003 Training splits - what to consider when splitting full body workouts into upper / lower workouts

Welcome back to another episode of hypertrophy past and present and as always we have a new slash I guess old workout plan to talk about with you guys today so one from the silver era before anabolic infiltrated bodybuilding and we have a topic that Chris you'll discuss with us in a bit more detail later on now before I jump into the workout plan is anything you want to start us off with or you're happy for me get started. I'm happy if you to get started I'm excited about this one I think we've got a really good connection between the routine that you've selected and the topic that we're going to be talking about from a physiological point of view. This is a little bit different to the plans we've talked about over the last couple of weeks so obviously we've covered two different plans so far and they we sort of highlighted how they evolved over time the second plan being about 25 30 years later than the first plan now what we have today is a plan that was discussed by Clancy Ross so Clancy was a silver era bodybuilder who won Miss America in 1945 and the plan we're going to talk about today was part of in the lead up to his Miss America win now he obviously did follow different plans over time so I'm not saying this is the only plan that he followed but there's a couple really interesting things about this plan so I think it's definitely worth us discussing because it does stand out a little bit from some of the other plans that we have talked about or we'll talk about now for some of you who've heard of Clancy you may be aware of him because he's well known for being an advocate for this set system so the the two plans you've discussed so far they use single sets they didn't even talk about sets well the the York one sort of talked about it in the sense of like adding extra exercises mainly so Clancy he really was a big advocate for adding an additional sets now this was so this this idea of adding sets are developed in the 40s 1940s and then 19 fees it became a lot more common and before we have the common place set system which is your standard you know 23 sets of however many repetitions what we had was what was called the split set system and so the plan that we're talking about today this was an early version of the set system and it was what was being referred to as a split set system which basically means they would repeat the exercise within the same workout but they wouldn't do it as straight sets they would do it kind of like a circuit so they would do an exercise do another exercise maybe do another one and then they go back to the first one and then they do another one do another one and then they go back to it again later so most exercises were being repeated sort of two or three times within the workout so backdrop so Clancy he's come from doing full body single sets and then lead up to before his Miss America when he's now started to implement this split set system so an example of this split set set system worker that he was following was as follows so it was an upright row going into an incline press going into a lateral raise and then an alternate curl and press with the dumbbell which is an interesting exercise a pullover and the floor press a bent over row a dumbbell curl a dip sit up side bend and essentially he repeated each of those effectively two more times each and then he added in squats leg press and calf raise and he actually performed those as sets so the upper body stuff was as a circuit but sets were actually being used in the lower body exercises now he followed this for I'm not sure how long a period of time he says and then what he found was by the time he was getting to his lower body exercises he was too fatigued and that was suffering and his legs were a low point for him he needed to emphasize his legs so what he ended up doing is actually and this is in the 40s so this is really early on for this to happen is he split out that workout and he kept the workout the same but he split the upper body exercises to the morning and the lower body exercises to later in the day now a couple interesting things here so he turned this into an upper lower but he didn't do the way most people do upper low today he didn't do you know upper lower day off upper lower day off day off he did upper and lower in the same day so if he's still training Monday Wednesday Friday now he does talk about in the lead up to some comps sometimes he would then go upper lower upper lower on on consecutive days but he preferred especially for longer periods of time doing it like this where you would do up in the morning and lower in the afternoon and there's one more point I want to make which I think is very interesting and he talks about when his cardiovascular capacity improved he actually went back to integrating this as a single workout so he removed the split and just did it all in one session again now there's a lot there I'm going to pause Chris what are your initial feelings thoughts about all of this there's so much here to talk about but you know if I if I go too deep into this serial too quickly then I'll be basically just helping straighten to the second half of our planned call for today so let me just start from the from the beginning and just you know look at some of these exercises I know that that's not our focus for today but it's always interesting to just look at some of these exercises so in terms of the exercise selection I mean obviously you know we've got some differences here from what we talked about previously we've got a floor press and which is essentially a horizontal press it's like kind of like the chest press or bench press that we would have today and so obviously that's slightly different from the aesthetic choices that we've been seeing previously where we didn't really have much chest work it was all kind of overhead pressing and either pressing work was all sort of focusing on the deltoids so that's an interesting there even so we do still have quite a strong focus on a deltoid development you know we still got upright row in there we've got a lateral raise in there got an incline press in there and we've got the the curl and press with the nose and there's a lot of shoulder work despite the fact that we've now introduced this slight diversion from the very strong unique or not unique so much as targeted if you like focus on the deltoids we're now kind of just saying well yeah we're going to keep all of that we're going to add in chest work as well in terms of back work it I think it's a little bit on the weak side we've got a pull over and we've got a row we don't have that sort of wide grip pull up or pull down that I keep looking for whenever I look at these routines interesting we have got a dip in there which I don't think we've seen previously I mean maybe it would have been in one of the alternate exercises but it wasn't in the main listing which is an interesting choice because dips can be really really effective for that sort of triceps development not really it's interesting to see that appearing for the first time now previously I mentioned that when I see a leg raise it's very interesting because that is breakfast from Morris from a hip flex point of view and that kind of starts to help you get over the fact that you don't have any extension machine so we saw that appearing for the first time last time and now I'm seeing it again here I don't believe he was doing the leg raise and then when he split it that's when he added the leg raise and I believe he added maybe the leg press there as well so he did add additional lower body exercises when he was able to split the session so when he was doing them as a combined session it was just the squats and the calf raises right and then when he expanded the sessions by doing them in separate times of day or even on sequential days he's adding those extra exercises interesting choice so I don't see a value so much in duplicating the squat with the leg press I mean there might be some differences according to foot position on the plate I don't know what the equipment would have looked like but certainly that leg raises a really interesting choice because it shows that knowledge or understanding of regional growth being kind of possible certainly within the quadriceps group now final comment on exercise selection that I have is just something that we've mentioned multiple times and it's the absence or the underuse of deadlift variations for the hamstrings because really when I look at these kind of programs and when we've looked at these and analyzed these together in the past it's like where's the hamstrings work I think we're spoiled for choice these days we've got some really nice hamstrings comb machines we've got the ability to do 45 degree back extensions we've got as many deadlift variations at any height that you might want to use you know at any variation you can think of and those are all possible to us when you look at these routines like even given the lack of equipment there is still a little bit of a deficit there in that regard and so you kind of wonder whether it's just the fact that they're not looking at them when they're not thinking about them or it's just not something that's kind of occurred as an important factor but certainly that would be I think the thing that really jumps out to me as an emission is that hamstrings? He does add deadlifts in later on in a couple of years time he does it in his program so it's interesting it's not here yet. That's what I've really got to say about the exercise selection side of things. I think really the comments regarding the structure of the workouts with it being initially a very very long workout. Now actually let's just pause there for a moment and introduce a question that we didn't talk about before we started the podcast but I hope that it is relevant which is that a lot of the questions that I get when I do a weekly Q&A are related to how many sets is it possible to do in a workout? Now I think we can answer that in the physiological section of today's call but I think what will be useful now is just to pause and say what was the perspective of that question in these periods of time that we're describing? How many sets, how many exercises were people doing? Because you've shared some information about this with me before offline and I think it's really interesting just to go there for a moment. A lot of the routines I think you mentioned on this podcast before, a lot of the routines early on tended to have 10 to 12 exercises in them. It was a couple of years ago. A number that really comes up again and again and again. But two things I think you've mentioned. One is that sometimes people would do more exercises than that and also when you start to introduce set systems like this, I mean I'm thinking this is an upper body 10 exercise circuit and that's being done three times. So that's 30 sets in total just from the upper body section. So should we just like kind of go there for a moment? Yeah definitely. So there's a few interesting things when you look at sort of total set numbers in a workout because even the guys who were doing very high sets like Clancy here with 30 sets in the upper body session, a lot of these guys would often talk about the value in what they would call the limited programs where for a period of time you would drop all the way back down to often 8 to 10 sets in a session and they often talked about these being very effective for gaining bulk. So just being very effective for gaining total muscle mass and for people who maybe had a very active jobs who were you know quite maybe had lower recovery capacity and things like that. So on the lower end of that you tend to see that sort of 8 to 10 sets of per session and then on the upper end and you mentioned that sort of 12 set number that 12 set number it repeatedly comes up as kind of how many exercises does it take to do a full body program thoroughly and that tends to be the number and then you know expanding from there they often talk about essentially doubling that. So a pretty standard number would be about 24 sets in a session and then they talk about these sort of superheroes when you go red parks for example who you know was known to have just insane you know work ethic and recovery ability and I guess you know cardiovascular fitness and some of these guys and Steve reads you know he talks about some of his programs as well and they tend to be somewhere in the realms of about 30 sets. Now one more comment I want to make on that is if you track this over time once you get the midfies what you see is a lot of the what I call fluff and people get quite offended at me calling it fluff but I'm talking things like side bands and neck exercises and forearm exercises a lot of these tent drop out and from their sort of mid fifties onwards there might be some of them but there's very few and so when we see these exercise or these workout plans that are you know often 30 34 sets they're generally including six eight sets of quote unquote fluff abs bands whatever so if I was to subtract that in my mind I would say we're typically seeing a range or somewhere between sort of 10 to 24 sets up to about 30 with that top end from sort of maybe 24 25 to 30 generally being a lot easier kind of exercises that probably aren't creating an issue absolutely those are usually single joint exercises yeah yeah yeah yeah because I think this is really interesting because a lot of the questions I get come from the perspective of people who are saying clearly it's impossible to do more than sort of 10 15 sets you know and I think what's really cool about this data set that we're describing is that we're talking about pre anabolic we're talking about people who are training before the introduction of animalics into bodybuilding scene and therefore would have had a relatively clear unbiased perspective on what their workouts were doing and how recoverable they were and also and again I'm kind of preempting what we're going to talk about shortly it's really interesting listening to the way that you describe his experience in running these workouts that we were talking about Clancy Ross these workouts that they was running because he's referencing the negative effects of fatigue you know and it's just very very cool to see that in that period of time the negative effects of fatigue were clearly perceptible you know and yet post anabolic suddenly hypertrophy researchers think that fatigue causes hypertrophy so many of them do I even today there's reviews and papers and opinions being written and the titles imply that fatigue is causing hypertrophy you know and it's like clearly it's not I mean that's just physiology I mean they make it so clear these old times I mean they talk about in the lead up to contest if you are doing longer workouts or you are doing you know six days a week or whatever all of them talk about taking a couple weeks off after the contest they say how important it is to take a couple weeks off they know that the fatigue is accumulated absolutely and I think it's just very cool to see these kind of understandings realizations in that period of time before the contamination of the experience was kind of introduced by a separate stimulus so yeah anyway the kind of the the episode of that is that you know we can look at these guys and we can see that you know they were doing high volumes in single sessions then we normally talk about today we tend to talk still about that kind of 10 to 12 numbers being a reasonable session volume they were doing a lot more than that and they was working for them and that's a really interesting kind of observation and I think the answer will become clear as we dive into the physiology to be honest I think we should just jump straight in because I think it follows on from this conversation perfectly absolutely so essentially what I'd like to do then and when we talk about the physiological side of things is just to explain why all of those observations are mirrored exactly by physiological reality so if we are doing a full body workout three times a week what we're going to see is that the problem arises as people tell me repeatedly in my Instagram questions the problem arises because you're going to end up doing a lot of exercises and potentially a lot of sets in a single workout is after all you just been saying so you got 20 you're faced with the possibility or or the or the challenge of doing sort of 15 20 sets in a workout and you're going no that's not something that I feel you know equal to doing now the issue there is that as we've talked about in the context of exercise order as I've talked about and written about in the context of exercise order the issue is that over the course of a workout you are building super spinal central nervous system team now how does that happen it doesn't happen the way people think it does it actually happens because of the sensations that are occurring in your body as a result of the metabolic activities that you're engaging in now there's a number of roots to get you there but basically the three main ones are if you have cardiovascular activity as in you start to get out of breath then you are going to feel that as a perception of sensation in your lungs and that's going to add to your feeling of discomfort bring you closer to your maximum tolerable perception of effort which is what determines how much effort you can ultimately produce in a set now if some of that effort availability is being used to tolerate that discomforting cardiovascular sensation you can't use that to create motune at recruitment so you end up with your recruitment levels dropping despite you hitting maximal efforts some of that effort is going towards the toleration of that cardiovascular sensation that's the main one the second one is that if you have burning sensations in the muscles from metabolites that's going to do exactly the same thing and the third one is that as you produce lactate and it goes around the body it starts to produce an inflammatory response and that again does the same thing it starts to make you feel tired and protect and basically not really wanting to be in the gym doing the thing that you're doing now those three things all are tied to your cardiovascular fitness so if your cardiovascular fitness is weak then what you're going to find is that very quickly as you go through setup to setup to set all of those sensations start to build quite rapidly and make you feel very uncomfortable not wanting to continue if your cardiovascular fitness is much higher than that what you're going to find is you're able to then do a lot more and continue to exercise you know doing more and more sets and accumulate a larger session volume so ultimately I think one of the interesting things is that people who have that high level of cardiovascular fitness now don't think it's a stretch to argue that people in 1914 would have had a high level of cardiovascular fitness than the average person today you know if you kind of see that like that gap and say well okay well why was it that Clancy Ros could do 20 30 sets and actually make that work for a minute single session and I can't well maybe it's that his physical activity levels across the day were a lot higher than yours or maybe his history of you know kind of sort of aerobic exercise or whatever it may be just physical activity these guys were in the military at some point again this time as well exactly exactly so I think ultimately there's this sort of no I don't think that aerobic exercise directly produces hypertrophy I think that's a silly idea but I do think that having a high level of cardiovascular fitness will support us doing higher session volumes in the context of these full body routines where you try and do everything in one session so there is that interesting kind of interplay there between that that that sort of cardiovascular side and the muscular side now one final comment on this is that you've got one cardiovascular system but you've actually got a whole load of muscles going on at the same available to you to be used in the next size at the same time and the bigger that muscle mass is relative to your cardiovascular system the more of a problem we're going to have with cardiovascular limitations so this is why I say to people if you've got issues with cardiovascular kind of recovery between sets you need to shrink the amount of muscle mass you're using in exercise doing squats and deadlifts and bench presses and you know kind of lap pull downs is probably going to be more challenging than doing the single joint stuff so the same thing applies if you start to increase muscle mass overall so anabolic is a really interesting one because if you start to get really huge amounts of muscle mass and be able to move seriously the larger amounts of weight you're going to be pushing your cardiovascular system really really hard as a result of just having that high level of muscle mass and that's a problem we actually see in some of the athletes in strength and power sports when they can move incredible amounts of weight really fast you know kind of like sort of track and field athletes then you're in a situation like well they're going to have a cardiovascular burden over the course of that training session which is absolutely just crazy and it doesn't look like it's going to be crazy but it actually is so you've got these really interesting kind of dynamics going on between the cardiovascular system being you know what it is and then all this muscle mass around the edges of it kind of making use of that energy requirement and then you have that interplay between the two things so basically to summarize what we're saying is that the challenge in the context of a full-body program is that ability to recover cardiovascularly and if the cardiovascular system is not up to the challenge then you're going to find that the ability to do 20-30 sets is definitely curtailed. One thing I find really interesting with that is this limitation is specific to full-body because once we divide the body into whether it's up or lower, push, pull legs, whatever else it might be suddenly we run to a whole new limitation which is just per muscle volume which is going to be driven by damage calcium ion accumulation etc so the limitations or even the I guess capacity or potential the ceiling for full body is actually quite unique in that regard. Yeah it's definitely a different kind of set of problems so if we now jump to say well okay let's look at doing upper lower and sequential days so like the Clancy Ross program was going upper lower repeated so a lot of people ask me this question it's like I've got this full-body routine that's going you know sort of three days a week could I instead of doing that full-body routine three days we literally just cut each workout in half and do upper lower on six days a week and just go to the gym every single day six days a week take one day off and would that basically be the same thing? No it wouldn't so what happens is that your post workout fatigue is exclusively related to the damage processes the calcium ion related processes which cause their own inflammation response which causes super spinal fatigue through a totally different oh it's the same overall framework mechanism but it's coming from a different place so super spinal fatigue in a workout is going from essentially the cardiovascular system super spinal fatigue post workout is coming from the muscle damage so what happens is if you do your upper lower workout sorry upper workout on one day and then come back into the lower workout the following day what your upper workout did in terms of muscle damage is now going to be the primary driver of your super spinal central nervous system to keep the following day and of course that's going to reduce your cumin on that second day doing that lower body workout now the interesting thing is that the two drivers and are very very different so somebody could have a really huge cardiovascular capacity be able to bash through 20 30 sets in a workout but they might be really really susceptible to muscle damage now I mean that actually describes the truck and field athlete really really accurately so you could have a person who's very very cardiovascular fit but muscle damage is very very kind of difficult for them to recover from they would be much better off doing that upper lower sorry that that full body a program and do the whole thing in one day take the next day off and then do the whole thing again on the you know the Wednesday or the Friday or whatever it is in the week that they're doing in contrast somebody's the opposite way around who perhaps has much more resistance to the muscle damage problem but doesn't have that cardiovascular fitness they probably would find that actually splitting it up a lower I'm going but okay you know I'm not going to be able to do a whole full body workout in one grams can split it down into a chunk and then come back the following day and do a smaller amount then that would be sorry of the lower body because it's other both of them than smaller then actually then works for them because the bigger challenge is actually the cardiovascular side of it not the muscle damage side of it so it's really really interesting to see it basically depends on what fatigue mechanism you're trying to withstand and because they're so different one is cardiovascular one is ultimately a calcium I related you actually have two separate challenges to meet and one of them you might find you can meet much more successfully than the other now did you want to jump in that I was just going to say it's interesting that we we're faithfully talking about the same type of fatigue but different ways of getting there and so it's interesting that you can have like you've pointed out there two very different types of people who are going to benefit from one of the other and ultimately the outcome can be the same like if they go into the wrong style or journey for them they're going to end up with that same negative outcome I don't know if you're going to touch on this later but I'm sure this people listening to this thinking well how do I know which one of those I am how do I sort of differentiate is that something we can talk about so it's actually very easy to monitor and cardiovascular system you know you can literally do it by how it feels and you can do it with a heart rate monitor so anybody can do a full body workout they can strap a heart rate monitor on the wrist and they can just watch what their heart rate is doing over time and if they really want to get into it you can get a plot for the whole session you can you know download into excel you can do all kinds of things and study what your heart rate is doing over a period of time basically if your heart rate is going up during your set and then it's going back down and it's going back down to your kind of normal walking around level or slightly above before you then do your next set then and that's just repeated pattern across your entire workout that's a pretty strong sign that your cardiovascular system is totally handling what you're throwing at it if your cardiovascular system is drifting up your heart rate is drifting up over the session and by the end of it it's you know not really going down very much between sets then that's the opposite situation that's telling you that you're really not handling the workload that you're throwing at your cardiovascular system and it's basically just kind of sort of you're you're in this at the state when you get to the end of the workout now is that perfect no because that's really just measuring the cardiovascular activity section and we've talked about three separate components we talked about metabolites we talked about the inflammation so not doing everything but it's a really good sort of starting point to get you to understand whether or not you are in that category of people who perhaps might find long sessions with high volume session volumes to be an issue there's a couple of things I think that interesting about that as well in that you can actually the way you lay out the program can influence this quite a lot so if you're doing some of these more cardiovascular demanding exercises earlier on that's going to have more of a negative impact so for me I know I normally program most of my legwork at the end especially if I'm going to squat I'll usually put that towards the end back extensions I'll put towards the end just because I feel they gas me so much and so a lot of people I don't know if you saw these comments but a lot of people last week when we looked at one of the the training plans actually started with bicep curls a lot of people are like why would you do bicep curls that doesn't make any sense but if you think about it in this regard we're doing 12 to 24 exercises maybe it makes a lot of sense to start with bicep curls and leave some of the heavy stuff towards the end and I think the strategic decisions you can make in a variety of contexts for example one of my preferred techniques is to alternate between cardiovascularly demanding exercises and cardiovascularly non-demanding exercises so I'll bounce between like the kind of the leg press or you know sort of for me pulling exercises really just cook me so like why could pull down you know or row that tends to be sort of my because that's just been my strength for so long and I tend to be able to move a lot to weight relative to the other exercises that I do and so ultimately that tends to be a problem so I tend to alternate and I'll go sort of like a leg press and then I'll do maybe something much less demanding as you say biceps curls or something like that and then I'll go to a pull a big sort of like pull down or something and then again I'll go to triceps I could have exercises and I'm like that and it kind of just that alternation gives me the ability just to get a complete recovery is it perfect no but it starts you moving in the direction of managing your session as a whole session rather than just kind of throwing exercises in any order whatsoever so I think there's a couple of things and I think yeah the movement you know nobody wants to go and do you know the most cardiovascular demanding exercise first like squats and then find that the rest of the session is completely written off equally if that's happening I would kind of look at the squat and go is that really necessary you know is there an alternative that will get you the same answer I really love single leg leg presses for that reason because I can absolutely get everything I need and not get cardiovascular cooked for the rest of the session you know I think there's strategic decisions that you can have to make or would be benefiting would benefit from making in order to sort of resolve some of these session issues this is what I think programming is so fun because it becomes I always call it sort of the art of programming here where you know you start thinking about and I understand this physiological underpinnings you know it's not always so obvious on paper kind of why you're making some of those decisions so for me one thing I like to do in context what you just said is a lot of the time the squatting exercise I'll program that as clusters and I will put them at the start but there'll be clusters of you know two repetitions so it's very little cardiovascular demand whereas if I were to do you know I sort of six or eight or ten or whatever squat I'd probably put that usually second last in my workout you know another thing that you can that we haven't even talked about here is the duration of the workout you know a lot of these these old school workouts they were lasting hours you know they were lasting two plus hours and people look at that and they they immediately think that's such a negative thing I know they used to be this idea ground you know cortisol elevating with longer sessions and all this kind of stigma and people there's there seems to be this mentality online at the moment where if the session's longer than 45 to 60 minutes you're doing something wrong but it's like well hold up if you actually have 75 minutes 90 minutes to dedicate to a full body session it might actually make it more effective based on what you're talking about yeah yeah absolutely I think that it's really the the cardiovascular system that we're keeping an eye on and I think that's you know some people I mean I've I've told this story many many times in my mentorship program that I've done but when I first started working as a personal trainer I was lucky enough to work with a very wide range of different groups of people in the area that I was living in in the country that I was living in at that time which seems to vary quite a lot these days but the place I was living in had a lot of endurance cyclists and so I actually got to do some strength training work with endurance cyclists was in with incredible cardiovascular systems and at the time I was exclusively working well I wasn't exclusively working I was kind of focusing more on the powerlifting side and I was interested in that for me and so it was fascinating watching what my recovery between sets of squats was like and what there's was so I would do you know a set of squats with relatively low repetitions and I would be absolutely gassed for like three to four minutes and this is at the same time as I was also doing endurance cycling so I mean I'm not my cardiovascular system was not bad it just wasn't in there league they would do the same kind of set and they would look at me afterwards within like 30 seconds is like we're going to do the next one then I'm like that's just incredible I can't get my head around just the massive difference in recovery times cardiovascularly even though I'm capable of riding you know sort of 50 under miles these guys could just do that probably in half the time they're just incredible athletes and it was translating to this insane recovery between sets of squats so I think cardiovascularly it's really really easy to get that information we just look at what cardiovascular recovery is doing post set of strength training and monitor that and see whether it needs training yeah and endurance athletes going to be able to just bash through the workout that you're doing and they're probably in half the time and it's totally fine that they do that because when like there was this idea a few years back that we should all leave three minutes between sets of exercises and I'm like hey that's definitely wrong because I needed seven between seven ys of squats when I was piloting but equally like your average kind of endurance cyclist might not even need that and it's not going to be the same for different exercises that use different amounts of muscle mass and it basically just comes back to is super spinal fatigue you know kind of gone away because the sensation has gone away and this comes back to the point that you have mentioned earlier which is that it's the same fatigue mechanism and the reason it's the same fatigue mechanism whenever we talk about super spinal fatigue so it's the same fatigue mechanism because it's literally just is there a sensation and is that sensation bringing you closer to your maximum tolerable perception of effort if so that's super spinal scene fatigue how does that sensation get caused while that's where it varies it can vary it can be the cardiovascular activity it can be the metabolite burning sensation it can be inflammation all of those in a workout or it can be muscle damage causing inflammation post workout and that's a completely different route that gets you to exactly the same place the reason it's the same place is because it's just a sensation so ultimately super spinal scene fatigue is one there's really interesting things that is a very very clear defined model in the context of more chorus psychobiological model of T but you can get there through different routes and you can actually get there through a whole lot load of other routes as well I mean if you're in pain or you know discomfort any other reason I mean we talked about you know kind of like if the exercise is really unstable or if that's high coordination demand that actually gets you to the same place because your brain is doing a effort perception related to the balancing all the coordination issue or if you're in pain for another reason that's going to do the same thing so ultimately it's all the same mechanism of fatigue it's just the routes to get there I know this is a tangent a little bit but at one of the gyms that I go to they've got a very good pendulum squat but the floor is uneven and they've got these like foam pads underneath the legs whatever trying to make it a bit more even but it's not and if you load it up heavily you get this kind of wobbling kind of thing that's happening and you know I'm in a pendulum squat I'm obviously stable like this it's not a hard movement for me to coordinate but my output in that that you know wobbly pendulum is so much lower than in a normal pendulum so yeah your brain is your brain is thinking about the wobble exactly exactly yeah you can't ignore it you conscious of it so the flip side you've talked about the muscle damage getting you to this endpoint is there a way that someone can identify how prone they are to that that's difficult so the way that I would always suggest monitoring for things like post workout central nervous system D is to measure something like so there's two ways of doing it really either you could do a test whereby you do the upper lower on sequential days and then separately do the upper lower and leave a day between them and that basically is just like my plateau's model where I say if you're concerned that you might not be recovering just leave one extra day of rest and see if your performance suddenly jumps upwards it's the same kind of ideas basically we're talking about doing sequential day workouts and then a separate occasion we just split them up and see how big I just gonna spell that out for people sure go for it I have a feeling some people overlook this so obviously let's say you're normally doing upper lower upper lower let's just say that's your normal workout plan and you are progressing and maybe you're at a point where you're able to progress maybe one repetition every second session on average so what you're saying there is give yourself that extra rest day between those sessions and if you continue to progress by you know that half the repetition one repetition that's the normal progression for you right so you're saying obviously that that fatigue wasn't really affecting you whereas if you're now progressed by two repetitions instead obviously there was an impact down the fatigue because we always need to consider well what is your current rate of progression anyway right so you know I'd hear this a lot from people you know I'm still progressing or whatever it's like okay but compared to what you were doing how does it actually look yeah I mean ultimately is exactly the same thing that you would do if you were concerned about I mean we talked about within session analyses by using heart rate monitors for example cardiovascular system you could actually do the same thing you can just move exercises from one end of the workout to the other and see if exercise order is causing you an issue so if you think that you're not recovering across a session but you don't have the technology to look R.A. monitors or you just don't feel comfortable doing that totally fine literally just reverse the order of your workout and see what happens it's an order to note with that as well that that works predominantly for full body sessions it's not going to work if you're training that muscle it doesn't work if you're training yeah obviously yeah a better way to actually state that is you should move your last single joint exercise to first in the session or universe versa yeah I mean there's there's you can kind of look you can eyeball the session yourself and see what you think is doing I mean if you if you're kind of fairly biceps dominant in a pulling exercise then that can create issues and conversely triceps and I'm pressing I think ultimately just have a look at your session and see what you think is doable hamstrings are a really good one so if you're out like for me I just kind of I'm an old man I literally just do hamstrings curls I do seated hamstrings kill that is my hamstrings exercise nothing else in my workout is touching my hamstrings I can put that first I can put that last and I get the same number reps every time so that is I think the probably the easiest one if you're kind of in that kind of old man territory like I am which probably none of my lessons are but it's a spot by the by but you get the idea the point is that you're looking for an exercise as you rightly pointed out that is unaffected by the rest of your session from a local masculinity point of view you're looking for one that's uniquely affected by the supra spinal fatigue mechanisms move that from the beginning to the end and you'll see whether your session is creating issues straight away I think so moving to the the kind of the aspect or one aspect of the of the routine that you shared this earlier which I think is really interesting is this idea well if if if we have identified that maybe we are more susceptible to muscle damage than we would like to be and therefore it's creating an impact for us doing a repeated upper lower six days a week we don't want to do that but equally we're looking at the list of exercises when we're going I really don't want to do you know kind of 30 sets in one session and that's what you want to do for your coverage of the body parts you're training then you can split that across either halves of a day and you can do your basically your full body routine and just cut it in half like Clancy Ross didn't say I'll do upper in the morning and I'm going to do lower in the afternoon now this is a really interesting thing because ultimately how long you leave between them upper workout and the lower workout determines whether you're falling into the category of it being a within session CNS fatigue problem or a post session CNS fatigue problem and the reason for that is because for muscle damage it doesn't actually happen in the workout it happens after the workout this is one of those kind of like one day I should really write a list of all the things about fatigue that hypertrus searches do not understand and I think this will be pretty high on the list every time you talk to a hypertrus search or about muscle damage they think it happens in the workout you're like oh well you know the tearing forces like what tearing forces you know they think it happens in the workout itself and therefore they're like oh well you know all this muscle damage is present immediately post workout and that then gets repaired and like it hasn't even happened yet you know like there's an idea going around at the moment the muscle damage repair happens before I perturb him like that's categorically false and physiologically impossible because the damage you're describing hasn't happened what damage yeah there's no damage to actually repair yet so that oh no no it's all happening the first 24 hours no it hasn't happened by that point it's happening over the course of the back half of that day so you're starting to get damage happening maybe sort of in the first few hours post workout but the inflammation response is really going to be the major driver of that damage and it's going to be the back end of that day so yeah the start of the second 24-hour period the second day post workout that's when all your damage repairs really happening you're repairing the myfiberals the areas again and people look at non-exercise nostril injury like contusions and things like that they go oh this behaves completely differently from excise induced damage because when we look at the myelot rates they go down in that first day like no that's because that's when the damage is really happening you only get the myelot elevation when you're repairing the structures replacing actually is a better word because it's not repairing it's replacing replacing the structures that you've cleared away and the clearing way is happening in that first day that's why myelot goes down because you're not actually doing any repair or replacement it happens all the second day actually it's identical to what happens during excise induced muscle injury it's just that your hypertrophy stimulus is happening in that first hey while your muscle damage is not doing that and you've got these kind of things moving in opposite direction so you don't see that deficit to myelot in the first day when you've got non-exercise muscle injury sorry when you've got excise induced muscle damage because you've also hypertrophy happening at the same time when you've got non-exercise induced muscle injury you do see it because obviously you wouldn't know hypertrophy happening simultaneously anyway so as I was saying fatigue is obviously going to start happening the muscle damage processes are going to start happening in that post workout period so if you do a upper session if you do an upper workout in the morning and you leave a couple of hours then when you come back to do your lower session you're kind of still in the same session as far as CNFT is concerned your physiology is determining that is basically the same workout with a really long rest period you know so but if you were to then push it a bit further and you get into the point where your inflammatory responses are starting to rise to create that muscle damage that we need to do to clear away all of the protease induced damage then what you're going to see is that you're now in the true post workout period and you're now subject to post workout CNFT so really when it comes down to is how long is that rest period between the morning session and the afternoon session if you put them really far apart like if somebody says well I work a professional job I need to be doing my workout in the morning and then I need to come back in the evening I'm like that's basically second day from a physiological point of view because you're into that territory now where muscle damage is creating your super spinal CNFT so honestly you'd be better if you if that's your limitation which it will be for most of my listeners I imagine if that's your limitation then don't do same day do sequential days do upper lower on sequential days and do if that's really what you want to do if you really need to split those sessions out split them on sequential days and do upper lower repeatedly you know six days or if you want to do this whole kind of every other day idea that it's been kind of going around for body fine I'm not going to go there but if you're kind of maybe somebody is able to work a flexible hours you have control over your own schedule now that situation you could potentially do an upper lower work and sorry an upper body workout and then you could maybe just a couple of have lunch and then have you coffee do a bit to work and then do the next one or you could do what you've described to me is a really interesting approach which is do your upper body workout and then just walk down the road go to supermarket come back and do the other half which I think is fantastic I mean obviously you have complete control over your own schedule so you can do whatever you want to do but if you've got the juice that's an important part I did not want to disclose things you told me of that I mean I don't know if you want people to know that you drink juice you see I am this is like respect people's privacy when they tell me things I'm very aware of that very well now I do I've because I I mix some stuff in with my juice and I've been getting a lot of questions about exactly how I make my juice mix so it is definitely a hot topic yeah so I want to jump back to the moment because you you said if and actually an interesting point is Clancy does actually say that that sort of upper morning and then low in the afternoon that their limitation is going to be someone's schedule and that if you if you don't have control over your schedule it's not going to work so while he doesn't specifically say how many hours he's leaving between it it is obviously that you know point that he's making so I mean I'm assuming he's probably not leaving 12 hours between it based on that statement but I'm not sure so you said there you know if it is 12 hours you can only do seven a.m. and seven p.m. or whatever you've insinuated that it will be better to actually give yourself that full 24 hours then instead of just a 12 hours because you're you're now inside that period of time where the muscle damage is happening very rapidly you're you've got a full on calpain a damage process happening you've also got the inflammation kicking off creating a problem and that's going to then lead to the supospinal sinus teal you're trying to avoid so I think yeah if somebody is say well look no I have to do seven and seven that's the only period of time times of the day that will work for me I will then just don't just do seven every day pick one morning or evening and just go every day and don't do that don't feel that you have to do them same day because it's not actually going to benefit you the benefit comes if you can keep those two workouts much closer together you know several hours apart I'm not I'm not comfortable giving super kind of sort of definitive numbers you know I think if you're around the three or four hour mark probably okay pushing it much further than that I think you're going to start to find that you're starting to gain to territory where that supospinal fatigue is developing now I want to ask what feels like a very obvious question but I want it to be maybe laid out so obviously an upper lower split repeated for four sessions in total throughout the week is a very common split it's one that I use with some of my clients it's one that you know it's probably the most common after full body would be my guest now the limitation with upper lower upper lower upper lower six sessions per week as you point out the limitation is the post workout CNS fatigue which is driven by the muscle damage now muscle damage is obviously muscle specific so the more volume that muscle is doing in a session the more damage is going to experience right so if we're splitting sessions across six sessions instead of four then logically logically upper lower upper lower six sessions must be having less post workout CNS fatigue than the four sessions because in the in the four upper lower upper lower two of those sessions is still followed by previously done you know session the day before exactly this is one of the biggest problems that we really talk about with traditional upper lower split done with four workouts per week say for example the classic Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday the biggest problem with that is that when people look at those they go oh well you know I can recover from Monday to Thursday doing say five four or five sets per muscle group per workout and that's totally true on a muscle level but if you do a bunch of like sort of upper body workout upper body exercises on Monday and you do four or five sets of those you are toast as far as super spot of fatigue is concerned on Tuesday because that muscle damage that you're now carrying around with you is going to create a super spot of fatigue problem on that Tuesday for your lower body workout and the same thing can happen on Thursday and Friday so really it's kind of like your Monday and your Thursday workouts are okay but you know a lot I mean again Monday is probably definitely okay but Thursday is kind of borderline because if you don't five sets on Tuesday there's not really a chance you're going to be recovered by Thursday so really your Monday workout is the only one that gets away completely free of any post workout CNS fatigue so yeah it does look like six days a week upper lower with less session volume would be better than doing that over four sessions but you know it is it is the difficult thing to really be precise about because as I say we can get a relatively good picture of what post workout recovery looks like on a muscle one muscle basis because you literally just measure the fatigue and fatigue is the observable external reduction and exercise performance so you literally just measure strength and that's really easy to do now there's tons of data about that we've got really nice dose response profile for session volume sorry muscle session volume versus post workout fatigue recovery time what we don't have is the same graph for supospinal CNST now it looks like it tracks it rather to be closely so I don't want to make this out to be like oh well we don't know we have a reasonable idea it's just we don't have the same perfect dose response graph that we do for post workout fatigue recovery if that makes sense so yes it does look like splitting your entire week's worth of upper lower over six days would be better than doing it over four days it does look like that but again I'm just kind of introducing a lot of caution there to say look we've got really great data on how post workout fatigue relates to muscle training volume for a particular workout yes we've got that really clear I've done the the graph people have you know seen it before we don't have the same level of confidence regarding how supospinal CNST works I think it works the same way I'd expect it to work the same way it does look like it works the same way but I just don't have that data either way there's not an argument for health up below a done four times per week could be superior to done six times per week if you were splitting the volume well exactly exactly exactly so what we're saying is that if you doing that smaller amount of muscle volume across six days rather than four days then you are going to end up with less interference between sequential days yeah it's really yeah I think that's it's an interesting point because people don't people my perspective on it is people often think about oh you know six sessions a week but they're not thinking about actually dividing those four sessions worth the volume across the six sessions and like you've just said there well if we do do that then obviously there's going to be less and strictly what we're doing is dividing our full body three times a week across six sessions I mean so it's kind of a little bit different because you are starting from a different numerical point because you start through your three full bodies rather than your two upper lower split routines but yeah I mean I could see where you might end up in the same way interesting just to do that and see where that ends up in the same numbers I don't think it'd be miles apart but I think it probably would be a little bit different so where does it leave us so if someone's wanting to if someone's I guess getting into this and they're asking well what should I do should I be doing full body and doing my 15 20 exercises or sets in one workout and doing that every other day or doing that Monday, Wednesday, Friday should I be doing my up in the morning and lower and evening or should I do up a lower up a lower for six times a week do we have I know you've talked about how you can test kind of you know which might be more suited to you is that sort of the starting point is any any other things you think people should be thinking about or considering? So I think it's a journey so you test something you start with something and then you move forwards on the basis of what you've learned I mean I know this sounds radical because I think people want the answers before they even start these days and I just just try something that is sensible and see what happens so I would always always always just start with a traditional three day a week full body program now if you find having started that that you are losing repetitions towards the end of your workout you're noticing a cardiovascular set of sensations you feel like your final exercises of the workout are losing repetitions maybe you then test that by the hamstring curl exercise example that I gave earlier moving that from one end of the workout to the other seeing what happens again assuming you're not doing any other hamstrings exercises in that in that routine and you notice that yes you are losing repetitions so what we've got here two steps first start second you know notice maybe that that a cardiovascular system is an issue for you now at this point what you could do having noticed those things what you could do is either you could say well I'm going to make an adjustment to my training program I'm going to split the routine or you could make it and actually that's not a binary choice to be honest but let me just go down that route first so you could decide to make an adjustment you could say well I'm going to split this out across two workouts in the day now if you have flexible schedule and you can do that and you can take a short break and then come back and do the other half or a couple of our break and do the other half perfect no problem at all or you can move it to the following day again not a problem now the reason I just caught myself and said this is not a binary choice is that the other thing you could be doing is fixing your cardiovascular fitness now that's you could just do that and you could just stick with the same full body program three days a week and simultaneously start working on your cardiovascular fitness and that problem will gradually go away or you could make the fix and I don't think it's a fix fix I think it's just like an adjustment you could make the adjustment and you could split your workout into two halves and either do that second half a couple of hours later or on the second day at the same time as you're working on your cardiovascular fitness and then in the future when your cardiovascular fitness is you know sufficient you could come back and just go back to doing single workouts three days a week so I think there's a number of things here and it's like the exact route you take is going to depend on your schedule and your circumstances and what you like to do I don't want to be in the gym six days a week I want to be in the gym three days a week that's because this is how my schedule works and how my preferences work and I'm not going to start training six days a week even if my session volume feels like it was getting out of hand I'm just not going to do that so everybody's having their own preferences so I think what I'm suggesting is that people just start with a three day a week full body and then look at the problem and go what do I think the problem is most of the time if you're having a problem with three day a week with session volume being too long it's going to be a cardiovascular fitness problem I mean that's the video that can be you can fix that with cardiovascular training you can fix it adjust it to get around the problem to a certain degree by moving the session late half the session later in the day long as it's not too far away or moving it to the following day and doing upper lower repeatedly six days a week or even as I say every other day if you want to go down that route so I think there is a relatively straightforward algorithm if you like to moving forward with these questions what the answer is not is asking influencers online what you should do that's not the answer so don't blow up my Instagram messages saying I think I should do this no no no no don't ask me what you should do yeah or can I do this you know die of your permission to do this yeah and the best we can do best you can do best I can do is give people like what you've done today how it works yeah exactly yeah and how you can assess it for yourself yeah exactly yeah the risk of maybe doing what we just told what we said we wouldn't do I do want to give a practical example of how I actually do this and I actually I intend to do full body sessions that's that's my goal always and if and this is the point you haven't necessarily brought up it's say I've got points in life where maybe stress levels are higher maybe I'm working longer hours maybe there's things that are contributing to my I guess perception of effort then what I'll do in that full body session is I will then split it and so my intentions always you know Monday when so Friday full body or every other day full body I might get in the session and I might know I just don't have the motivation here to actually do my normal full body session which is usually about 15 sets or so and so I'll just call it and I'll just do half of it I'll come back the next day like we've talked about do that other half and then I'll go back to my full body so I'll take a day off the next day and then I'll go back full body day off full body day off so for me over you know a week or two weeks or whatever I'm generally always getting that sort of three times you know frequency per week but it might be over four sessions just because for whatever reason that day you know hasn't permitted me to do that full body session yeah I mean that's that's a perfect example of auto regulation and I think that's that's definitely something that is important to bear in mind so we're always watching what's happening we're being observant and we're reacting to the information that we're gathering you know but at the same time we have a clear understanding of what the physiology is doing in the background so physiology doesn't care about you know our life circumstances it just does its thing so we've got to be aware that physiology is doing its thing we are observing and reacting and adjusting our plans according to what the physiology is telling us but also according to our circumstances dictate and we just do the best we can under the circumstances but as I say you know we know how to turn this into a reasonable starting point which is three days a week full body which is what you just described and then we just move forwards from there according to what I think we've given people a lot to think about I think we're probably going to get a lot of questions on these sort of topics and questions we've brought up is anything else you want to conclude with or should we leave people there I think that's good for today I think we've covered the important issues and obviously whatever questions we get we can use that to move forward and do podcast on in the future and like we said you know the goal here is to give people I guess an understanding of the the foundational principles that will guide your decision making you know we don't want to necessarily lock people into a box and say well it needs to look like this you must work out this exact way and whatever else like obviously there's nuance here and there's not so much nuance that it's like well you know you're different to this person to this person we all have different physiology you know the underlying physiology is the same but there's going to be some degree of you know variance depending on that individual so hopefully there's stuff there for you guys to consider and assess and actually analyze how you work and what works you know specifically for you understanding that that might even change over time as well as you become more experienced such as stages and life or you know hey maybe you've got a family and kids you've done at the same time to spend to whatever it might be but our hope as always is that this conversation is helpful for you guys in in moving forward so we hope you join us for another episode and we'll be back next week