Full body days vs Grouping Days

[SSJBartSimpson]

I was listening to Shethar's recent tricep video and he brought up something that got me thinking... he says to get a huge press that after his heavy press days he would do absurd amounts of volume on his triceps. (note, he does 225 lb military press for multiple reps).
I do question, is there any actual benefit to grouping training muscle/muscle groups like this on the same training session, as he mentions here after he's already worked them? Another way to ask the quesiton, is would he have had the same results if he trained his triceps iso work on squat day?

Which leads to a bigger conversation, are there true pros/cons to full-body days vs grouping days (IE PPL), or does it all just work out the same?
Full body days seemed to have been pushed much more as a reaction to the randomly assembled bro-splits, with ones as early as Starting Strength and 5x5, and BBM, RTS, and SBS-ATS follow these full body schemes. But plenty of lifters have had success with grouping days, and some popular programs follow this schematic as well - plenty of powerlifters do PPL, SBS free programs are based on grouping days, Candito, etc.

[CaptainAwesome]

I think they all can work, you just have to pick the right exercises, with the right volumes and intensities. Not an answer that will lead you to a "right" path, but I think that's the honest true answer to it all.

Full body seems to be something you can brute force very simply as a novice. You don't have to worry so much about tweaking things across the training week, just start conservatively and keep working up. Combine it with a nice bulk and you've got a couple months of progress. Full body after the newbie shit is over, requires the tweaking.

I've never done any PPL type work, it seems like a very difficult style of program to balance (I also don't like having 6 full workouts a week). There's a lot of potential pitfalls and it seems like a lot of the people(ppl, har har) I've seen who push PPL don't seem to do a great job of addressing them in the programs they put out there. Imagine if you have a "pull" day with a heavy deadlift session immediately followed next by a "legs" day with a heavy barbell back squat. I don't think this would go well.

I like 4 day upper/lowers. I've used them as hypertrophy focused training, I've used them as strength focused training. I devote two of my off days to some cardio work.

[OverheadDeadlifts]

I’ve thought about this too and I think the main benefit of grouping things together is that it’s way harder to fuck it up. Like if you’re doing all your benching and bench accessories on one day, you’ll likely be recovered by the same time next week even if you go absolutely bananas with the intensity and volume.

On the other hand if you’re training the same muscle groups multiple times per week it’s much easier to overdo it long term but there’s definitely benefits to be had if you get it right.

Basically if somebody wanted to write their own program but their knowledge of programming boiled down to ‘pick a bunch of lifts and do them until I’m completely trashed’, I think they might be better off training a muscle group once per week.

[SSJBartSimpson]

Imagine if you have a "pull" day with a heavy deadlift session immediately followed next by a "legs" day with a heavy barbell back squat. I don't think this would go well.

A lot of people do this on the same day though? Even at an advanced stage.

[CaptainAwesome]

Imagine if you have a "pull" day with a heavy deadlift session immediately followed next by a "legs" day with a heavy barbell back squat. I don't think this would go well.

A lot of people do this on the same day though? Even at an advanced stage.

Doesn't seem like that would go too well to me unless you backed the loads off quite a bit to make it work. Maybe there are some "workhorse" types that can do it? I don't think I could ever make that work without adjusting the weight down significantly.

[ChasingCurls69]

Imagine if you have a "pull" day with a heavy deadlift session immediately followed next by a "legs" day with a heavy barbell back squat. I don't think this would go well.

A lot of people do this on the same day though? Even at an advanced stage.

My squat and deadlift are at their strongest doing two SBD days per week, one with DL priority and the next one with squat priority. The loads have to be adjusted for sure, but the trend in e1rm is very apparent if I miss that one slot, even if that slot was only 2-3 sets.

I am really enjoying hitting the triceps hard after 1-2 bench days depending on if bench frequemcy is 3 or 4x/week, or after pressing if that's the focus. My press e1rm even trends down on weeks where I've skipped my triceps accessory 24 hours prior in the hopes I would be less fatigued for press, so I stopped doing that.

[Adams]

I’ve thought about this too and I think the main benefit of grouping things together is that it’s way harder to fuck it up. Like if you’re doing all your benching and bench accessories on one day, you’ll likely be recovered by the same time next week even if you go absolutely bananas with the intensity and volume.

On the other hand if you’re training the same muscle groups multiple times per week it’s much easier to overdo it long term but there’s definitely benefits to be had if you get it right.

Basically if somebody wanted to write their own program but their knowledge of programming boiled down to ‘pick a bunch of lifts and do them until I’m completely trashed’, I think they might be better off training a muscle group once per week.

I find this to be true. I'm self-employed and work 7 days a week. Sleep is inconsistent these days. It's much harder to program things compared to ten years ago. A split like L/P/P allows much more flexibility when life isn't consistent and is idiot-proof. I train as and when I can without worrying about
affecting my next workout. I can train 6 days in a row sometimes (which is rare), or 3/4/5 times a week and not feel beat up.

It's not ideal if you're focusing on a few lifts, but neither is working all the hours and not sleeping as much as I should.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

I think that it is very context dependent. Personally I like 3-4 full body days where the emphasis rotates i.e. day 1 focus on squat, day 2 focus on bench press, day 3 focus on deadlift and day 4 focus on press.

In terms of efficiency, I think that people have been getting big and strong with all kinds of splits and/or full body workouts, so all of them work.

Here are the advantages and inconvenients according to me:
- warmups: full body days usually involve warming up for several muscle groups, which wastes training time, split days involve only warming up a single muscle group at the beginning of the workout
- number of training days: splits usually involve more sessions per week than full body (some pro bodybuilders do 14 sessions per week !), which means more time commuting to and from the gym is wasted.
- recovery time of individual muscle groups: full body involves arranging exercises in a way that fatigue does not overlap too much, in splits usually each muscle group has a large amount of time to recover, so it tends to be more "fool proof". Also sometimes you can suffer from fatigue from the first exercise affecting the rest of the workout, say you start a full body day by doing an RPE 10 deadlift, whatever is coming after that will suffer appreciably. Once again fatigue management within a session has to be more on point if you train full body.
- frequency: full body allows for more frequency, which is potentially helpful if one wants to maximize neural efficiency if the same exercises are repeated several times in the training week

As you can see, I believe that the choice between one and the other is going to depend mostly on practical considerations.

[Hardartery]

I would say the @ChasingCurls69 and @CheekiBreekiFitness are pretty much on the money. Some people respond better to full body, some to a split. Personally, I don't like full body and would never use it, but that's just me, I know other people that did just dandy on full body routines. But I think it's important to note what chasingcurls said about prioritizing. If you Squat and then DL, you are going to have to sandbag a little on the Squat or do less well on the DL, you can't push both in the same session in the same way. As for pushing super high volume iso after pressing... I am going to be honest and say that I have no idea who the guy is or what his lifting looks like but I have known a lot of guys who can rep with a lot more than 225 lbs and none of them did that. I was repping 275 lbs strict at one point in my lifting career, and I did not do that. I DID do triceps many times a week, they can be hit often, and the good pressers that I knew (I was never a good presser) did that as well. I know several guys also liked to occasionally do a very low weight session and just rep out. By light I mean a guy with a push press of over 400 lbs playing around with 135 or maybe 225 for some pump work to move blood around.

[SSJBartSimpson]

I would say the @ChasingCurls69 and @CheekiBreekiFitness are pretty much on the money. Some people respond better to full body, some to a split. Personally, I don't like full body and would never use it, but that's just me, I know other people that did just dandy on full body routines. But I think it's important to note what chasingcurls said about prioritizing. If you Squat and then DL, you are going to have to sandbag a little on the Squat or do less well on the DL, you can't push both in the same session in the same way. As for pushing super high volume iso after pressing... I am going to be honest and say that I have no idea who the guy is or what his lifting looks like but I have known a lot of guys who can rep with a lot more than 225 lbs and none of them did that. I was repping 275 lbs strict at one point in my lifting career, and I did not do that. I DID do triceps many times a week, they can be hit often, and the good pressers that I knew (I was never a good presser) did that as well. I know several guys also liked to occasionally do a very low weight session and just rep out. By light I mean a guy with a push press of over 400 lbs playing around with 135 or maybe 225 for some pump work to move blood around.

That's what I was wondering, that the placement of volume probably doesn't matter. To give context to the lifter I linked, he was doing that 225 for reps at 20 years old, so a prodigy basically. He deadlifts >700 lb.

[cole]

Ive done both ways, with success.

I like full body sessions, they feel better overall and spread the stress out more evenly throughout the week. Whenever I do a U/L split, L days are always hard, and U days too easy. I also like following the squat-press-pull order, as it most accurately represents what I will be doing at meets. I will say that doing 4 full body sessions a week can be tricky and it becomes more difficult to manage fatigue. 3 day FB are better, for me.

The upside to U/L split is that if you are getting into major volume territory, you can devote more time to the lift itself. ie: squatting 5x5 can be a long difficult process once it starts getting heavy, and the idea of pressing and pulling after that is daunting.

Like anything, there is give and take, pros and cons to both

[SnakePlissken]

Ive done both ways, with success.

I like full body sessions, they feel better overall and spread the stress out more evenly throughout the week. Whenever I do a U/L split, L days are always hard, and U days too easy. I also like following the squat-press-pull order, as it most accurately represents what I will be doing at meets. I will say that doing 4 full body sessions a week can be tricky and it becomes more difficult to manage fatigue. 3 day FB are better, for me.

The upside to U/L split is that if you are getting into major volume territory, you can devote more time to the lift itself. ie: squatting 5x5 can be a long difficult process once it starts getting heavy, and the idea of pressing and pulling after that is daunting.

Like anything, there is give and take, pros and cons to both

My kinda take on it too. I think switching back and forth is good if anything just to mix things up. I've been doing 3x for the last half a year and have gotten pretty sick of doing hour plus to hour thirty sessions and the idea of switching to 4x with more U/L feels fresh. Eventually I'm sure that'll get stale and I'll go back to the simplicity of 3x Full Body again.

[BostonRugger]

I was listening to Shethar's recent tricep video and he brought up something that got me thinking... he says to get a huge press that after his heavy press days he would do absurd amounts of volume on his triceps. (note, he does 225 lb military press for multiple reps).
I do question, is there any actual benefit to grouping training muscle/muscle groups like this on the same training session, as he mentions here after he's already worked them? Another way to ask the quesiton, is would he have had the same results if he trained his triceps iso work on squat day?

For volume/hypertrophy biased workout, I like having an accessory that targets a smaller muscle group that might not have gotten sufficent work volume from the primary lift. Ex: if doing higher volume bench work. With the loads I'm using for volume stuff, I'm going to get some amount of work on the triceps, but it's not a full dose of volume because my pecs/delts can handle those loads without much help from the triceps. If you're working closer to failure, this is probably less of an issue.

I got this from a @Hanley thread. Caveat is that the description above comes through the conduit of my brain, several years later.

[GlasgowJock]

I think they all can work, you just have to pick the right exercises, with the right volumes and intensities. Not an answer that will lead you to a "right" path, but I think that's the honest true answer to it all.

This.

Also whether you're training 'movements' (volume/ strength/ power) or 'body parts' (hypertrophy) too I guess; I can smash through a full body session within an hour if I pick three movements - squat, press, hinge/ pull - if I'm just looking to maintain strength, which is pretty much what I've been doing for 2.5 years because #reasons.

I suppose hypertrophy you need to put in the necessary time unless you're of the Mentzer/ Yates school of thought.

[janoycresva]

I like full-body for the even distribution of training stress, but I always have to fight my caveman urge to do too much volume/let RPE go too high on those types of programs. It's easier for that fatigue to sneak up on you with a higher frequency full-body program than with a split.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

I like full-body for the even distribution of training stress, but I always have to fight my caveman urge to do too much volume/let RPE go too high on those types of programs. It's easier for that fatigue to sneak up on you with a higher frequency full-body program than with a split.

As a troglodyte myself I'm definitely guilty of this. Especially on full body training. Since sometimes you just do 3 or 4 sets for a movement, it's very easy to add one more set here and here, or add some exercise at the end of the workout, and before you know it you're doing way more than you can reasonably recover from.

[Hanley]

Shethar

Oh, he's a Bozeman dude. We go to the same gym.

That is all. Carry on.

[SSJBartSimpson]

Shethar

Oh, he's a Bozeman dude. We go to the same gym.

That is all. Carry on.

Nice