Okay, welcome everyone to the first episode of the Full Body Science Applied series. It's great to be doing these videos again. So in this series I want to go through five full body workouts as part of my new high frequency split that I talked about in my last video. where we're pretty much hitting every body part every training day. So if that sounds totally crazy to you, make sure you check out my last video for some context on that first.
So the way I've set this up is that each of the five workouts will have a specific body part focus. So we'll be prioritizing one muscle each day with slightly more emphasis. And we'll be starting today with the first leg focused workout.
So our main focus today is going to be the quads, hamstrings, and glutes. Now, as always, I kick off every workout with a quick warmup routine. So I'll do about five to 10 minutes on the elliptical or stairmaster.
then three to four minutes of dynamic stretching, and then I'll foam roll out any tight areas. And I already did a full science applied video on my warm-up routine, and I'll link that down below. So up first we're doing four sets of four reps on the squat using 80% of our one rep max.
Now it's really important that these sets not feel super difficult, so by the time you get to the fourth set you should still have about two or three reps left in the tank. And that's because going to complete failure on heavy compound lifts is especially bad when running a high frequency split, because if you push it too close to failure, it can really mess up your training the next day. So remember, squats activate a ton of muscle mass, including the spinal erectors of the back, meaning they have a pretty high potential to interfere with other exercises you might have planned the next day.
So instead of going for max effort, you really wanna hone in on using perfect technique at the assigned intensity. Now I wanna quickly look at squat depth here because that's something a lot of people struggle with. A few years back, I used to think that you should always squat as deep as possible because one 2002 study found higher glute activation on the full squat then the parallel squat, and the partial squat.
However, the study was limited by using the same weight for all three variations, and when it was replicated by Contreras and colleagues using relative loading, they found no difference between parallel squats and full squats, not only for the glutes, but for any of the muscles tested. So this implies that as long as you're going to at least parallel, you're in the clear if your goal is hypertrophy. Now, that doesn't mean you can just get under the bar and do knee bends, as previous work from Bloomquist and colleagues found that very shallow quarter squats paled in comparison to parallel squats for leg gains. So for people like myself who can get all the way down with just a little bit of butt wink, I'd say to go for it.
But for those with more limited hip or ankle mobility, apart from doing specific mobility drills to open those joints up, I'd say settling for a parallel squat is probably your best bet. Now one cue I've been using on the squat lately that you can try is to think about screwing your feet into the floor. So after you've set the bar in either a high or low bar position, walked it back two or three steps, set your stance to a width that feels comfortable to you, and taking a breath deep into your gut, not up into your chest, you might get even tighter by screwing your feet into the floor, causing your foot to make firm contact with the outer wall of your shoe, creating a more stable base of support.
And this cue can help prevent the knees from caving in as well. And for the squat, we're running a weekly undulating progression where the load alternates between heavy weeks and light weeks. So in week one, we're doing a heavy four by four, then in week two, dropping back to a lighter three by six, then it's back to fours in week three but with heavier weight to a lighter three by six again in the fourth week and the idea here is to strike a balance between gaining strength while still getting in enough so-called effective reps for hypertrophy okay so after squats we're moving on to three sets of eight on the incline dumbbell press so rather than moving on to our next leg movement right away we're hitting an upper body movement first to allow the lower body to recover of it This approach is based on findings from a 2017 systematic review which found that longer rest periods tend to promote greater hypertrophy because they allow for higher overall volume load.
So in my eyes, the more rest you can get between exercises for the same muscle groups, the better. So we'll hit some pecs, delts, and triceps while the legs rest a bit. And we're choosing an exercise here that targets all of the pushing muscles quite well, as we're able to stimulate three muscles with a single exercise, incurring less recovery demand per unit of time.
Now when it comes to muscle stimulation, we know from some EMG data that not only is there more upper chest activity with the incline press, there's also more deltoid activity with increasing bench inclination as well, especially when using a wider grip. This means that we can get a very nice mix of pecs and delts with this single movement. And we're opting for a freeweight dumbbell press over a machine press here, mostly because the lateral delts will be much more active with the freeweight variation.
According to data from Schick and colleagues, even though there wasn't much difference between free weights and the Smith machine for the anterior delts and the pecs, clearly the lateral delts were far more active when using free weights. This is most likely because the lateral delts perform a stabilizing role to help keep the dumbbells from tipping backward or forward. Also because we're not isolating the triceps on day one, I'm bringing the dumbbells a bit more down into the front with my elbows more tucked than usual, and this is going to target the upper pecs. a bit more as well since it's emphasizing shoulder flexion.
So to get the most out of this, you want to think about bringing the dumbbells down and forward and then pressing them up and back toward your face. Okay, up next we're hitting three sets of 10 on the lying leg curl. Now we know from basic biomechanics that the squats we just hit didn't do a good job of hitting the hamstrings because they're lengthening at the knee while shortening at the hip. Also, even though an exercise like the Romanian deadlift, which is coming up on day two, does hit the hamstrings through hip extension, One of the heads of the hamstrings, the biceps femoris short head, only crosses the knee joint, meaning it's biomechanically impossible for it to contribute to hip extension.
This means that if you want to hit all four heads of the hamstrings, you simply need to do some kind of knee flexion-based movement like a leg curl. Now remember, we're hitting RDLs on day two, so we want to choose an exercise that isn't going to have your hamstrings feeling too sore for those the next day. So we want to pick a less damaging exercise here like the lying leg curl over something like the glute ham raise. which is going to load the hamstrings in a more highly stretched position.
So as you can probably tell, how you sequence your exercises throughout the week becomes much more important on a high-frequency full-body split, so you avoid that interference with what you have planned the next day. All right, up next, we've got three sets of 10 reps on the lat pulldown. Again, here the key is stimulating the desired muscle group without generating too much overall fatigue.
So you could argue that, well, pull-ups might be a better choice as an overall backbuilder. But when programming a heavy exercise like the squat, and a pretty heavy dumbbell press as well, on the same day, it'd be tough to then also hit heavy weighted pull-ups. I mean that would be fine if you were only hitting your full body two or three days a week since you'd have plenty of time between those workouts to recover. When hitting a high frequency full body split, I try to only have one or two highly demanding movements per day to avoid those recovery issues.
Granted, we'll still be hitting heavy pull-ups on our back-focused full-body workout, because I do think they're worth including on a day that's actually more focused on prioritizing the back. We're also not hitting any horizontal pull or row on this day, including both a vertical pull and a horizontal pull five days a week, which just add up to way too much weekly volume for the back, so I tend to alternate a vertical pull like a pull-down with a horizontal pull like a row or a face pull from day to day throughout the week. Okay, up next, we're going to hit our first advanced intensity technique with three sets of a 12-12 drop set on the Easy Bar Bicep Curl.
Now, I definitely don't like to use a lot of intensity techniques on a high-frequency split, just because they do impose a higher recovery demand than just straight overloading sets. However, because the biceps are such a relatively small muscle, they simply won't generate as much fatigue on a drop set as something like the quads or the lats would. So because this technique isn't likely to impair performance over the next few training days, I think it makes sense to push it here so we can stimulate more muscle fibers per working set.
So this is the only exercise we'll be taking to failure on day one. And what I've been focusing on here is swinging the bar out in an arc rather than curling it back toward my chest. And I also queue for supination by thinking about driving my pinky up into the barbell as I curl. And we're going to round out this workout with three sets of hanging leg raises. I think any complete ab routine should include at least one exercise that brings the legs up toward the chest like a leg raise.
and one that brings the upper body down toward the legs like a crunch. And remember that research tells us that contrary to popular opinion, the squat actually doesn't activate the rectus abdominis or external obliques much at all. So if you want to maximize development of the abs, it's important to hit them directly.
And that's going to finish out the workout. Now for the record, if you guys are pressed on time, you can run each pair of exercises we just covered as supersets. So for example, for the first two exercises, you can hit one set of squats, rest a minute or two, hit a set of inclined dumbbell press, rest another minute or two, then go back to squats, and so on.
But since I'm not really limited on time myself, I prefer to just hit each exercise one at a time. And if you're interested in putting all of this together into a complete 10-week training program, you can check out my new high-frequency full-body program over on jeffnipper.com. And I decided I'm going to extend the launch for this sale for one more week so you can still get it for 25% off up until next weekend, and then it'll go up to $39.99 from there. And I'd say it'll probably be another four or five weeks before I get all the workouts up here on the channel.
And also I should say this program is designed for intermediate to advanced level lifters. So if you only have a year or two of training experience, I definitely recommend running my fundamentals program first instead, which also uses a full body split, but it only has you in the gym three days per week instead of five. So I'll put a link to the new full body program over here next to my head if you guys would like to check it out. Don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss the rest of the series.
Leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video and I'll see you guys all here in the next one.