Speaker A
All right, what's up everybody? So, I'm proud to finally announce that my full body program is now out on Boost Camp.
Exploring the benefits and considerations of full body training for all levels, plus an intro to the Full Body Maxing program.
Key Takeaways
- Full body training suits all experience levels and can be adapted for different goals.
- Proper programming minimizes fatigue and maximizes freshness for each lift.
- Crossover stimulus in full body splits can help maintain muscle growth and reduce volume needs.
- Mental benefits include less dread and more excitement per session due to rest days.
- The Full Body Maxing program offers a structured approach to high-frequency training.
Summary
- Full body training is effective for all training ages, from beginners to advanced lifters.
- Beginners benefit from high frequency and improved mind-muscle connection.
- Advanced lifters appreciate the psychological relief of more off days and manageable volume.
- Full body training keeps sessions fresh physically and mentally compared to push-pull-legs splits.
- Systemic fatigue is often overestimated if exercise selection and programming are done properly.
- Crossover stimulus from compound movements can provide indirect muscle work and warm-up benefits.
- Full body training allows for maintenance stimulus on stubborn muscle groups between direct sessions.
- The Full Body Maxing program on Boost Camp maximizes frequency with thoughtful volume management.
- The program encourages flexibility in exercise selection and progression tracking.
- Keeping session length reasonable reduces dread and improves consistency.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Program Announcement
- 00:52Full Body Training for All Experience Levels
- 01:53Benefits for Advanced Lifters and Psychological Aspects
- 02:53Mental and Physical Freshness of Full Body Training
- 04:50Systemic Fatigue and Exercise Selection
- 05:50Crossover Stimulus and Indirect Muscle Work
- 07:46Nuances of Muscle Group Training and Volume
- 08:46Program Details and Frequency Maximization
- 09:48Progression, Volume, and Session Length Tips
- 13:30Program Flexibility and Final Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
It's called Full Body Maxing. And in today's video, I'm not specifically going to go too, too in-depth on that program since on the app you can actually see an in-depth breakdown of the cues, the exercise selection, the volume amounts, and everything. I'll
Speaker A
touch on this at the end, but I do mostly want to take today just to talk about my thoughts on full body training in general so you can understand my reasoning of why I believe it to be a
Speaker A
good split as well as potential drawbacks that you have to kind of program around. And I want to make sure nobody falls into common pitfalls when it comes to full body training programming. So with all that said,
Speaker A
let's get into the first benefit in my opinion of full body training. This first one is more so just looking bigger picture and that is that full body training works for any training age.
Speaker A
You can't necessarily say that about any split. I'm not going to go into each one now, but I would say just from a practical perspective, full body, you'll see any training age doing this. It's not something that just beginners do and
Speaker A
then as you get more advanced, nobody does it or vice versa. In my personal opinion, full body is excellent for beginner lifters or people just starting out for the sole purpose of the super high frequency. Even if you have a
Speaker A
good amount of variety and you don't repeat each week or you don't repeat each lift multiple times throughout the week, you're still training each muscle group generally speaking directly three times a week. And even indirectly, whether it's through a compound movement
Speaker A
or isolation, you're still getting a good amount of frequency for each muscle group. And that just brings a higher level of bodily awareness. It improves your mind-muscle connection and it just gets you a lot more practice at making
Speaker A
your body move in various different ways. So you get better at using your muscles. To put that simply, you can also say that full body works on the other side of the spectrum for the most advanced lifters out there. And I would
Speaker A
say the main reason for this is one, because they're going to have a pretty high work capacity. You will have to tone the overall total volume down per session when you're super strong and you're doing super heavy lifting. But
Speaker A
what I would say is just from a psychological perspective, as you get more advanced, having off days is just such a breath of fresh air and it's such a weight off your shoulders, no pun intended, for someone that is stronger.
Speaker A
And as somebody that has been on both sides of the spectrum, I'm not going to say I'm like elite level or anything, but I am a little bit more advanced at this point. And being able to have extra off days throughout the
Speaker A
week is incredible because no matter how much I enjoy my training, no matter how motivated I am, there's still kind of that sense of dread and that sense of pressure that comes along with every workout because you're pressuring
Speaker A
yourself to push yourself hard. You're pressuring yourself to progress. You dread the genuine difficulty of every training session. So, while there are obviously tons of pros that come along with training, that's why I continue to do it. There are kind of
Speaker A
those downsides and that baggage that lifting just innately comes with. That's part of pursuing any difficult venture at your maximum capabilities or close to it. So that's why it can work if you are a beginner or an advanced and
Speaker A
then needless to say, it works excellent for anywhere in between as well. The next thing I would say here, you get to feel very fresh for every training session. I love push-pull legs, push-pull splits when they're programmed properly.
Speaker A
But going into basically every single session, having trained the day before, things can get just a little bit stale.
Speaker A
It can be a little bit tricky physically because you're exerting a good amount of energy most days of the week. I'd say five or six on most push-pull leg splits.
Speaker A
Just depends if you do two leg days or not. It can be a little bit draining physically and then mentally things can get a little bit stale, I would say. So having full body where every session you do, you had a
Speaker A
rest day previously, it's a pretty great feeling and it's just a great way, one, just to get a good pump. But I would say two, just because mentally it can be a little bit more exciting as
Speaker A
long as you have good discipline and you're staying consistent with everything. The next thing I'd say you are fresher for each lift that you're doing within a given session. I would also add that systemic fatigue, generally speaking, is an overblown
Speaker A
issue as long as exercise selection is reasonable. So, people will say, well, if a muscle isn't growing, you're going to want to train it earlier in the session. I would say very rarely is that actually going to be what is the game
Speaker A
changer for you. I'd find in most cases, that's kind of the logical conclusion that people jump to. And I would say it's probably not even in my top three, four, or five solutions to a muscle not growing that
Speaker A
well. A lot of it's just going to come down to your technique, your exercise selection, and how hard you're pushing that lift, among many other things. But that's kind of just the tip of the iceberg there. What I'd say overall for
Speaker A
full body, there is going to be some crossover, obviously, since you're training your entire body and odds are you're going to be doing some compound movements. But when you look at it from the perspective of how each muscle group
Speaker A
is being trained locally in terms of freshness, when you're doing a full body session on a full body program, everything's trained in a fresh state.
Speaker A
Of course, you're going to have some systemic fatigue, but I find that's pretty much entirely overblown. As long as your technique and, more importantly, your exercise selection is reasonable and programmed properly, you don't really have to worry about
Speaker A
systemic fatigue when you're on a bodybuilding-oriented program, as long as things are programmed properly as I previously stated. So, you're fresher for each lift. Each muscle group generally gets trained in a fresh state.
Speaker A
And I would also say that to kind of expand on this point, you get to take advantage of crossover stimulus. So rather than it being a net negative where, say, on a push day, your triceps are pretty much gassed by the end of the
Speaker A
session, and need I say more there, on a full body split, what gets to happen here is you get to build up just enough work to where you can at least get some stimulus. For an example here
Speaker A
would be maintenance. So let's say you have a muscle group that you're training on Monday and Friday and you don't need to train it three times a week. If you train it indirectly on Wednesday, it gets you enough stimulus to where you
Speaker A
can still make good progress and avoid any regression between your Monday and your Friday session. It might sound nitpicky, but in some people with some stubborn muscle groups, that can be a fairly important point. I would also say
Speaker A
that when it comes to this whole crossover stimulus thing, it provides you, at the very least, a warm-up for when you train that muscle later in the session directly. So, if you're doing something like a pull-up or a row
Speaker A
variation, it can train your elbow flexors for bicep work, so you can spend less time warming up. And at the very least, it can get you a little bit extra stimulus to where you don't need quite as much volume for those muscle groups
Speaker A
that get hit indirectly later in the session. So, this one can be, this one's a little bit more nuanced obviously depending on the muscle groups within the body. So something like the biceps on a barbell row won't be nearly
Speaker A
even though they are secondary movers, they won't quite get the stimulus of something like, say, your front delts.
Speaker A
probably get away with skipping an overhead press and just going right into a side delt or even a rear delt variation depending on how your program is set up. So I I could talk for days on that point itself, but I don't want to
Speaker A
water down the video with all that. So next point, you can maximize frequency and avoid any regression. I would say you get to train as much as possible and you you don't really have any situations where maybe you take two steps forward
Speaker A
then take one step back because what I found is that when I'm training at say once a week per muscle frequency or even up to like one and a half times per week, say I'm doing like a 5day rotating
Speaker A
split, I found that every time I do this, I can get good stimulus and have a good session for each muscle group, but it almost feels like I'm taking two steps forward and then one step back when I of 3, four, 5 days between
Speaker A
training that same muscle group. So, this is why bro splits tend to not work quite as well as higher frequency splits. Obviously, we have a decent amount of literature that kind of shows this, but I'd even say anecdotally, most
Speaker A
super highlevel jacked natural guys have spent extensive amounts of time in their training careers training two or three times a week for each muscle group. So, if you're following something like a bro split or even more realistically here,
Speaker A
if you're doing something like a pushpull off legs offslit where it's uh like a 5day instead of a 7-day split, even with that, it kind of just feels like you're taking two steps forward and then taking one step back when you have
Speaker A
all that excessive rest time between one muscle group session to the next. So, it kind of helps you avoid that. And that's uh one of the main benefits of full body in my opinion. So, let's talk about this
Speaker A
program in particular. I've got a couple different things to go over here. So, when it comes to my full body maxing program, the frequency is what we're maximizing here. When it comes to training variables, you're going to have
Speaker A
that FOMO follow you everywhere. So, if you are maximizing your frequency on a full body program, you have to tone down your volume and your variety per session. So, the way I like to see full body training when it comes to frequency
Speaker A
is like, do you remember when iPhones first came out and you could play that game Doodle Jump, it was like the first game on the app store probably. It's like, you know, when you jump up and you hit that next level right at the peak of
Speaker A
your previous jump and then you immediately take another massive jump even though you only cleared that first step by like a millimeter. That's kind of how full body training works. you take a big step forwards and then once
Speaker A
you're done taking that first step, you immediately take that next step instead of say jumping up your guy super high, coming halfway down and then hitting one of those levels kind of halfway beneath you and then jumping up. You only get uh
Speaker A
that would ultimately be 75% of the total height as if you actually hit the level at the peak of that previous jump.
Speaker A
So, kind of a nerdy example there, but I figured that analogy worked pretty well for explaining the purpose of full body.
Speaker A
So, you're maximizing frequency. Ultimately, you need less levels to jump on as if you were to take two steps forward and then one step back. So, it will be less volume per session, less variety per session. But the good news
Speaker A
is you can have a ton of fun with variety throughout the week on a full body training program. You can kind of have that that one lift, say on Monday, where it's a lift that you know works really well for you. You know, it's kind
Speaker A
of a basic fundamental lift that you kind of dread just because it's so ridiculously hard. And then you can have Wednesday where it's almost like the fun but kind of easier, less intimidating or mentally draining lift where you're
Speaker A
still getting really good stimulus but you're not relying on that as your bread and butter. It's just to get you some extra stimulus on Wednesday. And then you then you can kind of take like a happy medium in between good stimulus
Speaker A
but also something you enjoy lift on Friday and you're making excellent progress. You don't have to have every session for every lift be super super daunting like it can be with other splits. So, that's one of the main
Speaker A
benefits I would say. And then when it comes to volume, I know this is this is something that everybody's going to have questions on here. So, I do have it all kind of cleared out or not cleared out,
Speaker A
I have it all laid out in the description of the program on the Boost Camp app. So, when you read the description of the program, you'll get you'll get a whole breakdown of how the volume works. And it's very simple. So,
Speaker A
the way the volume works on this program, it is a default to two sets per lift per session. I technically have it as a range, so it's two to three. If you want to start at all two, that's totally
Speaker A
fine. If you want to start at all three for every lift, that's also totally fine. What I would suggest for most people, if you don't want to immediately jump to two or three, I would say default everything to two. Pick one to
Speaker A
three muscle groups that are either a high priority or a weak point, and then you can bump those areas up to three. As you progress throughout the program, I would add volume to areas that have been growing previously but have hit
Speaker A
plateaus. So, if an area that let's say you're struggling to grow an area, volume isn't necessarily going to be the solution. It's likely your technique or your intensity. If an area was growing and then it kind of randomly stops, but
Speaker A
everything else is generally growing and you haven't really changed anything else, then volume could be the issue.
Speaker A
And of course, I'm not directly coaching everybody on this. It's kind of just some general advice that you'll have to take when it comes to volume manipulations, but that's generally going to be my rule of thumb. And from
Speaker A
there, uh, it can't necessarily apply to every single situation, but that's a very good baseline to base your judgment off of when it comes to volume. So, that's pretty much it for the program.
Speaker A
What I would say here is if you want to try this program, you can check the link in my description to download Boost Camp if you haven't already. I have a handful of free programs. the full body maxing
Speaker A
program. It is premium, so you will need a subscription to use it. But the good news here is you actually get two weeks of Boost Camp premium for free when you use the code basement. So if you want to
Speaker A
try it out for free, go ahead and do that. I highly recommend it. And Boost Camp is it's the best app. It's the best possible way to track your training.
Speaker A
They have literally everything. So a couple quick benefits of Boost Camp that I'll list off here. The first one is you can track your workout duration. This is actually something that I talked about years back on the channel where I said
Speaker A
keeping your overall training session length down makes your sessions less intimidating and less daunting. You have less dread going into every session. So one of the first things you'll see is in the top lefthand corner you can actually
Speaker A
start a timer for the entire training session. And then more specifically here you can track your rest times as well.
Speaker A
So there's a start and go clock where you can track your rest times between each lift. And that helps to make sure you're meeting that threshold of time you want to spend on the entire session.
Speaker A
You also get to see your training history for each lift. So every time you log your lifts, you can look back and see what your previous performances were for every lift. So you can make sure you're progressing at a rate that's
Speaker A
reasonable for you. You also get to see your all-time records. So, if say on like the peak of your previous bulk, you hit a a weight and a rep scheme that's much higher than what you're at now, say
Speaker A
post cut, you you know what to base your progressions off of, and you can compare and contrast from there. You can also leave yourself notes for each lift, which I find to be very useful. So, you can leave this in as a recurring thing,
Speaker A
or you can leave it as a one-time thing. This can be useful for things like making sure you're doing the same setup each time. For example, if you're doing say a machine overhead press that has a bunch of different seat heights and a
Speaker A
bunch of different grip options, you can note down that you had the seat at height number five and you used say the wide pronated grip, for example, on that machine. You can also use it for short-term things such as, I got eight
Speaker A
reps, but my butt came up on the Smith bench on my eighth rep. Go for eight clean reps next time. This can make sure that your progressions are going well and you have more context for the performance that you have noted down.
Speaker A
You can also make minor adjustments to the program and you actually can make major adjustments, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. You can do things like add sets, remove sets, you can change the weight that you're doing from for each set within a specific
Speaker A
lift. You can also rotate or add in new lifts to the program. So, I would recommend if you're following one of my programs, you don't have to follow it to a tea if you don't want to. But in a
Speaker A
perfect world, if you have access to every piece of equipment that's laid out in the program and you enjoy and know how to do all of those lifts, I would recommend following them the best you can. With that said, if you have one or
Speaker A
two lifts that you want to swap out, that's fine as long as they're relatively close variations and they're lifts that you do like. Uh, and if you want to add stuff in, again, I'd be very conservative with it. But if you want to
Speaker A
add in some ab work, some direct calf work, or any other muscle group that's not going to directly impact the recovery of any other muscle group trained heavily within the program, that's fine. So things like calves, abs, obliques, neck, uh wrist flexors, wrist
Speaker A
extensors, and other elbow flexors besides the bicep like the brachiialis and brachioraiialis. those get to be a little bit more of a gray area, but generally speaking, you can still add them in as long as you're a little bit
Speaker A
more conservative with volume. And other than that, the program should be pretty much good to go. So, if you have any questions on any of that, let me know in the comments. And I hope everybody has a good time enjoying this program.
Topics:full body trainingworkout splitstraining frequencymuscle growthexercise programmingfatigue managementmind-muscle connectionBoost CampFull Body Maxingbodybuilding
