Push Day Workout Overview

Okay, what's going on guys and welcome to the first episode of the ultimate push-pull leg series. In this video, we're hitting our first push workout of the week and over the course of the next six videos, I'll be taking you through the rest of the push-pull leg sessions to complete the full week of workouts. Now, if you want to get everything in your hands right away, you can pick up the full Push-Pull Legs Hypertrophy Plan, which just launched over on jeffknipper.com, and I'll have a little more info about that at the end of the video. So without further ado, let's dig into push day number one, where we'll be doing seven exercises that target the chest, shoulders, and triceps. All right, so after a quick warmup of five minutes on the treadmill or stairmaster and a few upper body dynamic drills like arm circles and cable external rotations, we're kicking the workout off with just one near max effort set of three to five reps on the bench press now obviously before that heavy working set we'll want to do a full warm-up pyramid to get the blood flowing and prepare ourselves mentally for that heavy load to come on the top set and i'll put my full warm-up protocol here if you want to pause and read all right so with the bench press you want to set up an arch that feels comfortable to you with the most important thing being that you get tight and stable on the bench it doesn't have to be a huge power lifting style arch but you should at least dig your upper back into the bench so you'll have a strong base of support you should also pinch your shoulder blades together and tuck your shoulder blades down That's what I'm doing here as I roll my elbows forward, which will further increase that stability. For the max effort top set, have a spotter help you unrack the bar by lifting the weight out softly, not yanking it up aggressively, and make sure you have three points of contact with the bench your butt, your upper back, and your head. Lower the bar down and slightly forward until it reaches the highest contact point on your chest, and then press the bar slightly back and up with as much explosive force as possible. Your elbows should be slightly tucked on the negative, and then you can optionally flare them out as you push the weight up. However, some people may find flaring uncomfortable on their shoulders, and in reality, there's a pretty wide range of elbow tuck that's perfectly fine on the bench press because when you look at the way the pec fibers fan out, anything from 0 to 30 degrees of elbow tuck is going to line up with the majority of the pec fibers anyway. So within this range, you can pick a level of flare that you feel working your pecs well, that you're reasonably strong with, and that doesn't give you any pain or discomfort. If you don't have a spotter, you can try unracking the bar with your butt up off the bench. This is legal and competitive. and then once you've unracked, drop your butt down onto the bench and start your set from there. Now, one thing worth noting is that the International Powerlifting Federation recently updated their rulebook in an attempt to combat the increasingly out-of-control range of motion problem with more and more exaggerated arching. So now you need to reach a certain amount of elbow depth in order for the lift to count. So according to the new rules, you need to get the bottom of your elbow below the top of your shoulder joint in order for the lift to count. So this is what bottom of the elbow below top of the shoulder. shoulder joint looks like to me and I would say that as long as your arch isn't really massive this shouldn't be an issue for most of you watching anyway and this is a rough guide for how difficult your top set should be on the final reps you're grinding it out the bar speed has clearly slowed down but you're still keeping your form tight and maybe you could have gotten one more rep but likely no more than that now if you don't like to bench press for whatever reason feel free to swap it out for a flat dumbbell press or even a machine press for the same number of sets okay so after our heavy top set we're doing two sets of 10 reps on the larsen press press. For these, you'll want to drop the weight back to about 75% of what you used for your heavy top set. So if you did 295 pounds for your top set, you'd do about 225 pounds for your Larson press. Now, the Larson press is basically just a normal bench press, except your legs lie flat on the bench rather than having your feet planted on the floor. I'll usually grab another bench or a box that I can set my feet on so they aren't left hanging, and that helps me keep my balance on the bench a bit better. So you'll do the same setup with the same arch. The only difference is that you keep your feet up. This way, you'll completely eliminate any leg drive, which will help isolate the pecs, front delts, and triceps more. And then to make the movement even more hypertrophic, I'll take a slightly closer grip, which will increase the range of motion and shift the emphasis slightly more toward the upper pecs and triceps. And unlike the top set where we're using explosive force on every rep, here we want to use a nice smooth and controlled tempo with a one to two second negative and a one to two second positive with just a soft touch on the chest at the bottom. You want to feel the pecs and triceps stretching and contracting as you press rather than just moving the weight from point A to point B. All right, after that, we're moving on to three sets of it. eight to ten reps on the standing dumbbell arnold press for the most part i think any optimized push day should have both a horizontal press to target the pecs more and a vertical press to target the shoulders more of course if you're really pressed on time you could collapse them both into a single incline press like we did in our minimalistic workouts but here we're going for maximum effectiveness over maximum efficiency so we want to do both pushing movements so for these you want to start with the dumbbells facing palms in and then as you press you're going to flare your elbows out until until you get to full elbow extension. and then reverse the motion back down under control. In the past, I've often hit these in a higher rep range and thought of them more as a mind-muscle connection pump-style exercise. And because of this, I've often limited myself to 30 or 40-pound dumbbells. But lately, I've been loading them quite a bit heavier, and I've worked my way up to 60-pound dumbbells for sets of 8 to 10. I've found that thinking of it more like a barbell overhead press by squeezing my glutes and driving through my heels has helped me overload my shoulders better. And these days, I think of it more like an in-between movement. I still want to feel my delts working, and I'm going to do that. and I still want to get a good shoulder pump, but I'm also much more focused on gradually increasing the weight as well. Also, this is an exercise where wearing a belt and wrist straps can make a pretty big difference. So if you have either of those, I definitely recommend throwing them on for this one. Okay, after that, we're super setting two sets of 12 to 15 reps on the cable press around with two sets of a static pec stretch for a 30 second hold. So the press around is one of those exercises that can feel a bit awkward for some people at first, but once they play around with it for a few weeks, it tends to really click. I think of it like a combination between a cable fly and a cable press, except you're doing one arm at a time. And the key thing is that you're pressing around your body past the midline to get the most end-range contraction out of the pecs possible. If you think about pretty much every other exercise that hits the pecs, they almost all stop at or before the midline. When you press, you stop before the midline. When you fly, you stop before the midline. When you dip, you stop before the midline. But the chest isn't fully contracted until well past the midline. So with the press around, we're trying to target that very end range of motion that hardly ever gets hit. Now is that end range of motion really important for hypertrophy? I'm not sure. As far as I know, it's never been directly studied, at least not in this context, but I certainly can't see it hurting, especially if the stretch isn't being compromised. So after hitting one side on the press around, we'll stretch that same pec for a 30 second hold, and then switch and do a press around with the other arm, and then stretch that other pec for a 30 second hold as well. Now, three years ago I uploaded a video breaking down this study, which showed that holding a stretch for 30 seconds in between sets at about a 7 out of 10 intensity, so just before the point of pain or discomfort, was able to increase muscle growth by approximately 50%. The group that did traditional training without interset stretching saw a 6.2 millimeter increase in muscle thickness, while the group that did stretching in between sets saw a 9.4 millimeter increase on average. Since then, more research has come out on the topic. And just this past month, a new review was published by Schoenfeld and colleagues, where they concluded that interset stretching may enhance muscular adaptations without increasing the time spent exercising. That's because you can just do the stretching while you're resting in between sets. So the benefit of stretching in between sets seems to be gaining, as opposed to losing, scientific support over time. And we also don't need to worry about any potential strength interference because we're doing the static stretching on our last exercise for the pecs for the day. However, even if we were doing that stretching earlier, it wouldn't be a big deal because, contrary to popular belief, static stretching doesn't seem to interfere with strength unless the stretch is held for longer than 60 to 90 seconds. So to me, this seems to be something with only potential upsides with no clear downsides as of now. I mean, you're just resting between sets anyway, why not add some stretching? Okay, after that we're moving on to three sets of 12 to 15 reps on the crossbody cable y-raise. Now, I first saw this movement in a training vlog from one of the natural bodybuilding goats, Alberto Nunez. He was talking about how he gets a much better stretch on these than regular cable lateral raises, and I can see why. For example, if you look at the lean-away Egyptian cable lateral raise, which I'm still a big fan of, by the way, you'll notice that your body sort of blocks you from getting a really deep stretch on the delts. And just think about it. If you're going to stretch your side delts as much as possible, you're not just going to put your arm against your side. Instead, you're going to pull your arm across your body, and that way you should feel a big stretch in your delts. So with the cross-body Y-raise, that's kind of the stretch we're going for, except under-act. of tension. And the way Alberto described these was to think about drawing a sword at the bottom and then sort of flicking it up and out at the top. Now, one thing to be aware of is you don't want to turn this into a front raise. We're not lifting the cable up in front of us. We're lifting it out and back in a diagonal plane of motion. Also, if we look at the anatomy of the deltoid muscle fibers, it's pretty common knowledge that there are three heads. There's the front or anterior head, the side or lateral head, and the rear or posterior head. However, the latest anatomy literature suggests that the deltoids may be better thought of as having seven intramuscular segments. And so some of these compartments, like the D4 or D5 segments, could be hit more effectively with something sort of in between a front raise and a lateral raise. So something like a Y raise. The bottom line is that lifting the arm out at slightly different angles and in slightly different planes of motion is more likely to maximize development of the entire shoulder and help create that round 3D delt look more effectively. Okay, up next we've got three sets of eight reps on the squeeze only tricep press down, supersetted with three sets of eight reps on the stretch only overhead tricep extension. And we'll be hitting both of these exercises as a superset, so doing them back and forth. back to back without resting in between. So basically we're doing partial half reps on both of these exercises, except on the press downs, we're only doing the second half of the range of motion. So hitting the squeeze part only. And on the overhead tricep extension, we're only doing the first half of the range. motion. So hitting the stretch part only. Now I want to give credit to hypertrophy coach for this combo. I first saw these on his Instagram. So I tried it out for myself and it immediately clicked. And the reason I think it works so well is the second half of the press down is the hardest part of that exercise. Hypertrophy coach calls this staying where it's the hardest. But you can't just do half reps because we know that the stretch aspect of the lift is probably the most important. However, it's actually really hard to get a good stretch on the triceps with press downs. So instead we'll just flip around and do half rep stretched partials. with the overhead extension. So this is a fun combo move, and I think you guys will really feel your triceps working in a unique way if you want to try it out. Then to finish off the workout, we're doing two sets of 10 to 12 reps on the crossbody tricep extension. The goal here is to get in a little extra tricep volume with the arm positioned at a less conventional angle. Most people pretty much always do tricep extensions and tricep press downs with their arms tucked into the sides, but much more rarely, if ever, do tricep extensions with the arms flared out to the side. So I think this is a good variant. variation to include because the long head of the triceps crosses both the elbow joint and the shoulder joint, and so varying your shoulder position can impact which region of the triceps you're emphasizing. As of now, I don't think we have the scientific evidence to be able to say with any real confidence which shoulder position is best at targeting which division of the triceps, and there are most likely going to be individual differences regardless. So my best recommendation is to include a variety of tricep exercises that put the shoulder in different positions, periodically swapping them in and out. And like I said at the beginning, guys are looking to get started on the full week of training right away, I just launched my new push-pull legs hypertrophy system over on jeffnipper.com. This covers 12 weeks of push-pull legs workouts and is split up into three phases. Phase one uses the workouts that I'll be doing here on the channel, which have moderate to high volume and moderate to high intensity. Phase two is a low volume and ultra high intensity phase. It's a really fun and unique four weeks of training. Phase three is what I'm calling the super compensation phase. This is where we jack volume all the way up, even higher than in phase. phase one and do very high rep metabolic style training. The idea is that after the low volume of phase two, it will be much more sensitive to the increase in volume in phase three. Then after week 12, there's a full deload week so you can start the program over again and keep running it through for as long as you're continuing to make progress. For launch week, it's going to be 30% off so you can get the full 12 week program for just 35 bucks. You also get a full spreadsheet for tracking your progress, an ebook that explains everything you need to know about the program, and access to a full video library of exercise. demos from me. There's over 75 exercises included in the program. It's designed for intermediate to advanced trainees, so if you're still in your first year or two of training, I'd suggest running through my fundamentals program at least once first before moving on to this routine. For the record, I'll be running this program myself for the next three months, so if you want to run it as well, you can pick it up over at jeffnipper.com, which I'll put a link to in the description box down below. So that's it for this one, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video, subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you guys all here in the next one.

So without further ado, let's dig into push day number one, where we'll be doing seven exercises that target the chest, shoulders, and triceps. All right, so after a quick warmup of five minutes on the treadmill or stairmaster and a few upper body dynamic drills like arm circles and cable external rotations, we're kicking the workout off with just one near max effort set of three to five reps on the bench press now obviously before that heavy working set we'll want to do a full warm-up pyramid to get the blood flowing and prepare ourselves mentally for that heavy load to come on the top set and i'll put my full warm-up protocol here if you want to pause and read all right so with the bench press you want to set up an arch that feels comfortable to you with the most important thing being that you get tight and stable on the bench it doesn't have to be a huge power lifting style arch but you should at least dig your upper back into the bench so you'll have a strong base of support you should also pinch your shoulder blades together and tuck your shoulder blades down That's what I'm doing here as I roll my elbows forward, which will further increase that stability. For the max effort top set, have a spotter help you unrack the bar by lifting the weight out softly, not yanking it up aggressively, and make sure you have three points of contact with the bench your butt, your upper back, and your head.

Lower the bar down and slightly forward until it reaches the highest contact point on your chest, and then press the bar slightly back and up with as much explosive force as possible. Your elbows should be slightly tucked on the negative, and then you can optionally flare them out as you push the weight up. However, some people may find flaring uncomfortable on their shoulders, and in reality, there's a pretty wide range of elbow tuck that's perfectly fine on the bench press because when you look at the way the pec fibers fan out, anything from 0 to 30 degrees of elbow tuck is going to line up with the majority of the pec fibers anyway. So within this range, you can pick a level of flare that you feel working your pecs well, that you're reasonably strong with, and that doesn't give you any pain or discomfort. If you don't have a spotter, you can try unracking the bar with your butt up off the bench.

This is legal and competitive. and then once you've unracked, drop your butt down onto the bench and start your set from there. Now, one thing worth noting is that the International Powerlifting Federation recently updated their rulebook in an attempt to combat the increasingly out-of-control range of motion problem with more and more exaggerated arching.

So now you need to reach a certain amount of elbow depth in order for the lift to count. So according to the new rules, you need to get the bottom of your elbow below the top of your shoulder joint in order for the lift to count. So this is what bottom of the elbow below top of the shoulder. shoulder joint looks like to me and I would say that as long as your arch isn't really massive this shouldn't be an issue for most of you watching anyway and this is a rough guide for how difficult your top set should be on the final reps you're grinding it out the bar speed has clearly slowed down but you're still keeping your form tight and maybe you could have gotten one more rep but likely no more than that now if you don't like to bench press for whatever reason feel free to swap it out for a flat dumbbell press or even a machine press for the same number of sets okay so after our heavy top set we're doing two sets of 10 reps on the larsen press press. For these, you'll want to drop the weight back to about 75% of what you used for your heavy top set.

So if you did 295 pounds for your top set, you'd do about 225 pounds for your Larson press. Now, the Larson press is basically just a normal bench press, except your legs lie flat on the bench rather than having your feet planted on the floor. I'll usually grab another bench or a box that I can set my feet on so they aren't left hanging, and that helps me keep my balance on the bench a bit better. So you'll do the same setup with the same arch.

The only difference is that you keep your feet up. This way, you'll completely eliminate any leg drive, which will help isolate the pecs, front delts, and triceps more. And then to make the movement even more hypertrophic, I'll take a slightly closer grip, which will increase the range of motion and shift the emphasis slightly more toward the upper pecs and triceps. And unlike the top set where we're using explosive force on every rep, here we want to use a nice smooth and controlled tempo with a one to two second negative and a one to two second positive with just a soft touch on the chest at the bottom. You want to feel the pecs and triceps stretching and contracting as you press rather than just moving the weight from point A to point B.

All right, after that, we're moving on to three sets of it. eight to ten reps on the standing dumbbell arnold press for the most part i think any optimized push day should have both a horizontal press to target the pecs more and a vertical press to target the shoulders more of course if you're really pressed on time you could collapse them both into a single incline press like we did in our minimalistic workouts but here we're going for maximum effectiveness over maximum efficiency so we want to do both pushing movements so for these you want to start with the dumbbells facing palms in and then as you press you're going to flare your elbows out until until you get to full elbow extension. and then reverse the motion back down under control.

In the past, I've often hit these in a higher rep range and thought of them more as a mind-muscle connection pump-style exercise. And because of this, I've often limited myself to 30 or 40-pound dumbbells. But lately, I've been loading them quite a bit heavier, and I've worked my way up to 60-pound dumbbells for sets of 8 to 10. I've found that thinking of it more like a barbell overhead press by squeezing my glutes and driving through my heels has helped me overload my shoulders better. And these days, I think of it more like an in-between movement.

I still want to feel my delts working, and I'm going to do that. and I still want to get a good shoulder pump, but I'm also much more focused on gradually increasing the weight as well. Also, this is an exercise where wearing a belt and wrist straps can make a pretty big difference. So if you have either of those, I definitely recommend throwing them on for this one. Okay, after that, we're super setting two sets of 12 to 15 reps on the cable press around with two sets of a static pec stretch for a 30 second hold.

So the press around is one of those exercises that can feel a bit awkward for some people at first, but once they play around with it for a few weeks, it tends to really click. I think of it like a combination between a cable fly and a cable press, except you're doing one arm at a time. And the key thing is that you're pressing around your body past the midline to get the most end-range contraction out of the pecs possible. If you think about pretty much every other exercise that hits the pecs, they almost all stop at or before the midline.

When you press, you stop before the midline. When you fly, you stop before the midline. When you dip, you stop before the midline.

But the chest isn't fully contracted until well past the midline. So with the press around, we're trying to target that very end range of motion that hardly ever gets hit. Now is that end range of motion really important for hypertrophy?

I'm not sure. As far as I know, it's never been directly studied, at least not in this context, but I certainly can't see it hurting, especially if the stretch isn't being compromised. So after hitting one side on the press around, we'll stretch that same pec for a 30 second hold, and then switch and do a press around with the other arm, and then stretch that other pec for a 30 second hold as well.

Now, three years ago I uploaded a video breaking down this study, which showed that holding a stretch for 30 seconds in between sets at about a 7 out of 10 intensity, so just before the point of pain or discomfort, was able to increase muscle growth by approximately 50%. The group that did traditional training without interset stretching saw a 6.2 millimeter increase in muscle thickness, while the group that did stretching in between sets saw a 9.4 millimeter increase on average. Since then, more research has come out on the topic. And just this past month, a new review was published by Schoenfeld and colleagues, where they concluded that interset stretching may enhance muscular adaptations without increasing the time spent exercising. That's because you can just do the stretching while you're resting in between sets.

So the benefit of stretching in between sets seems to be gaining, as opposed to losing, scientific support over time. And we also don't need to worry about any potential strength interference because we're doing the static stretching on our last exercise for the pecs for the day. However, even if we were doing that stretching earlier, it wouldn't be a big deal because, contrary to popular belief, static stretching doesn't seem to interfere with strength unless the stretch is held for longer than 60 to 90 seconds. So to me, this seems to be something with only potential upsides with no clear downsides as of now.

I mean, you're just resting between sets anyway, why not add some stretching? Okay, after that we're moving on to three sets of 12 to 15 reps on the crossbody cable y-raise. Now, I first saw this movement in a training vlog from one of the natural bodybuilding goats, Alberto Nunez.

He was talking about how he gets a much better stretch on these than regular cable lateral raises, and I can see why. For example, if you look at the lean-away Egyptian cable lateral raise, which I'm still a big fan of, by the way, you'll notice that your body sort of blocks you from getting a really deep stretch on the delts. And just think about it.

If you're going to stretch your side delts as much as possible, you're not just going to put your arm against your side. Instead, you're going to pull your arm across your body, and that way you should feel a big stretch in your delts. So with the cross-body Y-raise, that's kind of the stretch we're going for, except under-act.

of tension. And the way Alberto described these was to think about drawing a sword at the bottom and then sort of flicking it up and out at the top. Now, one thing to be aware of is you don't want to turn this into a front raise.

We're not lifting the cable up in front of us. We're lifting it out and back in a diagonal plane of motion. Also, if we look at the anatomy of the deltoid muscle fibers, it's pretty common knowledge that there are three heads.

There's the front or anterior head, the side or lateral head, and the rear or posterior head. However, the latest anatomy literature suggests that the deltoids may be better thought of as having seven intramuscular segments. And so some of these compartments, like the D4 or D5 segments, could be hit more effectively with something sort of in between a front raise and a lateral raise. So something like a Y raise. The bottom line is that lifting the arm out at slightly different angles and in slightly different planes of motion is more likely to maximize development of the entire shoulder and help create that round 3D delt look more effectively.

Okay, up next we've got three sets of eight reps on the squeeze only tricep press down, supersetted with three sets of eight reps on the stretch only overhead tricep extension. And we'll be hitting both of these exercises as a superset, so doing them back and forth. back to back without resting in between.

So basically we're doing partial half reps on both of these exercises, except on the press downs, we're only doing the second half of the range of motion. So hitting the squeeze part only. And on the overhead tricep extension, we're only doing the first half of the range.

motion. So hitting the stretch part only. Now I want to give credit to hypertrophy coach for this combo.

I first saw these on his Instagram. So I tried it out for myself and it immediately clicked. And the reason I think it works so well is the second half of the press down is the hardest part of that exercise.

Hypertrophy coach calls this staying where it's the hardest. But you can't just do half reps because we know that the stretch aspect of the lift is probably the most important. However, it's actually really hard to get a good stretch on the triceps with press downs. So instead we'll just flip around and do half rep stretched partials. with the overhead extension.

So this is a fun combo move, and I think you guys will really feel your triceps working in a unique way if you want to try it out. Then to finish off the workout, we're doing two sets of 10 to 12 reps on the crossbody tricep extension. The goal here is to get in a little extra tricep volume with the arm positioned at a less conventional angle.

Most people pretty much always do tricep extensions and tricep press downs with their arms tucked into the sides, but much more rarely, if ever, do tricep extensions with the arms flared out to the side. So I think this is a good variant. variation to include because the long head of the triceps crosses both the elbow joint and the shoulder joint, and so varying your shoulder position can impact which region of the triceps you're emphasizing. As of now, I don't think we have the scientific evidence to be able to say with any real confidence which shoulder position is best at targeting which division of the triceps, and there are most likely going to be individual differences regardless. So my best recommendation is to include a variety of tricep exercises that put the shoulder in different positions, periodically swapping them in and out.

And like I said at the beginning, guys are looking to get started on the full week of training right away, I just launched my new push-pull legs hypertrophy system over on jeffnipper.com. This covers 12 weeks of push-pull legs workouts and is split up into three phases. Phase one uses the workouts that I'll be doing here on the channel, which have moderate to high volume and moderate to high intensity. Phase two is a low volume and ultra high intensity phase.

It's a really fun and unique four weeks of training. Phase three is what I'm calling the super compensation phase. This is where we jack volume all the way up, even higher than in phase.

phase one and do very high rep metabolic style training. The idea is that after the low volume of phase two, it will be much more sensitive to the increase in volume in phase three. Then after week 12, there's a full deload week so you can start the program over again and keep running it through for as long as you're continuing to make progress.

For launch week, it's going to be 30% off so you can get the full 12 week program for just 35 bucks. You also get a full spreadsheet for tracking your progress, an ebook that explains everything you need to know about the program, and access to a full video library of exercise. demos from me. There's over 75 exercises included in the program.

It's designed for intermediate to advanced trainees, so if you're still in your first year or two of training, I'd suggest running through my fundamentals program at least once first before moving on to this routine. For the record, I'll be running this program myself for the next three months, so if you want to run it as well, you can pick it up over at jeffnipper.com, which I'll put a link to in the description box down below. So that's it for this one, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video, subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you guys all here in the next one.

Transcript for:Push Day Workout Overview

Transcript for:
Push Day Workout Overview