This is the GOAT training split

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

02:06 Why do all the pros do body part splits?

03:57 Why the research underestimates higher training frequencies?

06:47 Diminishing returns

08:17 Diminishing returns per session

10:36 My Online PT Course

11:01 Stimulus to fatigue ratio & recovery

11:46 Active recovery

13:25 Is recovery even essential?

14:35 Time efficiency

17:06 Conclusion

18:22 MH Physique App

Transcript:

What if I told you there’s a way to set up your training program that has been uncovered in research to deliver superior or at worst neutral results? It also happens to be much more time efficient. Would you do it? Of course you would! You view my channel, so you’re much smarter than the average individual and a better human being. This training technique is “Full body training”, so this video will shine the light on full body training and why you should be implementing it.

The first argument for full body workouts is that if you simply empirically look at all the results of studies, the trend is very clear. Higher training frequencies deliver either better gains or at worst neutral results. There is one exception out of the 50 or so studies have been done on high frequency training where the lower frequency group actually got better gains in one out of the four studied muscle groups, but it wasn’t consistent in that study, and it was mostly because there just didn’t seem to be any gains in this sample of individuals in the higher training frequency group. Basically all the studies show either better gains with higher training frequencies for strength development, fat loss or muscle growth, or similar gains.

In most of the studies there are no significant differences between the groups. And if we look at the latest meta analysis of the total literature by Pelland et al. from 2024, the meta analysis found that there was a 91% probability that higher training frequencies resulted in more muscle growth. However, the effect was small and inconsistent. They also found that strength development had a quite positive relationship with higher training frequencies. So there was a pretty significant and consistent effect that higher training frequencies resulted in higher strength development. So the total literature basically just says: “You might get better muscle growth, you’re probably getting somewhat better strength gains and there is essentially no probability that you’ll get worse gains.” So purely empirically, it makes sense to go with the highest training frequency per body part that fits your schedule. That is, by definition, always full body workouts. If you train four times a week, that would be for full body workouts. If you train seven times a week like I do, that’s seven full body workouts.

“Now hold up!” – you might say. “Seven full body workouts? You are a loco-loco Manno!” It’s actually not crazy at all. It’s bodybuilders that are the exception. Indeed, even in bodybuilding circles, up until about the 50s, full body training was the norm. Almost all the great classic physiques that you’ve seen of truly natural trainees that have built exceptional physiques. All of those were built on full body training. Almost all athletes train with full body workouts. Many bodybuilders, especially natural bodybuilders still train with full body workouts. Shotput athletes, those amazing sprinter physiques, those amazing gymnast physiques, those amazing CrossFit physiques… – (10) – Zero! – …strongman, powerlifters, all of them pretty much train with full body workouts or something very close to it. It is really a niche segment of the bodybuilding population that is the exception among all people that do physical exercise, that train with body part splits or push-pull-legs upper-lower, something like that. So really, full body workouts are the norm.

It’s also specifically in trained individuals and athletes that we see better gains with higher training frequencies. In untrained individuals the research is quite clear that it doesn’t really matter how often you train. Volume is king. How you distribute that volume across the week doesn’t really matter in untrained individuals. Though I would say again, there are about four studies that find benefits of higher training frequencies and none that find any detrimental effects of higher training frequencies. So again, purely empirically, the same applies that full body workouts are either better or at worst, equally effective. And here you can see a research overview of the studies that find significant between group differences in trained individuals and you can see that in basically all cases, higher training frequencies deliver superior results in at least one measure – either fat loss, muscle growth or strength development, strength development being the most common, or a strong trend thereof.

It’s also specifically in trained individuals that actually train like serious lifters train that we see the most consistent benefits. That’s because researchers want to know what is the effect of training frequency independent of training volume. And then we see clearly training volume is king. How you distribute the volume over time, which is a matter of training frequency, is or strictly secondary importance to training volume. However, in practice you are never in a volume equated scenario. If I increase your training frequency, so I take your “Monday chest day” and now you have your incline bench press, decline bench press, flat bench press because you do all of them, don’t you? And then I’m going to take some of those exercises and I put them… Say the incline press goes to Wednesday and the decline press goes to Friday. What’s going to happen to your total volume? It’s going to increase.

You’re going to be able to do more repetitions when you do your incline and your decline bench pressing because now you’re doing it in a fresh state rather than after six sets of other bench pressing. So of course, you’re going to be able to do more reps, or you’re going to be able to do the same number of reps with more weight, meaning your total volume is going to increase. In that sense training frequency is much like your rest interval. Longer rest intervals generally increase muscle growth when that results in a greater training volume.

Training frequency, if you think about it, is really just a very long rest interval. We call it a rest interval when it’s a couple of minutes and we call a training frequency when you take the exercise and you move it to a different day. But really it’s the same thing. You’re just taking more time in between doing the same exercise again, resulting in more total volume because you are more recovered when you do the remaining sets. We also have one specific study, Neves et al., that looked at what happens when you equate or do not equate total training volume. And then here we saw that if you do nine sets on one day and you do three sets three times a week on other days, indeed you get the same gains when you equate the total volume. So you equate the repetitions, which basically makes the group with the higher training frequency training less hard, right? Because you’re doing three sets and you only have to do the volume that the other group did on Monday – on their chest day when they did six sets of bench pressing before, and now you’re doing that in a fresh state. So you’re just training less hard. And we see that in many of these studies. If there’s no increase in total volume with the higher training frequency group, the higher training frequency group must simply have trained less hard. And then it’s actually amazing that they could get the same results with less effort.

Indeed, in some of the studies we actually see that the individuals report less perceived exertion, so their RPE ratings are lower during the sessions. Now what Neves et al. did is that they had another condition in which they did the three sets three times a week, but with as much volume as they could. So this is the realistic setting that we are interested in. You have your nine sets on one day and you’re going to spread them across the week instead of doing all of those nine set for that same body part. And that doubled the percentage increase in muscle growth from 2% to 4%. This did not reach statistical significance, strictly speaking, but the effect size trend and the confidence intervals clearly supported that there were better gains.

And I should note, we don’t expect a massive increase in strength development or muscle growth here because it is a relatively small increase in training volume. We know that training volume is king and there are diminishing returns. So if you increase your training volume from, say, 20 sets to 22 sets per week on average in the literature, we see that that results in more gains. But it’s a pretty small effect. And in an eight week study in trained individuals that small effect is going to be very difficult to detect. Because how much muscle realistically does a trained individual build in eight weeks? It’s very little. And now they’re building, say 5% or 10% more. Well that’s a very, very small effect. That’s well below the measurement error of ultrasound, individual variance…

In all of these studies, there’s so much noise that it’s really just very difficult to detect such small differences. So we are talking about fine tuning here. But again you get either better results or equal results again as supported by Neves and the total literature. So if we zoom in in which types of studies we see that full body training or higher training frequencies result in better gains than the lower training frequencies or body part splits, we see that it’s in trained individuals that are actually training to failure, which is so far what most probably serious lifters watching this channel fall into and 3) when they’re doing a lot of volume per session. Because if you’re doing two sets, then of course, moving that second sets to a different day doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You’re not that fatigued yet. It’s not going to make a big difference. But if you’re doing, say, nine sets or ten sets, then we see a bigger effect.

A meta analysis published by James Krieger in his Weightology when it was still operational found that there were strong diminishing returns to training volume, not just across the week as a whole, but also to training volume within a session. And here you can see the graph. You can see that there seems to be almost a plateau effect after some six sets per muscle group per session. I also did an analysis like this and found a similar results, although that was confounded by the fact that some of the Brazilian studies seem to have data fraud in. So we really need to have an official meta analysis that re looks at these data. For now, I would say that the trend in the data is that when you’re looking at very high training volumes per session, indeed, those are the studies in which we more reliably see beneficial effects of higher training frequencies.

And this makes perfect theoretical sense, because, as I said, when you’re cramming in more volume for a muscle group beyond, say, ten sets or six sets per session, you’re getting very sharp diminishing returns simply because of your fatigue level. Where you’re doing your seventh set of bench pressing, how much extra volume and how much stimulus for muscle growth are you really stimulating with that? There’s actually one way to tell and that’s by looking at muscle protein synthesis and anabolic signaling. We have some of the studies here and they generally find that there is an increase in muscle protein synthesis and anabolic signaling when you increase the volume per session, but there are indeed diminishing returns. When you go up to around the ten set mark, there seem to be very, very little additional muscle protein synthesis that takes place.

We have a good study from Damas et al. which found this, where you get very limited additional muscle protein synthesis when you increase the volume beyond eight sets per session. And in rats this research is very clear. Now, of course, this research is in rats, but the base muscle physiology is actually not very different and most findings in rats have also applied to humans when it comes to this base physiology in exercise science.

Again this is in rodents. But where you see that the muscle protein synthesis response plateaus and when you go above ten sets per session you actually get into an almost negative effect because muscle protein damage and muscle protein breakdown keep increasing as you do additional volume, but the muscle protein synthesis response does not increase as much anymore. And again, we don’t have the muscle protein breakdown data in humans, but the overall trend in the literature is that we get a similar dose response for muscle protein synthesis. At some point, your body just gets the hint and cramming in more additional volume may result in essentially junk volume, or at least a very poor stimulus to fatigue ratio.

Speaking of the stimulus to fatigue ratio, higher training frequencies have also been found to improve that in various ways. In research we see that higher training frequencies, again, mostly with full body workouts, result in better ratios of testosterone to cortisol, they result in less muscle soreness, they result in lower perceived exertions during the workouts and they result in higher levels of muscle activity. Multiple studies on this that find some statistically significant differences. Again, in other studies, there are no statistically significant differences, but the overall trend favors higher training frequencies for sure, which also covers the concern of recovery. If anything, it seems that recovery is better when you do higher training frequencies. Indeed, in some of the limited research that we have that looked at this, they find that spreading your session out results in faster recovery times.

The biggest potential benefit of higher training frequencies and full body training is probably that you get active recovery. When you are training, you increase blood flow throughout the entire body, mostly in the muscle groups that you train, but also in the rest of the body and research has found that this improves the recovery of those muscle groups. Some of the studies have even found that relatively light training, like a bench press workouts, very, very light, more like a warm up style or like power training, improves recovery of bench press strength over the next days. So full body training essentially makes sure that you’re always putting lots of blood flow in all your muscles, and that may improve tissue turnover and healing rates.

There’s also research by Raastad et al. which found that higher training frequencies improve recovery speed. So these researchers had individual strength trainees that were first doing four workouts per week using a typical upper-lower split, and then they had them do full body exercise with six sets per session for the quads, mostly doing squats, leg extensions and leg presses, and they found that after two weeks of doing the super high volume, high frequency training, their speed of recovery actually improved. So they didn’t start overtraining, they actually got used to it. To put it in the researchers words: “In conclusion, 2 weeks of heavy training reduced acute neuromuscular fatigue after a test workout. As a result, recovery was complete 22 hours after the workout performed after the heavy training periods but not after the workout performed before the heavy training period. This faster recovery may explain why daily bouts of leg extensor strength exercise were well tolerated by most subjects.” In general, I think that most people dramatically underestimate what their bodies are capable of and when it comes to training frequency, training volume, mental considerations are usually a much bigger concern than actual physical overtraining of the musculature.

It’s actually also questionable if recovery is even really necessary to begin with. I think it is, and it’s generally good to stay below your maximum adaptive training volume over time, but we do actually have two studies in which they compared doing workouts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then they compared that to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, just doing them all back to back and they found equal gains. So recovery might not even strictly be necessary in the first place. Either way, all of the research is very consistent with the idea that the total weekly training volume that you get is what really drives your gains.

The best way to achieve a very high training volume, given a number of sets that you do, is to do them with high training frequency, spreading the sets out across the week as much as possible, because this maximizes the volume that you get per set, because you’re more fresh. We see that literature, you know, you get that higher muscle activity, you get more force output, you can simply do more reps or lift more weight when you are more fresh. So you get more total training tonnage, more total volume, and that seems to be the driving factor for higher training frequencies’ better gains in some of the studies. Especially when you otherwise do a lot of volume in one session and you are a trained individual, training with relatively high volumes and going close to failure.

And that brings us to time efficiency, which is probably, practically speaking, the greatest benefit of higher training frequencies and full body workouts. Most people that do upper-lower splits, push-pull-legs splits, your programs are horribly, horribly, horribly time inefficient. They’re effective if you get the volume in, you do the work, you’re going to get great results, but they’re very, very time inefficient. When you’re doing a workout with bench press, five minutes of rest, bench press, five minutes of rest, you are spending so much of your time in a gym not exercising, it’s actually crazy if you think about it. It’s also very inefficient for the equipment because you have one individual occupying one piece of equipment for like 20 minutes just to do four sets for that one exercise. Now, you can be much more efficient with a full body workout because now, instead of resting during your rest interval, you can do another exercise. So you can do squats, chin ups, overhead press, all of them with minimal resting between and then maybe five minutes later you’re just still doing your squats, but now in between that time, you also did your chin ups and you also did your overhead presses. So that should cut your workout time basically into a third. And I also see this myself.

I do full body workouts every single day. Most of my workouts are done in 45 minutes max and I train with reasonably high volume. That’s because I am almost never fully resting in a gym. My rest intervals are usually a minute or so because I’m not doing the same exercise after a certain set. So I do one exercise, I do a different exercise for different muscle groups and then later I come back to that one exercise. And you can be flexible with this because I know many people train in the busy gym, I do too, and you don’t want to hog all the pieces of equipment. You don’t have to. You can just be flexible in your exercise order. So you can just look at I finished my chin ups. Now can I do leg extensions or can I do leg curls? If one of those is free, you do that one. If not, in worst case scenario, you just stay where you are and you do your next set of chin ups after your rest interval. So the worst case scenario is equally time efficient as the way most people train anyway.

With full body workouts you have way more flexibility in your exercise order and which exercises you string together so your time should be much, much lower. And I see this myself in clients, most people’s programs, I can dramatically increase their training volume without increasing their training time. And that in practice, does result in greater gains because you simply get more volume in in the same amount of time that people have. Many people are limited by time in the end. Full body workouts offer an extremely time efficient, effort efficient way to get high volume in for a given number of sets and time that you have.

In conclusion, full body workouts are the most rational way to train based on multiple lines of evidence. Many people compare different training splits like upper-lower, push-pull-legs, full body, and they never really considered the underlying factors. The underlying factor is your training frequency per muscle group and research decisively shows that higher training frequencies per muscle group lead in superior or at worst equal gains compared to doing split workouts or lower training frequencies. The higher strength frequency per muscle group will always be achieved with full body workouts, so it makes sense to spread your volume out across the week as much as possible.

Research shows that you get more volume for a given number of sets. That extra volume is likely to lead to either better gains or at worst, equal gains. And also, if anything, recovery capacity will be the same or it will improve based on multiple lines of research, in recovery indicators that we have, the trend is in favor of higher training frequencies due to active recovery. Full body workouts also allow you to train and by far the most time efficient manner. There’s really no objective reason not to do full body workouts. Basically all arguments I’ve heard for split workouts revolve around some completely irrelevant or subjective indicator, or it’s because you get a better pump. Now, if you just like getting a better pump and you’re willing to sacrifice time for that, that’s fine. But it’s really not an objective indicator of any improvement in your gains.

Because full body workouts are the best, my App generally programs high training frequencies and full body workouts, or something very close to it. It doesn’t have to be exactly a full body workout, it doesn’t need to have a name like push-pull-legs or upper-lower, it just needs to have a high training frequency per body part. With my App you’ll not only get a free optimized evidence based training program, you’ll also get your macros calculated, your daily energy expenditure estimates and a full meal plan to go along with this and you can try it out for free for two weeks. Check the link in the description and let me know what you think. And if you like this type of content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.