also, this is at least my position, my understanding of the research and just the anecdotal evidence is

if you're new and you haven't gained much muscle and strength yet, there's no reason to get fancy with periodization. My recommendation to those people is just stick with double progression and you're going to get stronger. You're going to be adding, you're going to be gaining reps and adding weight to the bar consistently, and it's going to be a lot of fun. But eventually there's a point where you have to be a bit more deliberate with your periodization. And obviously, there are different ways to do that. I have ways that I like, and I think there are different ways to get to the same end result, but that periodization is more applicable to intermediate and advanced weightlifters.

Definitely. That's generally what the research finds. There's actually some data showing that in rank untrained individuals, excess periodization and variation in general can be harmful, probably because basically, when you can still progress linearly in weight, there's just almost no way you can improve on that. If you can put five pounds on the bar and lift that again next time, then you're not going to tell me that you have some fancy periodization technique that allows you not to put weight on the bar for like three workouts and then instantly put on 20 pounds because that's what you would need to do

to outpace linear progression. It's just not happening. So once you're past that stage, I think that daily undulating periodization is the best supported research module. And I mean, objectively it is, but I think it's also anecdotally, practically one of the best ways to program, which basically means you have higher and a lower rep day.

And especially if you do frequent full-body workouts, I like to alternate the rep ranges. So if you're working chest two days in a row, I do like to make sure that the stimulus is very different. So you want a different exercise and probably also a different rep range. So maybe Monday, do heavy bench presses. And then Tuesday, do high rep flies, something like that. As far as DUP goes, I talk about this in the new second edition of a book that I actually emailed you about, and I'm sure you saw it yet, but it's called Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. It's meant for intermediate and advanced weight

lifters. And I agree that DUP is great. And I'd be curious to hear your take on this. However, I think it's best suited to programs where you are performing the same exercises, or at least that's the type of programming used in the literature that best supports it. So you would be bench pressing, let's say two or three times a week or squatting two or three times a week, and you're going to be varying the rep ranges. And that's not to say that the principles are invalidated by changing the exercises. But one of the reasons I didn't go with DUP for that program is you are changing the exercises quite often. And my experience and my understanding of the literature, I went with a weekly undulating model. Yeah. I don't change the exercise often. I typically just do basically the pure daily undulating periodization, which just means every time you repeat the exercise, basically you alternate between two, sometimes three, but generally just two rep ranges, like high and low rep day.

So not only do I use different rep range for different exercises, but also when you repeat the bench press again, you do like higher reps. So like one week, you have the low rep day. It is like a very straightforward DUP type of model. Yeah, I don't do much with exercise variation. There's actually a recent study on that. That's randomly doing exercises

with like an app that generates an exercise that hits the same target musculature, but with a different exercise. It does not improve strength development or muscle growth. And if you look at the absolute numbers the constant exercise group that just stuck with the same exercises or otherwise exactly identical programs did much better

like they had over 50 percent more growth in all three measured heads of the quads over 50 percent more bench press strength gain which is makes sense because they bench press more you know if you stick with the bench press you're gonna get better on the bench press strength gain, which makes sense because they bench press more. You know, if you stick with the bench press, you're going to get better on the bench press. But also for muscle growth, their BMI increased a bit more and they lost 1% body fat, whereas the random exercise selection group stayed stable in terms of body fat. So none of that was statistically significant, but I'd say that there was a trend that wasn't just evident in the absolute numbers, but it's also meaningful practically. And I think that applies for many people when you start getting too fancy, rather than just

training hard and trying to, while that's still possible, progress linearly. Like I said, it's hard to outpace that with any kind of fancy programming technique. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, even as an intermediate and advanced weightlifter, we still are just trying to add weight to the bar, but we have to do so much more work to get there. It's the main difference, right? Exactly. And okay, so you're using a DPN and do you do your heavier days earlier in the week when you're fresher, when you've come off a couple of days of rest, and then you do your higher rep later in the week, or do you reverse it or? It doesn't matter so much. I actually usually have non-weekly templates so i have like a certain

number of workouts that you alternate between with a certain structure like maybe my program will be five days better than seven days and has like two workouts one rest day two workouts one rest day you know something like that and it just alternates so like some weeks on monday will be the chest day but other weeks on the monday you actually have the full body day or something, you know? So in general, with programming, it's good to think outside the Gregorian calendar because it can be convenient for some people, especially if you have like a weekly schedule

for work and everything. So your recovery also has a weekly variation in it. Or people with kids, you know, because weekends is like kid stuff. But there's no need to really focus on that because it's not an actual variable that matters. You know, it's not like your body cares it's Tuesday, like your biceps. I don't want to live today because it's Thursday. I hate Thursdays.

And as far as volume, what are you shooting for? What's the range? We can look at it in terms of, you spoke about an individual session. You're definitely not going to go above 10 hard sets for any individual muscle group in a session. But what about weekly volume? Probably just look at it per per muscle group per week. But I've had exceptions like I've had with Nina Ross. We became a pro. I had to be pro naturally. You know, she's not genetically average. So at some point we had around like 60 sets, at least for like the glutes, quads for like 40 or so.

And then delts were also like 30, 40. And other muscle groups were more like a moderate 20 or so. So, you know, some people, especially women can tolerate pretty obscene volumes. Other people really don't tolerate that volume at all. And they'll get injured very, very quickly. Yeah. Anyone listening, I would not recommend it. I mean, even if you have the time and you have the will, I would not recommend it. Yeah. It's basically, she's the highest I think I've ever done with anyone. So, you know, that's 10 years of coaching, to put it in perspective. But yeah, most people fall in more like the 10 to 30 range.

Burying on the side of lower, while that still results in good progression, is probably sensible. Some people may have to go lower. I've had some Wall Street people, and they have no sleep, chronic high stress. So recovery is pretty much down the drain all the time. And then even 10 sets may be pushing it. So you really have to look at individual recovery capacity, how advanced they are. If they're more advanced, you can push towards higher in range. Also very important, are they bulking or are they cutting?

So are they an energy surplus or deficit? It's not a bad rule of thumb to actually just multiply the average volume with the energy balance factor. If you go from maintenance to 20% energy deficit, then you may also want to cut 20% volume because your recovery capacity is going to take a hit. We have at least one good study on Ramadan fasting that shows that during Ramadan fasting, one group that decreased volume by, I think, 33%, depending a bit on which muscle you look at, had better strength progression. They didn't measure muscle growth but they had better strength progression than the group that stuck with the same

volume they were doing before. So, basically, an energy deficit is a recovery deficit and you can actually make better progression sometimes if you take that into account and not push yourself too much. Whereas while bulking, you can really push yourself to the limit more. That's interesting.

I've never heard it put that way in terms of the deficit, the size of the deficit and the reduction in volume. But practically speaking, yeah, you should be reducing your volume a bit for sure. I mean, if you're going from a lean bulk to a cut, if you don't, you will be forced to at some point, there just will be a point where you realize, all right, this is not happening. This is not working. So you're assuming you were training super hard before at least, you know? Yeah, true. True. Is there, I'm sure there are. So what are the scenarios where you would recommend a different kind of split or maybe not? Actually, I'm not, I don't think that your position is that full body is best always for everyone but maybe it is i'm just curious yeah actually i would be that's not my position for sure i basically scale up frequency along with

training advancements so basically anyone that i have to full body is like at least late intermediate unless they're training like two or three times a week like i said because then full body i think makes sense for almost anyone. But based purely on the literature, it's actually very hard to make a case of why just always training full body is actually detrimental. Because pretty much, like I said, if you just group all of the studies together, you don't care about any other factor like energy deficits, plus how advanced they are, whatever. Then basically, the literature says, well, looking at higher versus lower frequency, we have, I think it's like 15 to 20 studies that find neutral. So it doesn't really matter what frequency you do.

Then you have like six or so, let's say, either significantly or very strong trends for benefits of higher frequencies. And only one study for one out of six studied muscle groups found significantly greater progression in the lower frequency. And that was more a case of the higher frequency group just not having any biceps growth for some reason, whereas the other lower frequency group did have growth that was more comparable to all the other muscle groups. So I'm not sure if that study really should be met with, should have a lot of weight. Basically, the overall trend is like it's probably neutral or beneficial and if you also look at recovery indices higher frequencies are generally positive like they're going to increase how much volume you do they're going to decrease

soreness they're going to improve your testosterone to cortisol ratio you know it's actually quite hard to make a case i'd say against doing full body but in practice you do see that people can end up with too high volumes and beginners, even if it's just one hard set, they may get injured or just even one hard set per day, like every day is simply too much for them already. Yeah. That's what I was going to ask about is there's just that recovery point is can you recover fast enough from, because you got to strike that balance, right? Between the recovery and the amount of volume you need to do in each workout to hit your weekly volume and so the question is can your body do it right and so that just again comes down to the individual and like you said it's going to be

more intermediate and advanced weightlifters who are going to be able to do it right who don't get too sore who basically don't walk away from let's, five hard sets for a muscle group with a bunch of muscle damage that's going to take five days to repair. Yeah. So I would say, though, that I would definitely agree with an untrained individual. You don't want to have them do even one hard set a day, probably. But there are still ways to actually make it very effective because I think the two studies in the literature that reported the highest ever muscle growth rates, they were with blood flow restriction training, training every muscle group twice a day in untrained individuals.

So at least in the short term, that can actually end with blood flow restriction training, which is debatable if that is easier to recover from. For the joints, it certainly is. But even then, you know, it might work, but it's definitely unconventional and requires a bit different training programming practices. So i'm not an advocate of it but uh and you can only do it for your limbs i mean so it's it's also limited in that regard like yeah that might be good for your arms and yeah you can actually implement muscle restriction training also for non-occluded muscle groups as long as the limb is a limiting factor in the performance okay so yeah that's probably something to get into in a different podcast because I have to go in one minute, but yet it is an interesting finding in research.

Mental note, because I've only used it and spoken about it in the context of you got your arms and you got your legs. There you go. Yeah. So yeah, that's a traditional way to implement it. Totally. Okay, good. Well, that actually coincides with the, that was the last point I had that I wanted to ask you about. So I think this has been a great in-depth discussion of full body training and for people who want to, if they want to do some of your workouts, for example, because I think we've done a good job covering the big moving parts, but there might be some, still some questions like, all right, how do I actually turn this into a workout program I can use? Can people find some full body workouts of yours on your website or

do you sell them or? I don't really sell workouts. I just have coaching in my PT course, but you can get a lot of information for free. If you go to my website, bennoensimals.com and I'm right on the main page, there's a big button that says like free email course, put in your email, click hit. And then you get like a tour of my most popular contents, which also include training frequency and some previews for my PT course, some excerpts, just a lot of free information. Of course, after that, I'm going to teach you with like full course and everything, but that's probably the best way to learn more about this or just search training frequency on my website because there's a ton of stuff on there.

Okay. Perfect. Perfect. And is there anything else you'd like people to know about before we wrap up here? Anything new and exciting or if you want to talk about your PT course as well? No, they'll see all of that if they're interested and they do a free course or browse on my website. I'm not the best salesman.

So yeah, no, I just want to get, I always like to ask because sometimes people do have things like, oh, I do have this thing coming up or I'm about to release this new thing. Yeah. What I have coming up is a client consult. Okay. Perfect, man. Well, thanks for taking the time. I look forward to the next one. Yeah. It was great talking to you and let me know when this goes online. I'll be sure to share it. Okay. Thank you. All right. See you. Yep. All right. Well, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and you don't mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to me from in whichever app you're listening to me in, because that not only

convinces people that they should check out the show. It also increases search visibility and thus it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any new stuff. And if you didn't like something about the show, please do shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com, just muscle, F-O-R, life.com, and share your thoughts on how I can do this better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, even if it is criticism. I'm open to it. And of course, you can email me if you have positive feedback as well, or if it is criticism. I'm open to it. And of course, you can email me

if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email. That is the best way to get ahold of me, mikeatmuscleforlife.com. And that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.