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 full body all-encompassing single workout that I could do kind of over and over again different variants of that and build a couple from the movements 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 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, 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 Speediance.

I was talking about these Speediance 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 Push Pull Legs from Arnold 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.

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 these workouts are full body minus legs and all kinds of different exercises.

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 exercises. And unlike the Tonal exercises that I had back in the day where the blocks were three or four exercises, my block is actually more like eight, nine exercises. So, it's eight or nine exercises in a row.

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?

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.

So it's not insignificant. And the reason why it's not more than that, you'd think, oh, well, it should be 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.

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.

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 because I have a lot of ankle issues. I blew my left ankle again kickboxing. I injured it running in 2018 and actually tore the tendon off the bone. Calf raises are in and I can now do them at pretty much full strength which is good.

But yeah, they are full body and 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 bro split. And I did that for the rest of the lunar challenge.

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 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 Speediance up a couple days a week, three days, four days a week maximum, you know? So two days at the minimum and four days at the maximum and hit the machine up, hit it hard while I'm working on it, and then not have to worry about it.

Having to do a workout every day just doesn't fit into my schedule right now with two little ones. So we're going all over the place most of the days of the week.

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 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 bro split. I saw huge gains, especially in my biceps, from having a specific targeted arms day workout. 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.

In my full body workouts, it's mostly back. It's mostly upper back, too, to try to make sure that I don't tear my shoulder again. So, it's a lot of that kind of work. And I have had no shoulder injuries for all of these years post switching over to the Tonal originally. And for someone who does jiu-jitsu, that's rare.

In fact, I was having injuries to my shoulders all the time whenever I was free lifting. 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 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 crossfit stuff, these are far safer. I had an argument with someone 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. So, I'm 225 pounds and I'm relatively strong.

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 have this machine. That's all I need. I could work out right now. I don't need anyone else here.

That is what I'm getting at with the safety of these machines. Are they as good as two spotters? Probably not. To be honest with you, that's probably not realistic that they can replace two spotters. But are they better than no spotter? Which is what I was doing before by the way.

I was lifting with absolutely no spotter because I prefer to train alone. And so in that preference of training alone, I gave up the ability to have a spotter. And I did drop a weight once and so you know that's pretty dangerous whenever you drop it, bend the bar because 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 in half. So just realized that you can have some seriously dangerous stuff happen with free weights. You see it on the all the time online.

If you look at the people who go to bench and then have it roll up on their neck and you know that that can kill you and has killed people. That's all because of no spotter.

Like that couldn't have happened to me because of the placement of where I bench. It'd land on my stomach. 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.

But that also happened to me where I couldn't pick it back up and put it on the catches because I went to failure. This machine, I can actually go to failure and just 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 bro split immediately became 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."

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 between major workouts and I'll do pieces of it, right? I'll just do the warm-up sets from the arm workout as its own kind of pseudo workout.

So that's the other big thing that I would say even on the Speediance I wouldn't worry about completionism around your workout. And what I mean by that is there are days where I don't get the whole work.

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 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."

That's what I ended up doing today. But this is all after I built that initial physique. 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 give myself a lot more grace on this, especially because right now I'm starting the preparation for the Lucky Charm race here locally, which is like a four mile race, which is not far, but for the deconditioning, for the ankle injury, for the fact that I haven't really run seriously in years, to get back into it and start training for that is actually my primary objective.

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 honestly I did terribly when I showed up so I might as well have not been there.

Now the priority is the running is number one, even over the jiu-jitsu. So like it's going to be running and then it's going to be probably lifting and then jiu-jitsu comes in at number third, but it's a close third to the lifting.

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 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 strength-based jiu-jitsu training day and you'll 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. I would say one in 10 training sessions are like that. It's more likely to get the cardiovascular strain that I got on Friday than the strength-based training.