foreign okay what's going on guys and welcome to the first pull workout of the ultimate push-pull leg Series in this video we're hitting six pulling exercises the target the back rear delts and biceps and then in the coming videos I'll be taking through the rest of the push-pull legs workouts to complete the full week of training now I noticed that on my last push day upload there were a few people that were asking what the difference is between this new push-pull leg series and my previous ones from 2018 and 2021. the main difference is that both of these programs were power building routines so they were focused on both strength and hypertrophy more evenly whereas this new routine is much more bodybuilding focused this means we'll be doing more exercise variation including a bunch of new exercises and more novel intensity techniques than we did before and this time while doing plenty of bodybuilding work we'll be using what I call a minimalist approach to the squat bench and deadlift doing just the minimum volume required to make progress on those lifts so for those of you who do care about strength there is some strength work in this program but it's very minimal and I'll always offer substitution options for the power lifts if you want to make it even more bodybuilding focused and as before if you want to have everything in your hands right away you can pick up the full ultimate push-pull legs hypertrophy plan over on jeffnipper.com and I'll have a little more info about that at the end of the video alright so after a quick five minute warm-up on the treadmill or StairMaster in about 10 arm circles per side and 10 cable external rotations per side we're kicking things off with four feeder sets on the lat pull down for 10 reps each now the idea of a feeder set is something I learned from my great mentor John Meadows we do these a lot together when we train it's basically a way of warming up where you'll do four or five feeder sets gradually building up in weight until you get to one all-out set to failure so for your first feeder set you'll pick a light weight and do it for 10 reps this should be very low exertion at an rpe of four or five just meant to get the blood flowing then you'll rest for a minute or two increase the weight a bit into another 10 reps and now you're up to an rpe of six or seven so it's getting a bit harder you'll rest for another minute or two increase the weight again and do another 10 reps and now you're at another rpe of seven or eight so you've got two or three reps left in the tank here and you'll increase the weight one last time and try to get 10 reps and this time you're going to an rpe of 10 so all the way to failure now the argument you'll hear against doing feeder sets is that they might end up fatiguing you for the main working set so some might argue that it'd be better to do a shorter warm-up with less sets and Reps so you get to the working sets faster this is the approach that I also take on most exercises especially when I'm trying to overload with more weight however on a more mind muscle connection based exercise like a lat pull down where many people do struggle finding a good mind muscle connection with their back I find that feeder sets can accomplish two things first they can help you get into a better Groove with the movement so that by the time you reach the failure set your lats are engaging much better and second they can be helpful in finding the right weight for the failure set because you select the weight for that set based on how hard the feeder sets felt for example if your third feeder set already feels pretty heavy you know you won't need to add much weight for the failure set on the other hand if your third feeder set still feels pretty easy you know you're strong on this day and should bump the weight up for the failure set and then after that first failure set I'll rest for two or three minutes and do one more set to failure and I challenge myself to reach the same number of reps as I did on the first failure set with the same weight but because of fatigue that's not always possible oftentimes I'll end up getting seven or eight reps for the second failure set and then after that I'll do a mini drop set by stripping the weight back by about 30 percent and cranking out four or five more reps I like doing this at the end just to make sure the back fibers are in fact reaching very high levels of activation because with the lat pull down in particular you might reach technical failure but find that your back could probably still do quite a few more reps if you just cheated a little bit so rather than cheating I compensate by doing this mini drop set to really finish things off and I'm using a middle overhand grip at about 1 to 1.5 times shoulder width here when doing straight sets I'll often use a different grip width for each set however because the entire point of feeder sets is to get in a good Groove and establish a strength Baseline I'd rather keep my grip consistent from set to set here and the middle grip is usually the sweet spot because if you go too wide you'll shorten the range of motion and if you go really close the biceps tend to take over a bit more I'd also recommend using straps on your failure sets this way your grip strength won't limit the number of reps your back can do and I also find that most people are able to feel a much stronger mind muscle connection when they strap in if you don't have straps I'd recommend at least using a thumbless grip which in my coaching experience is one of the best cues for helping people engage their back better one last thing I've noticed from many of the ifbb pros who train at my gym is that they aren't super stiff and uptight when they train I think this is a good thing when I allow my body to move more naturally and be more fluid within reason I can feel the target muscle working so much better than if I'm very stiff and uptight so on exercises like this I think it's okay if you allow yourself to lean and rock a bit as long as you're feeling the target muscle pulling and stretching under control especially on the negative okay after that we're hitting three sets of 10 to 12 reps on the Omni grip chest supported machine I mean grip just means that you're using a different grip for each set so for set one we're using a wider grip on set two we're using a slightly closer grip and then on set three we're using either a neutral or under a hand grip now I'm using this panata chest supportive machine at my gym but you can use any chest supportive machine that you feel working your back well that can be a simple t-bar row or if you don't have machine access you can simply do a Helms row with dumbbells bracing your chest against the back of an incline bench in my opinion every pull day should have at least two main types of exercises a vertical pull like the lat pull down we just did and a horizontal pull like the machine row we're doing here now and while both exercises will hit the entire back to a substantial degree the lat pull Downs will emphasize the lats and Terrace muscles while the rows will emphasize the traps and rhomboids of the mid-back especially if we focus on actively squeezing our shoulder blades together and like I mentioned earlier we're using three different grips for each of the three working sets simply because the back is so complex and it's made up of so many different muscles that I'll pull on the skeleton in slightly different ways so hitting those muscles from slightly different angles by varying your grip position makes a lot of sense okay after that we're moving on to a superset of bottom half dumbbell lat pullovers and a static lat stretch for a 30 second hold and we're doing two sets of each so we'll do a set of pullovers stretch our right lat for 30 seconds stretch our left lap for 30 seconds rest for 30 seconds then do a second set of pullovers then scratch our left lat for 30 seconds stretch our right lat for 30 seconds and then move on to the next exercise so just note that we're switching the order of the side we're stretching first on each of those supersets now I'm calling these bottom half pullovers because we're completely cutting out the top half of the range of motion instead just staying in the more lengthened stretched aspect of the lift and this is because there's virtually zero tension on the lats at the top now I'm not sure how many people in my audience are aware of this ongoing debate but the pullover has been recently added to the chopping block of exercises for the last little while online some coach have been arguing that because the labs don't have the best leverage with the arms positioned overhead the pullover is probably not a very good exercise choice for the lats however just because the lats aren't optimally leveraged with the arms overhead doesn't mean that they can't still experience stretch and tension as long as the bulk of the muscle fibers are behind the active joint which they are in this case they'll still have some leverage on that joint and I personally still like the dumbbell lat pullover as a stretch type exercise for the lats for two very simple reasons first I always feel a great stretch on my lats when I do them and second my lats are always sore for a day or two after doing them now neither of those two things are ideal for determining exercise selection on their own but when they line up over years of training I think they're perfectly reasonable proxies for muscle activation of course the only way to really know if the pullover is a good lat exercise would be if someone did a longitudinal hypertrophy study where they measured the lat thickness of a group doing pullovers versus the lat thickness of a group not doing pullovers across several months but as far as I'm aware that study doesn't exist so until that study comes out and potentially proves me wrong I still think lap pullovers are a solid option to include as for the stretching I do one lat at a time by just grabbing onto something solid and leaning my hips back until I feel a nice deep stretch all along one side of my back I'll hold that stretch for 30 seconds at a 7 out of 10 intensity so just before the feeling of pain or discomfort and then I'll switch and do the other side I talked about the benefits of intercept stretching in my last push Day video so if you didn't catch that one I'll link it down below okay after that we're doing three sets of 12 to 15 reps on the Omni Direction face pull again omnidirection just means that we're pulling from a different direction on each set on set one we'll position the cable low and pull from low to high on set two we'll position the cable at shoulder height and pull more or less straight across in the middle and then on set three we'll position the cable high and pull down toward the eyes and again this just goes back to the concept of the back being a big complex web of different muscles and so while it is true that a vertical pull and a horizon horizontal pull are the only two movements you really need to grow your back I think that if we're trying to maximize back development hitting things from a variety of different angles is likely more optimal okay so after that we're moving on to three sets of six to eight reps on the Easy Bar bicep curl I find a lot of people neglect lower rep bicep work and just aim for the pump and mind muscle connection but I think including a bit of both is important so here we're using some decent weight and focusing on Progressive overload in a low to moderate rep Zone you can treat this more like you would a bench press or a deadlift where you should track the weights you're using over time and make sure that either the weight or the number of reps you're hitting is increasing from week to week obviously it's important to keep your form consistent but a little bit of hip drive on the positive to get the bar moving is okay as long as you're controlling the negative on each and every rep all right and then to finish off the workout we're doing two sets of 10 to 12 reps on the bottom half preacher curl so here we're doing partial reps in the stretched aspect of the lift only I decided to include these based on the results of this 2021 study from sadle and colleagues which split 30 32 subjects into one of three groups one group did only the bottom half of their preacher curls so they curled from 0 to 50 degrees of elbow flexion another group did only the top half of their preacher curls so they curled from 80 to 130 degrees of elbow flexion and then the third group was a control group they didn't train at all after five weeks the bottom half group saw more than twice the gains in muscle thickness as the top half group indicating that the lengthened stretched aspect of preacher curls is the more hypertrophic part of that lift and then in the study the authors highlighted a whole bunch of other literature pointing toward the idea that training a muscle at longer muscle lengths is very important for muscle growth and here I like to do one side at a time so I'll start with my weaker arm and then match the reps with my stronger arm this is good for preventing any little bicep asymmetries from developing and also helps me focus on really feeling the stretch and mentally focusing all the tension to one bicep at a time and like I said earlier if you'd like to have the entire push-pull legs program all in one place so you can just go to the gym and run it you can pick up the full 12 week ultimate push leg system over on jeffnipper.com I think it's my most interesting program to date in terms of How It's structured and sequenced across three distinct phases of training and it's definitely my most bodybuilding Focus program to date as well there's also a four day five day and six day per week version of the program available depending on how many days per week you can train so I'll leave a little more info about that in the description box down below if you'd like to check it out and 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