Full Body Minus Legs: My Current Training Split Explained

It's kind of like where do you go from here, right? And where I decided to go from there is to switch my workout paradigm from that type of a workout to a fullbody all-encompassing single workout that I could do kind of over and over again and build a couple different variants of that from the movements from from the Arnold workouts that I like the best. So, I took all of the work, all of the lifts that were my favorites, which there was a lot of them in there. So, there's a lot of different lifts and the ones that were my favorite. Plus, I added some stuff that I wanted to that I'd been, you know, kind of experimenting with and I wanted to put them into a workout. So, I did a full body minus legs because I realized that if I add the legs to the workout, I'm probably not going to do it. So, uh, that that's the approach that I took. And so, I have these full body minus legs workouts and that's pretty much what I've been doing ever since except there was one challenge on Speedience. So, I was talking about these expedience challenges and there was one month where they did this lunar challenge and the lunar challenge was you had to work out every day and it was the first time where these pushpull legs from Arnold, those wouldn't work for it because they're too grueling, too taxing for where I'm at right now and the amount of time I'm going to dedicate to training and uh and my workouts. I thought, "Oh, I'll just be able to do my workouts." And what I'll do is I'll do my full workout, which by the way, this Sunday I did a full workout. And to give you an idea, the full workout is 41.5K pounds is what I did on Sunday on that workout. And that's and these workouts are full body minus legs and all kinds of different exercises. and they're one warm-up set, one set to failure of each exercise. So, I go through, I have a list of warm-ups, and then I have a list of of uh of exercises. And unlike the tonal exercises that I had back in the day where the blocks were three or four exercises, my block, which is not really a block in here, they're just all sequenced. My block is actually more like eight, nine exercises. So, it's eight or nine exercises in a row where I'm doing all the warm-ups for it and then I'm hitting the the real sets of those. And the thought process of that is if you have nine of them ahead of time, that gives you a lot of time to make the decision of am I going to do the hard sets or not? And so, what I thought I was going to do for that lunar challenge is that's fine. I'll do Sunday. I'll do a full workout. Monday, I'll do a warm-up set only. Tuesday, I'll do a warm-up set only. Wednesday, I'll hit a full workout. And if I do just warm up sets, you're looking at about 10,000 lbs lifted roughly, right? Just doing the warm-up sets. Uh so it's it's not insignificant. And that's and the reason why it's not more than that, you'd think, oh, well, that it should be half about half, a little under half. But what happens is there's eight or nine workouts, then the lift, then the hard lifts, and then there's going to be another set of four or five workouts of warm-ups, and then another set of four or five, you know, hard exercises or or some some variant thereof depending on I have different I have four different of these workouts that I've built. And the workouts are built in a way that's designed to maximize the efficiency on the machine. So more thought is put into how to maximize the efficiency of the machine than anything else. But it is a a basically full body workout minus, you know, actually one of my workouts has deadlifts, which is the only leg exercise and calf raises. So I should say almost all of them have calf raises. Um because I have a lot of ankle issues and actually that's what I blew right before vacation. I blew my left ankle again uh kickboxing. So my my first vacation I had a boot on my foot and uh it's the same injury I had in 2018. I actually injured the same thing running. So I injured it running in 2018. uh ended up at the orthopedics place then and then came back and they're like ah this is the same foot almost the same injury you know uh a little bit worse this time actually I tore the tendon off the bone so same basic injury but uh calf raises are in and I can now do them at pretty much full strength which is good that means everything's kind of healing up after a month and a half uh from from from the injury. But yeah, they are full body and they uh they they you know I thought they were going to work for the Lunar Challenge perfectly and I got into it and I tried it and after three days I realized I was going to fail miserably because the third day of just doing warm-up sets I was so fatigued I couldn't do them. So, I had to skip the day and then I could do the full workout again, but this is not going to work. I have to redesign my program. And that was the first time where I built individual day exercises of individual muscles and did the bros split. And I did that for the rest of the lunar challenge. So, uh for the lunar challenge in particular, I switched over to a brosplit. Uh but that was because of and then by the end of it I was tired of doing that and I wanted to go back to my because it's a lot of days. I don't like working out. I don't like lifting every day. I work out every day but I don't like lifting every day anymore. I did that to build this physique. I don't want to have to do it now. I want to be able to get in hit the speedience up a couple days a week, three days, four days a week maximum, you know? So two days at a minimum and four days at a maximum. and hit the machine up, hit it hard while I'm working on it, and then not have to worry about it. And having to do a workout every day just doesn't fit into my schedule right now with two little ones. So, uh, we're we're going all over the place most of the days of the week. And even like today normally would be kickboxing for me, but with that injury, I'm still not 100% ready to go back and throw kicks with that foot yet. So that's that's how I got the time to actually record the video that I've been wanting to make for quite a while. What I'm getting at though is my opinion on training splits are do whatever will work for you in the situation you're in today. And if you're trying to build a phenomenal physique, I think you could build it on PPL. I mean, for sure, because that's what I built mine on, you know, Arnold's Arnold's blueprint modified onto one of these devices. That's a phenomenal approach. And I think the other one that would really work based upon the lunar challenge is that bros split. I saw huge gains, especially in my biceps, from having a specific targeted arms day workout. You know, before I had a full body workout and there was some arm work in there, but there wasn't 10 arm exercises in a row in there. You know, it was a lot of back work with a little bit of arm work. in my full body workouts, it's mostly back. Uh it's mostly upper back, too. Uh to try to make sure that I don't tear her shoulder again. So, it's a lot of that kind of work. And I have had no shoulder injuries for all of these for all of the years post switching over to the tonal originally. And uh for someone who does jiu-jitsu, that's rare. And in fact, I was having injuries to my shoulders all the time whenever I was freelifting. It's why I'm pretty passionate about using these devices instead of using free weights. Even though I have free weights, I still love free weights in a in in a way, you know, it's not like I think they're useless and terrible. I just think everything has an application. And if you're doing crossport stuff, the these are far safer. You know, I had an argument with someone and I talk about it. I talked about on the channel before where they said free weights are safer and then they told me I need two spotters because they realized, oh, he's strong, you know, and I'm big. I'm right now I'm 225 pounds, right? So, I'm 225 pounds and I'm relatively strong and uh so not even one spotter is going to work for certain lifts for me. you know, it just So, now they're like, "You need two spotters and I I have this machine. That's all I need. I could I could work out right now. I don't need anyone else here." So, that is what I'm getting at with the safety of these machines. Are they, you know, are they as good as two spotters? Probably not. Uh, to be honest with you, that's probably not realistic that they they can replace two spotters. But uh are they better than no spotter? Which is what I was doing before by the way. I was lifting with absolutely no spotter. So realize that in my basement lifting by myself with no spotter because I prefer to train alone. And so in that in that preference of training alone, I you know I gave up the ability to have a spotter. And I I did I did drop a weight once and uh so you know that's pretty dangerous whenever you drop it, bend the bar because I had I had a lot of weight on it. Bent the bar and thankfully I got my head out of the way and it caught on one of the safety catches but when it caught it bent the bar almost, you know, in half. So just realized that, you know, you can have some seriously dangerous stuff happen with free weights. I mean, you see it on the all the time online. If you look at the people who uh go to bench and then have it roll up on their neck and you know that that can kill you and has killed people. Uh and that's all because of no spotter. Like that could that couldn't have happened to me because of the placement of where I bench. It'd land on my stomach and then like I had that happen once where I couldn't pick it back up and I had it on my stomach and I forget what I did. I think I tilted it to the side and then threw it off whenever I got strong enough. Like whenever I repaired, you know, whenever I got enough energy back in my left arm, I threw it off to the side. But that also happened to me where I couldn't pick it back up and put it on the catches because I I went to failure. This machine, I can actually go to failure and just and just uh you know, it handles it that way. But in general, my stance on what you should be doing is whatever you have time for. I would really not recommend because the bros split immediately became uh a really terrible idea for me the second that competition was over and I noticed it immediately. I'm like, "Wow, I can't do this kind of workout because I'm going to just miss days." Uh, I I left the arm workout in and I will do that every now and then between major workouts. So, I will do that as its own thing uh between major workouts and I'll do pieces of it, right? I'll just do the the warm-up sets from the arm workout as its own kind of pseudo workout uh like tomorrow I might end up doing that because today I I did most of a workout. That's the other big thing that I would say even on the speedians I wouldn't worry about completionism around your workout. Uh and what I mean by that is there are days where I don't get the whole work like today I got uh so Monday so Sunday I did the massive full workout and then uh I can't remember and I have it on the other phone what what all workouts I did this week but I know I skipped a day and today I went to work out uh or no I I did it sat Saturday or Monday I did the full lifts and then today I went to work out because today's Monday. Um, today I went to work out and I definitely didn't have the strength I had on the other workout and I got through all my warm-ups. I actually did the majority. I did h I got halfway through the working sets and then finally I was like enough is enough. I'm losing too much strength. I don't feel strong enough to continue. And I called it there. It's like you don't have to. You can just end the workout when you feel the workout's over. It's not the end of the world to say, "Nope, I'm going to call this here." And uh so that that's what I ended up doing today. But this is all after I built that initial physique. I I wasn't ending workouts early at all whenever I was going from 250 lbs down to 185 lbs. So realize then I was not ending workouts early. I was following the plan and executing it to perfection, right? Everything had to be perfect during that time. However, now I I give myself a lot more grace on this, especially because right now I'm I'm starting the preparation for uh the Lucky Charm race here locally, which is like uh it's a four mile race, which is not far, but for the deconditioning, for the ankle injury, uh for the fact that I haven't really run seriously in years, um to get back into it and start training for for that is actually my primary objective. So I always set up a structured list of what are my primary objectives. So sometimes it's jiu-jitsu is at the top of the list. Sometimes obviously lifting and losing weight in 2023 was the top of the lift list and I didn't do any running and I didn't do almost any jiu-jitsu. In fact, I almost took the entire winter off. Like I was gone. I may have showed up once every two weeks and I and honestly I did terribly when I showed up so I might as well have not been there like it was that bad of performances in 2023 over you know when when I was doing this when I was losing all that weight. Uh now the priority is uh is the running is number one e even over the jiu-jitsu. So, like it's going to be running and then it's going to be uh probably lifting and then jiu-jitsu comes in at number third, but it's a close third to the lifting. And what I've realized some of my jiu-jitsu training sessions, I came back last Friday to jiu-jitsu and I wear a Whoop and it shows me the uh heart rate strain of the jiu-jitsu sessions because I wear it in my underwear. And that actually registered as one of my hardest runs and it thrashed me to be able to do my run for that day. So I have to be cognizant of jiu-jitsu does not really interfere with my strength training very often. Every now and then it will. I'll have a particularly strengthbased jiu-jitsu training day and you'll know like you know because you can barely move your arms after it. That was a strength-based jiu-jitsu training day. And they happen every now and then, but they're pretty rare. Um, you know, I would say one in 10 training sessions are like that. Uh, it's more likely to get the cardiovascular strain that I got on Friday than the strengthbased train. And there's no measurements for that, by the way. The WO can't measure it. uh nothing really does a very good job from what I've seen of measuring uh strain strength-based strain and um at least not for jiu-jitsu.