full body five days a week this is the training split I've been running for the last six months and I think it's great now when I explain this setup to your average gym bro they tend to look at me like I've got 10 heads sometimes they'll suggest that body part splits make more sense where you just destroy one or two muscles a day and then give them a full week of rest to let the muscles grow and while this clearly can work I think there are much better options out there one option would be the
push-pull leg split where you're at least hitting each muscle twice a week something highlighted in the scientific literature has been better for muscle growth upper lower splits are also solid and while full body training is relatively popular most people seem to think of it as a beginner's routine we're only training two maybe three days a week which is exactly why this split stands out so much there just seems to be something wrong about hitting every muscle every day except there isn't now I was first introduced to this style of training exactly three years ago in
an interview that I did with menno hence women's where he explained that optimal training frequency is different for beginners than it is for advanced trainees if you are a beginner then most research shows that there is actually no benefit to training a muscle group more than once a week hitting each body part once a week that works very well for beginners but as you get more advanced the time course that you can elevate muscle protein balance that periods basically decreases as you get more advanced so basically after you lift weights there's a period of time
when muscle protein synthesis increases and the muscle becomes more sensitive to amino acids this is why your muscle grows in the first place and research tells us that that response stays elevated for about two days or so in new lifters but actually returns to near baseline after just 12 hours or so in more experienced Trinis so the original theory was that if you're a well-trained lifter the more frequently you can hit a muscle the more spikes you'll see and muscle protein synthesis and the better muscle growth you'll get as a result but the question is
do these more frequent spikes and muscle protein synthesis actually add up to produce more muscle growth over time well that's a very good and very controversial question some skeptics have pointed out that these studies only measured mixed muscle protein synthesis which isn't as relevant for building contractile muscle tissue as myofibrillar muscle protein synthesis also in 2014 one group of researchers really flip to this theory on its head claiming that acute protein synthesis doesn't even correlate with hypertrophy at all however when I brought this study up here on the channel at another protein researcher reassure me
that protein synthesis does in fact predict hypertrophy an idea I personally think is more supported by the literature overall so while the jury is still out on the theory I think what we really want to know is will this high frequency style of training get me more jacked and this is where it gets really interesting in 2012 a group of Norwegian sport scientists conducted a secret frequency study that would come to be known as the infamous Norwegian frequency project now because this study was originally designed to get their national powerlifting team a competitive edge the
results were never fully published not only presented at clandestine scientific conferences with one dusty abstract making its way onto the Internet but despite all its secrecy I still like this study because it used very highly trained lifters so they split subjects into a group hitting their full-body three days a week and a group hitting their full-body six days a week the rest of the program including weekly volume was exactly the same and after 15 weeks of training the six day per week group got nearly twice as big and strong increasing their lifts by a total
of 10 percent versus five percent while also gaining significantly more muscle granted while I do personally trust these authors and the results because this data set was never published in a peer-reviewed journal there is reason to be skeptical so last year a different team of researchers attempted to replicate this infamous Norwegian project but this time they used early intermediate lifters and only ran the study for six weeks compared to the original 15 so perhaps it's not surprising that they didn't find much of anything similar strength and size gains between the three-day per week and six
day per week programme but at worst I think this study shows us that both frequencies can be effective and does lend support to the idea that the benefits of higher frequencies that are likely seen with more experienced lifters than less experienced lifters still an important point to consider with all this research is that weekly volumes are always equated between groups whereas in the real world they probably wouldn't be how frequencies tend to lead to higher volumes this has led many experts in the field to argue that these studies don't even account for the single greatest
benefit of higher frequency training being able to accumulate more high-quality volume and I think that's a good point when I was in Australia training with Eric Helms he explained to me that the main fit of high-frequency full-body training is simply being able to spread out your weekly volume to help increase the quality of each set the first question you're gonna ask me why do I choose to train for why that's right so I ask myself I think for the most part the benefit is that it's a way to manipulate volume spread if I did like
we did today press cafes and then have upper body I have a way more energy and I can distribute the same amount of volume with less fatigue over the week Grint doing formal body sensors brings more about volume and fatigue management and this is how I've come to think about training splits in general how well can we organize these three variables into a training week in other words does our split allow us to reach optimal volumes at an appropriate intensity while allowing for recovery so let's start with falling so there's general scientific consensus at this
point that 10 to 20 working sets is a good weekly volume range for most muscles but it's not enough to determine how much volume you're doing per week you also need to consider how much volume you're doing her workout as new data suggests that there's a per workout ceiling for volume somewhere around five to ten sets per muscle this means that after you've done five sets or so for any given muscle in a single workout any extra work that you do risks falling into the wasted sets or junk volume category as far as hypertrophy goes
so splitting up your volume across more workouts throughout the week reduces the likelihood of doing any so called wasted sets and you can make sure that they all count this is one advantage of doing high frequency training so what about intensity well I think full-body training has an advantage here as well and this is something I definitely didn't expect when I first started this split because I thought that hitting the same muscle on consecutive training days would just sort of tire me out as the week went on but I've actually found the opposite because I'm
normally only hitting one exercise per muscle that can really give that exercise my full focus and attention and because the volume per workout is so low compared to other splits I've run I find I'm able to recover from it so much faster as well for example on day three of my new program for lower body all I have to do is hit three sets of leg press and four sets of calves so I find I'm able to execute those leg presses so much better than if they came after say squats and lunges on a leg
day and honestly never having to do a full leg day on this split has been great historically I'd always feel so fatigued by the time I got to the third or fourth exercise that no matter how determined I was my performance would just start to take a hit at some point as the workout drawn down and you can contrast this with full body training where you're normally only hitting one exercise four legs on any given day so what about recovery this is the thing most people seem to have the most reservation with I mean there's
just no way you can recover with only 24 hours between workouts right actually I would say it's not that hard remember when I say we're hitting chest every day I'm not saying that we're hitting a full Monday chest day every day that would definitely be overtraining instead you can think of it like taking a typical Monday chest workout and just splitting it up across four or five days of the week also by the second or third week a phenomenon known as the repeated bout effect will kick in where your body adapts to the new stimulus
and learns to recover faster than you ever have before as a result you likely never feel sore after training which is actually a good thing as soreness simply impedes performance so a high-frequency split should actually improve your body's ability to recover not impair it this is of course assuming you don't overdo it without their volume or intensity in the individual workouts especially early on so while all of this certainly seems like a homerun for high-frequency training there are a few potential concerns to be aware of first because there isn't as much time for recovery between
sessions it is very important that you stop a bit shorter of failure for the first few weeks generally being more in the 7 to 8 RPE zone rather than the usual 8 to 9 then as the repeated bout effect kicks in your body adapts you can start to train closer to failure again may also need to train some muscles while still sore for the first week or two which can be annoying but granted this is common on any new training routine but still does highlight the importance of doing a full and complete warm-up before training
of course after the first week or two this soreness concern should totally go away as well so is full-body 5 days a week the best training split I would say for me at the moment yeah I think it is after years of running push-pull leg splits and upper lower splits I think this routine is giving me exactly the motivation I need for continued progress still I wouldn't necessarily put it on a pedestal and say it's the best in all contexts if you're interested in a full summary of how I think it stacks up against other
splits you can pause the screen here and see what might be best for you at the moment and if you guys would like to give this style of training a shot I did just launch my new intermediate to advanced high frequency full-body program over on Jeff nipper comm which builds a complete 10-week program around the principles discussed in this video now if you've only been in the gym for a year or two I'd recommend starting with my fundamentals hypertrophy program instead which also has a full body routine included but only as you in the gym
three days a week instead of five so the program includes three training phases block one is more focused on getting adapted to the high frequency training and allowing the repeated Vout effect to kick in block two ramps up intensity and volume for a massive hypertrophic stimulus before leading into week nine which is a full d load and then you get to go crazy and week ten where you perform as many reps as possible on the main lifts and see what kind of gains you've made now there's also a full breakdown of volume for every body
part so you can modify the numbers slightly up or slightly down depending on your specific level of advancement and what areas or body parts you want to focus on and I'm going to be running this program myself for the next few months so if you guys want to follow along with me you can pick it up for just 2999 for the week of launch and then after that it'll go up to thirty nine ninety nine so I'll put a button over here next to my head to the new program if you'd like to check it
out don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already I've got five full body science applied workouts on the way starting next week and I'll see you guys all here in the next video
