 What's more effective for building muscle body part splits or full body workouts? Watch this our next color is Justin from Colorado Justin what's happening? Hey, so how's it going good? Hey guys, I just want to first start off by saying like everyone does Thank you so much for everything y'all do. I know I kind of wrote a little bit in my question But I've been listening to you guys for the last nine months haven't missed pretty much an episode And y'all are a huge inspiration in getting me to the point where now I'm personal training myself So thank you for that. Cool. Awesome My question today has to revolve around training and training splits Specifically a couple different questions So I'm looking to Get into physique competition Being a men's physique competitor doing a natural competition Within the next probably 12 to 18 months I want to give myself a good kind of training base to go off of As well as I'm looking at potentially in the future after that I'm taking on some competition clients as well So I'm looking at What training splits are for those and I'm seeing with a lot of you know, the top level guys You see a lot of kind of bro splits push full legs up or lower But I don't see a lot of full body splits or full body workouts Which is what you guys I know kind of pushed the most so I was wondering what your opinions were As far as training, you know natural and enhanced clients with Full body splits versus going into something like more of a push pull legs Yeah, and what what you guys had thought about that moving into Into training actual competition clients. Sorry. I know I said that a few times. I love this So this is uh, I'm going to give you a little little Story here because this is kind of what led to the creation of maps anabolic When you look at the the evolution of muscle building type programs what you see before the widespread introduction of performance enhancing drugs like testosterone or actually the first Anabolic steroid really used was dianabol Everybody did a full body workout everybody trained the whole body Three days a week as anabolic steroids became a bigger player In body building and physique enhancement You started to see athletes switch more to splits. So the question is why what is what is it about the splits? That the enhanced athletes liked versus the full body, which natural athletes, uh, you know liked even more Well, there's a couple differences one When you're anabolicly enhanced you have a very very enhanced Uh recovery ability which means you could train with a lot more volume and a lot more intensity If you're doing a tremendous amount of volume a full body workout can just get too long, right? So if I'm if I'm doing 15 sets per body part and I'm training my whole body on a Monday Man, I'm going to be working out for three hours. It's just it's just a very very long workout So that's one so they split it up so they could do a lot of volume Without spending so much time in the gym at any, you know given moment. So that's one thing The second thing is that When you work out with weights you send a muscle building signal and we can actually measure this with something called most muscle protein synthesis And we see that it spikes about 24 hours post workout and then it starts to dip At about 48 to 72 hours Very rapidly in which case it gets back down to baseline So you work out on Monday by the time Wednesday comes around that muscle building signal really starts to drop off and disappear Now this doesn't necessarily happen to an enhanced athlete because they're taking a hormonal chemical muscle building signal like if you give A man testosterone high doses of testosterone and don't even have them work out You'll build muscle just from the hormonal signal In fact, there was a study that compared natural lifters To men who didn't even lift weights and just took testosterone at high doses and the men who didn't lift and took testosterone Built a little bit more muscle than the guys who lifted who are natural So when you have a loud Hormone muscle building signal You don't have to necessarily go back and send another muscle building signal as quickly As you do when you're natural So natural people natural athletes tend to build more muscle better with more frequency of training hitting the whole body Three days a week enhanced athletes can get away with One or two days a week of hitting the entire body And of course natural athletes can't handle the amount of the amount of intensity and volume That enhanced athletes can handle now that being said i'll make this argument as well I'll argue that enhanced athletes will also build more muscle train the whole body three days a week Now this doesn't necessarily mean that they train the whole body monday wednesday and friday They can still do a split But they'll probably get better gains if they made sure to hit every body part three days a week Okay, now there are studies that compare this and the studies do show that more frequency Tends to it trends towards more muscle and more strength Now the studies will show two days a week or two times a week for per body part Is seems to be the best for hypertrophy But if you actually look at those studies what you find is that the three day a week or three times a week Although the hypertrophy isn't necessarily better. You see strength trend a little bit better And my argument is the skill aspect of resistance training if I can do You know if i'm doing 30 sets of squats and i'm doing it two days a week So 15 sets twice a week versus 10 sets three days a week The total volume is the same But i'm practicing squats three times during that week and i'm practicing the skill of squats And and that is a very important component to success with resistance strength So when we're talking to most people Most people we tell them full body workouts are best now We do have advanced bodybuilder style routines like maps split Where you're doing more of a split type routine Or even if you go extreme like maps ped which is a split a double split type routine But yeah for most people especially natural hit the whole body three days a week And you'll get the best results out. I mean everything we know about the cns is about Frequency and about like teaching your body these movements you get better at them so from Overall from a quality perspective and in terms of performance and I know You know within the bodybuilder world or aesthetic world, you know That this is sort of one of those things. It doesn't seem to be considered enough But the more effective you are in the gym in terms of building strength it actually promotes more muscle And to be able to disperse more of that volume throughout the week So you can really focus in on some of these major lifts and have that kind of You know focus and attention specifically on the ones that that move the needle the most You know for me, it just it's an advantage that you have versus Doing legs all in one day and like having poor quality towards the end of your workout Justin i'm sure you've if you've been listening to the show Long enough you've probably heard me say my goal is always to do as little as possible To elicit the most amount of change One of the biggest mistakes I see people that are interested in getting into competitive bodybuilding mince physique bikini any of those Is they look to the athletes that are doing that or already been doing that for years And they look at how they train and then they go right into that and I just think that's a terrible strategy Um, well getting ready for competing. I spent about a year training Before I actually started prepping for the show So and a lot of that was building my physique building my metabolism Slowly scaling volume and what it looked like was maps anabolic maps performance maps aesthetic maps split and then maps ped It's like a year and a quarter year and a half of training right there in itself And the idea was that there's why would I jump all the way to ped just because my body can tolerate it or handle it I'm not going to get the most results that way I'm going to get the most results by doing as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change And slowly building volume over time So my generic answer without knowing a ton of information about you would be That's how I would build my routine. It would be running a program like anabolic right now And I'm going to try and max out All the benefits from you know a program that's only three day a week type of training routine And then I'm going to slowly scale that up. Uh, and that's how we kind of wrote the programs I believe too. I don't know if I'm sure maybe Doug can look this up or maybe sal you remember You remember when you wrote down, um all the different pathways you would recommend based off of your goals Did you do like a aesthetic bodybuilding one? Do you remember? I don't remember Yeah, I mean it would be what I just said But I you know sal put together this on the the mind pump media i g For chokey a couple years ago. I think for people when they ask questions like hey, this is my specific goal How would you follow your programs? And I know we have a bunch of them in there I believe we did one for that. If not, it's what I just said. That's what you would follow is that type of Yeah, you know, Justin, it's interesting because of all of the Uh strength training or resistance training based sports The only one that sometimes goes in this direction of each body part once a week is bodybuilding You look at powerlifting olympic lifting Kettlebell track any other strength sport. It's about frequency now You ask yourself why because they're much more focused on skill than hypertrophy So what does this mean for you who wants to be a bodybuilder? Well borrow from them I think it's it's dumb to ignore that and really this trend of training less frequency Uh of body parts didn't really happen till the 90s even in the 80s and 70s They were doing body part splits and they were hitting the whole body two or three days a week They were just doing so much volume. It didn't make sense to do the whole body on one day They were in there six days a week, you know, I uh, which is what PED looks like. Yeah PED was written that way. It's our highest volume program and and we split it up like that It is and again, uh, you know being enhanced with hormones allows your body to react respond and adapt differently Then when you're natural when you're natural you over train your testosterone goes in the floor when you're enhanced You over train your testosterone still high, right? You got a muscle building signal That's on all the time when you're natural It's on or off and the goal is to keep it on more than off in order to build muscle So those are the big things to consider. So if you're natural, I'd go full body Three days a week, uh maps and a ball of style. I think would probably uh, be best Okay, shoot that over to him Oh, sorry, um one other um small thing for you because I know you always say to kind of like Whatever you're not doing now is usually going to be what's best for you moving forward Does that include with doing uh, or differing up like your body part splits versus a full body would Going into like I've been running Anabolic for the last three months. I just finished phase three a week to go So we're turning into something more like a push full legs or like a maps aesthetic work No, no, no maps maps aesthetic will be just fine. Um, okay, so uh, we'll send maps aesthetic to you Since you have maps and a ball there's a lot of variables you can modify before you modify the split Okay, okay, so there's a lot of things we can look at before we go into You know a push pull split or uh, you know even bigger split and I I mean Look splits are fine. There's nothing wrong with splits. Here's what I want you to remember Uh train the whole body Uh, whether you do it, you know, monday wednesday friday or five days a week or whatever two or three days a week That's that's that seems best for most people once a week is not enough for most people And don't don't be afraid to run. I mean we have time right? I think you told me well over a year that you're you're you're planning to do this, right? So this isn't like in a couple months Right. So don't be afraid to run maps performance either Because it is so different, especially somebody who has like a bodybuilding mentality It'll be so unique to how you you train right now that you're going to get great benefits for that You're going to get tremendous benefits from it and it'll be good to go away from a very traditional body part split type of a bodybuilder routine And I use that that's how I use performance on my way of getting ready to compete was I interrupted the The bodybuilding mentality that I had in training and I followed performance and saw great benefits from it So don't be afraid to run that program either. I think maps aesthetic is fine and perfect I think that's okay for a singular way, but it's okay for you to throw in performance for You know a fey or for a cycle and then move back into like the bodybuilding focus Okay, awesome. Cool. Thanks for calling in Justin. Yeah, of course. Thank you guys. No problem Yeah, we haven't visited this in a while We did it really early on because when we you know first started with maps and a ball Like we knew this would be a big question Although I do see this becoming less of a controversial topic I think when we first started seven years ago saying this people like oh full body It's all about bodybuilding. You're seeing more people now get this, right? It's interesting because even in the sports world. So I had to kind of come in and And explain You know to the high school kids like to to stop doing the body part splits and they were doing that for performance reasons And so it still persists, you know in terms of like what people think is the first type of program They should do is as body part split Hey, if you enjoyed that clip you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here And be sure to subscribe