In this episode of Muscles by Brussels Radio, Ben and John dive into the essentials of training and cardio for bodybuilders, athletes, and anyone aiming to improve their fitness. They discuss machine-based training for precision, the value of cardio for health and performance, and how to balance steps with intentional movement. Plus, they explore advanced techniques like lengthened partials and share practical tips for optimizing workouts based on personal goals. Whether you’re a seasoned lifter or just starting out, this episode is packed with actionable insights to level up your routine!
📢 Highlights from this episode:
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Cardio vs Steps: balancing health & performance
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Machine-based training advantages
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Developing social confidence
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Mindful cardio practices
👉 Tune in for an honest, relatable chat that goes beyond the highlight reels and into the heart of what it means to connect authentically.
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vegan bodybuilding, cardio for fat loss, machine-based training, advanced training techniques, how to optimize workouts for bodybuilders, best cardio strategies for heart health and endurance, vegan fitness, strength training insights, training and cardio hacks, muscle-building advice
Transcript:
[Ben:]
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Vegan Protein’s Muscles by Brussels radio. My name is Ben and I’m joined again by John Thomas aka The Bodybuilding Vegan. John was on a couple episodes ago and we talked about all things bodybuilding.
We had a discussion around natural and enhanced bodybuilding and some of the differences there and the episode was well received and so we decided to ask John to come back for a part two. Thankfully he said yes, so here he is and today we’re going to be talking a little bit more about the X’s and O’s when it comes to training and nutrition and how John likes to program for himself and for his clients and maybe kind of some of the subtle differences or similarities between natural and enhanced dieting and training. So before we jump into that, John, thank you for coming on the podcast again today.
How’s your day going and we’ll go from there.
[John:]
Welcome, thank you for having me on here. Look at you wearing the Bodybuilding Vegan shirt and I’m over here shirtless. Admittedly, I try to get some vitamin D each day.
I mean, I take my supplements, don’t get me wrong, but I do think that mentally we get something different from getting a bit of sun exposure so I try to walk around. I was getting a few steps in after my last meal. I’m always multitasking so I’m probably going to stretch during this episode because I never stretch and so I’m trying to make that happen more, but I’m like, where do I fit that in?
Anyways, before I get super long winded, my day. Man, it’s what you make it. That’s really what every freaking day is, is whatever you make it.
And when I woke up, I did not make it the best day ever. I checked WhatsApp, which is where I handle all my clients. I had 145 unread messages.
I know you coach, so I know you know how some of that feels. Just that anxiety of, oh shit, I got a lot to do. And then I knew I had committed to an Instagram post this morning.
I had committed to planning out some additional social media projects. I just was, I was feeling overwhelmed and then I realized after a positive interaction with fellow vegan bodybuilder Robert Cheek that it really just is whatever you make it. So this got really long, but I’m doing the Vegan Foodie Fest January 25th in Miami, Florida, and we just booked Robert as one of the speakers.
So I’m super stoked for that. And it just made me feel really good to know that, you know, somebody I’ve looked up to damn near half my life, pretty much ever since I found out about him. For those of you that don’t know, he is the godfather of vegan bodybuilding.
I would not be here. Ben would not be here if it wasn’t for Robert Cheek. He paved the way for all of us, really, alongside people like Danny and Giacomo that have been in the game for a very long time.
And yeah, it’s just really cool to have him there and to be able to text somebody that I used to think was like a god that I’d never get to talk to. So it’s very cool. So anyways, I am in a much better mood now.
I’m prepared to have the best day ever, regardless of what life throws at me. I woke up, I’m here. I got all my senses, all my fingers and toes.
I really can’t ask for much more than I get an hour to hang out with Ben. I mean, come on. So yeah, I’m good.
I’m very good. I’m having the best day ever.
[Ben:]
Isn’t it funny how just one interaction like that can completely change the trajectory of your day? And I think about that when you go throughout your day and you have those little interactions, like maybe you hold the door for somebody or you just say good morning to somebody you’re passing on the sidewalk and how much better you feel with those just little interactions. And you can choose not to do any of those things.
You can choose to just kind of stay in your own bubble, keep it to yourself and go throughout your day like that. And that’s definitely something I’ve done before. And I’ve also found at the same time that when I do go out of my way to do the little human things that add up throughout the day, I just feel so much better.
And it could be a random thing like I was at Wegmans, which is a grocery store chain in the northeast just maybe a week or two ago. And dude, I was wearing your shirt. I was wearing the bodybuilding vegan shirt and the black one.
And I was just walking around the supermarket and I think this girl was leaving and I was going in. She was like, hey, I love your shirt. And I was like, thank you so much.
And that was just like a small thing. But her saying that made my day so much better. And it’s like when you give somebody a small compliment like that, just saying like, hey, I like your shirt or like your outfit or whatever it is that can go so far.
And I think it’s just remembering that you have the ability to create that for yourself every day is something that I think you are kind of getting out there.
[John:]
A hundred percent, man. I think we all have the ability to influence and impact those around us. Now with social media, you can reach out really far and do it in all sorts of places.
But like you said, even at the grocery store, something little like that. And I view these as like win-wins like or for example, like this guy approached me. It was a while ago, like six months ago, and just asked me out of the blue, like, hey, I’m running late for work.
Can you give me a ride? I was like, I was actually trying to record. I was trying to record a reel outside in front of this building.
And like, he’s like, I don’t mean to interrupt, but like, I just missed the bus. And I was like, you know what? Actually, like my mom’s here with me.
And like, we didn’t have anything to do the next hour. We were just hanging out. Yeah, I can take you.
And the reason it’s a win-win is when I dropped him off, he got to go to work and not be late. So he felt good. And I felt like I did something good for someone else.
So it’s just one of those things where it’s like, if you’re feeling down or you’re feeling bad, go do something nice for someone else and you’ll feel better. That was what basically helped save me during a breakup was every day. I was like, I don’t care about myself, but I’ll try and make somebody else happy.
And eventually it just ended up making me happy. So yeah, this has literally nothing to do with vegan bodybuilding, but here we are.
[Ben:]
It’s got everything to do with life and vegan bodybuilding is a part of life. We’ll tie it back in that way. But speaking of vegan bodybuilding, I would love to get an update with where you are at in your own bodybuilding process.
Last time we talked about kind of your overall journey and how you got to where you are right now, but we didn’t dive too much into specifics around you’re in an off season. What are your kind of your current plans, your current goals? What have you been up to recently?
I know that you finished up a mini cut, maybe like a month ago or six weeks, something like that. And now you’re kind of thinking about the next steps. And of course that relates to your plans for next year and how all of that ties in together.
So where are you at with your current bodybuilding?
[John:]
That is a really pertinent question and one that I hope I can answer well. I don’t know is the most honest answer here. So, I mean, I do know aspects of it.
So yes, I did do a mini cut. I think we started that around 248 pounds. I think I got down to 238 and really did not go any lower than that.
Even with cardio getting pushed up a little bit more than normal and food getting dropped a bit more than normal. There is this aspect that I’ve noticed, at least with myself and with other of my clients that use gear, that use anabolics, you’ll start to almost recomp unless you push really hard through it. So like I stayed at 238 pounds for like a month straight now, like fluctuating within one or two pounds of that.
But that was the average. And I think that was because we had added gear back into play. And it’s just almost like your body just doesn’t want to drop weight just for the sake of dropping weight.
I was getting leaner, getting stronger. So probably kind of recomping. And now we’ve added even more food back in.
Like for example, my training day macros right now are 370 protein, 500 carbs, 75 fat. And it’s not actually a lot of food for me, but it’s way more than we were. And I’m just sitting at 241, 242 every day.
Now, granted, I’ve been pretty locked in on my diet. I haven’t been cheating like I used to. And I think that might’ve been slowing the fat loss progress.
But now we don’t have all that extra cheap food. So I’m not really growing quite like I should. We’re technically in a bulk right now.
I’d like to push the food higher. That’s something I’m going to voice to my coach. I’m realizing at my level in the game, at least where I’m at, I feel it is more important for me to be a communicative athlete versus just a soldier that’s given orders and executes.
I think I’m at the point where I have enough inherent knowledge that I can somewhat advocate for what feels like best to me. So currently we’re in a bulk. I am trying to maintain relative levels of leanness.
I’ve noticed that bulking too hard in the past just ends up slowing you down. You end up having to cut longer. You don’t really gain the strength that much faster by getting fatter.
Not that much. Yeah. And then for somebody myself, 242 pounds, I want to get bigger, but every pound you add is more stress on your heart and the rest of your organs.
So it’s like, if you can do it a little slower along a little less food, it does make sense. As far as training goes right now, everything feels good and I really want to keep it that way. I’ve been training, I think a bit more smarter.
Not every session is, and we’ll get into this when we talk about training intensity, but not every session and every set is, my mom’s life dies if I don’t hit a PR. My mom dies if I don’t hit a PR. Her life is on the line.
If I don’t go that direction, maybe I don’t hit as many PRs. However, I’ve noticed I have not gotten injured nearly as much as past years, especially on lower body. It’s a real mind fuck for me to go in and not hit legs a hundred percent, but sometimes something will feel a little nagging.
My glute will feel a little tight or whatever. And I’ll be like, you know what? Today’s just an adductor and abductor day with some other isolation stuff thrown in, but I’m not going to try and PR on ab squats.
And it’s been working well. I’ve noticed that, you know, I kind of alternate it. Like one week, I’ll go a little harder one week, a little softer, and I’m getting really into the weeds here, but that’s, what’s working for me where I’m at right now.
I’m going to shut up.
[Ben:]
Cause I feel like I went way over here. No, you touched on some good things that I had written down. So I’ll probably just touch on those right now while we’re on the topic.
I’ll go kind of in reverse order. So what you just talked about and then kind of work our way backwards. So starting with the training thing, I mean, to me, it just sounds like you are using the knowledge you’ve accrued over the years, knowing yourself and your training, being an advanced athlete and using that to make informed decisions in the gym, because there is a degree of psychological arousal is the term that is like the sports science term, basically a degree of heaped up that you need to get before a certain set to perform to your maximum capacity. But there’s also there’s a curve.
So if you go too far on that spectrum, it can actually impair your performance where yeah, maybe you let technique or your form get a little bit looser, maybe looser than it should be. And that’s something that leads to some niggles or eventually could accumulate to an injury. It’s not always that linear, it’s not always that black and white, but that’s something that that can happen.
Or on the other end of the spectrum, if you find that you are, you know, taking thing and this is probably less so for the competitive, competitive bodybuilders out there. But if you’re kind of just going into your sets, and you’re taking treating them kind of lackadaisically, then you’re probably not going to get the most out of that you have to have some intent during your sets. And I think it’s finding that balance for people.
Yeah, maybe not going in so psychotic into a set where it’s like, you know, you’re getting like, so emotional and so hyped up that it’s impairing your performance. But you have to bring some intensity, I think we all kind of find our way along that that spectrum over time. And it’s knowing when you can really push it or when you need to push it.
And when you need to pull back, and it sounds like you’re just kind of continuing to hone that skill of okay, today, I’ve got it or today, I don’t have it. And ultimately, I think, like injuries are the great limiter for physiques. Because if you are not able to train a muscle, even if you’re training at 80 or 90% capacity, that’s usually enough to still make progress.
Yeah, maybe it’s a little bit slower than what it would be. But if you’re staying in the gym longer, and you’re not having to regress every 10 or 12 weeks, because you’re picking up these little niggles and injuries, that is going to be a general upward trajectory. It’s like with fat loss.
Yeah, you might have some weeks where you kind of plateau or maybe even the scales up a bit. But you’re, you know, the trend is continuing to go down. And it’s the same thing with training, you know, you might have weeks where yeah, maybe the performance is a little slower, you only add a rep or you maintain your performance.
But there’s other ways that you can progress, you can make your technique a little bit cleaner, you can, you know, that just that felt smoother, whatever it is. And then you pick your spots, okay, today, it feels like I can really go for it and hit that PR, or, you know, I would love to hit a PR today. But today’s just not the day based on how I’m feeling.
And I think that is something that’s really important. And I think it’s often harder to do that with ourselves than it is maybe to encourage like clients or people that we coach to do that. Because something that we’re often saying to people that we work with, hey, you got to listen to your body.
Like if something is feeling off, if you’re feeling like you’re gonna maybe not in a place to do this exercise today, just you know, take it on the chin and come back to fight another day. Is that something that you found with yourself and with the people that you coach?
[John:]
Oh, yeah. I mean, I always tell every client I work with, you know, your body better than anyone else in the world, including me, even if I’ve worked with you for three years, you’ve still lived in your body for how many years you’ve been alive. So I definitely want people to listen to things like when I when I got my most recent significant injury, I actually had the luxury of filming that entire workout for YouTube.
And it wasn’t until I went back and I might have covered this in the last podcast. But when I played back the video, I remember telling my girlfriend like, ah, my right hamstring is kind of burning on the hamstring curl machine. And I thought my my skin was just getting pinched.
That’s what I thought it was. And then an hour and a half later doing RDLs, I popped my right hamstring in the same exact spot. But I had forgotten what had happened on the hamstring curls because I was getting all psyched up.
I’m like, not today. It’s going down. I’ve already told myself today it’s going down.
So it’s going down. And it freaking went down. I went down on the floor.
And I think that’s it is hard. It’s a really fine line, man, because like, I guarantee with my new methodology of trying to listen to myself, there will be the day that I’m in the gym, and I’m tired. And I make an excuse of maybe I don’t feel my best today.
So I’m not going to kill myself on high squats. And I’m basically going to wimp out of a hard set or a hard session, because I’m tired that day where I could have still performed. However, I guess it’s almost it’s almost like our legal system.
Like, I’d almost rather let the occasional bad person go on accident than convict an innocent person. And in this case, I’d rather have an occasional softer workout than do what I did that day and go balls to the wall on a day that my body wasn’t ready for it. So that’s the other thing, too, is like, like you were saying, like, you have to psych yourself up.
And right now, for me on any typical leg day, hack squats, pendulums, leg press, any of those movements, I’m using so much weight that really even a misstep, a slight miscalculation, somebody smacks me during the exercise, or something catches my eye, like, I don’t know, somebody falls in the gym, and I turn to look. That’s, that’s almost a guaranteed injury. Like that lapse in judgment for even just a second is enough to where I’ll get hurt.
Now, if you’re a brand new athlete to the gym, and you’re like pressing one plate, like your injury chance is really low. But if you’re doing 10 plus plates, then it’s, it is almost even mentally taxing sometimes, like going in, like, I’ll tell myself not allowed to get hurt today. But then I can even think about it.
And you’re like, well, how can I get hurt on this? And then you actually think about visualizing the injury. And I’m like, this is not the right mental visualizing that I need to be doing.
But I don’t want to be completely ignorant. It’s almost like a seatbelt. Like you wear your seatbelt in the car, not because you love thinking about car crashes, but because if it happens, you’d rather have it on.
So yeah, I think I made that way longer than it needed to be.
[Ben:]
Let’s, let’s stay on the topic of training here. And you touched on just then, the fact that invent individuals with larger degrees of muscle mass who are stronger. And this, you know, at the extremes is usually individuals who are assisted enhanced taking some sort of performance enhancing drugs, they are going to by necessity need to use larger loads as they continue to progress in their physique and their strength.
So I would like to know, there are some coaches, some individuals who will implement strategies like pre exhaust or pre fatigue, where they’re using some sort of isolation exercise before a compound to therefore limit the amount of load that needs to be used on that compound, but you can still take it to a sufficient degree of intensity to produce to produce a good stimulus on that exercise. Is that something that you have used in your training before or ever program for clients?
[John:]
Yes, I would say it’s in my training right now. And it is something that I use for clients right now as well. So with like, like kind of going back to where we were before, for injury prevention, I think it’s really vital to have a clear, intentional, well designed training program for whatever you’re training.
Now, I’ve done this long enough that like, I can just walk into the gym and make something up. But if you’re like an average lifter, that’s just starting, and like you walk in the gym, and the first thing you do is barbell back squats, or the first thing you do is bench press. I think that that is a recipe for disaster.
So for me, for my clients, pretty much every single workout that I write, unless it’s very, very specific for someone else will have some type of isolation, warm up exercise in play. So if we’re training like a pull day or a back day, you might have cable or dumbbell pullovers, something to get some blood flow, something that I don’t want you like seriously tracking and trying to set PRs on. This is wake your muscles up, wake your mind up, get some blood flowing, maybe even get a little sweaty before moving on to your main lift.
For a push day for like chest. I do like any of the back supported, like cable flies, or machine flies, something like that, just to again, warm up those chest muscles, stretch them a little bit. For legs.
I have all my clients do walking bodyweight lunges as the first thing they do. I am a better coach than client and I don’t have myself do that. Though I probably probably wouldn’t hurt.
But I definitely do some some seated leg curls. That’s always what I start with. I get a good pump in my hamstrings.
First set might be 20 reps. And that’s still almost like a warm up, even though it’s hard. And then I’ll maybe add some weight and then I move on to the compound stuff.
Now, in a bubble, in a nutshell, if you said, you know, everybody you care about their life depends on you, lifting the most weight that you can on the hack squad. Besides the mental preparation, the physical preparation that would look like for me as I would still go into the gym, I would do some mobility work, make sure that I’m feeling good, get on the hack squad, do a few reps to warm up at some differing weights, and then take a larger jump that I’m safe with, like, probably do a single rep with like seven plates per side, and then go to a working set with nine.
And I feel like that would give me a reasonable degree of being able to beat my previous PR, but still leaving me a little bit worried injury wise. However, luckily, that crazy weird scenario isn’t usually presented. And by doing those hamstring curls, and my other warm ups, and then a few extra warm up sets with that hack squad, I’ve almost guaranteed that I’m not going to get injured on this movement, and guaranteed that if I am going to get injured, I have some clues before going in.
It’s almost like clearing a minefield, you can just run through it blindly, or you can get out your mine sweeper and try and see if there’s any mines. I guess like, for example, on that day that I did pop my hamstring on the RDLs, I did a single warm up set with 55 kilograms, so like 130 pounds, 120 pounds, and then jumped right into the 200 pound dumbbells. Like, I should have done a few more sets to get ready for it.
And maybe even doing those few sets at lighter intensity, maybe that would have prevented the injury. Maybe that would stretch whatever needed to be stretched, or allowed my body to get into it. Or maybe I popped it with only 130 pounds, or 150 pounds, instead of 200 pounds in each hand.
So, for all those reasons, like, yes, it might take away a small, like a percent from your top set to do that. But like we were talking about before, if you never get injured, and you’re able to hit these top sets, even if it’s 1% off, eventually your top sets will be way higher than they would have been otherwise. So, yeah, very big on injury prevention and setting up proper programming, especially through using isolation work, warm ups as needed to really just get your body ready for the hell that you’re going to put it through.
[Ben:]
Yeah, John Meadows was really big on this. He would almost always start his workout with a contraction-based exercise, a short-based exercise, because we know that those kind of exercises produce less muscle damage. There’s less tension at those long lengths, where you’re probably more likely to get injured transitioning from that eccentric to that concentric.
So, if you think about coming out of a hole at the bottom of a squat, or pressing off your chest for a bench, or transitioning from kind of that deep stretch on something like an RDL and coming back up, those are going to be the points where you’re most likely to get injured. So, doing a contraction-based exercise, like a leg curl, or a fly, or a leg extension, whatever it is, before you go and do that big compound, and then he would have the compound second, and then a stretch-based exercise for that third exercise. And I think that, of course, there’s individual circumstances you need to program based on the person in front of you, but I think that is a pretty good template for a lot of different days that you can set it up like that.
So, I think he was kind of ahead of his time in that way. And I think that there is value in looking at research studies that have been carried out at the same time. I think that anecdote does matter a lot, and I think that it’s something that gets downplayed, but especially as you get to, I mean, sure, like there’s, yeah, I think you can maybe extrapolate it more to individuals who are natural than enhanced, because there’s just no research on enhanced bodybuilders.
And so, I think in that space, probably it makes more sense to look at anecdote and look at what, do your own kind of study, where you look at like a hundred of the best bodybuilders from history, or maybe right now and see, you know, what are the crossovers between what they’re doing? And I mean, you have to take everything from that, but you can see what are some of the commonalities, because I think success does leave clues to an extent. So, I want to transition into that, talking about the interaction between training intensity.
So, your proximity to failure, the amount of volume you’re doing. So, we could define that as number of sets per week per muscle group, and the frequency at which you train a muscle. So, how do you see these three variables interacting?
Do you rank any one of them higher than others? And I’ll leave it at that for now, and perhaps I’ll have some follow-up questions.
[John:]
Okay, great. I do want to reply to a couple of things. Yes, John Meadows was ahead of his time.
For those of you that don’t know, he’s MountainDog1 on YouTube. Go watch his stuff. I’ve learned so much from him.
It lives on in my clients, and a lot of the beat-up bodybuilders would go to him whenever they couldn’t do traditional, add another plate to get bigger. John Meadows would find other ways to drive intensity without just adding weight. And then back to what you’re saying, too, on studies.
Studies are great. Studies just prove what we already anecdotally know. You want to be a study-only person?
Well, you might have more luck with natural athletes because there’s probably more of them, and they’re more likely to go submit to a study. If you are a gear-using, top-10-in-the-world bodybuilder that’s paying thousands of dollars for a coach, tens of thousands of dollars for gear, tens of thousands of dollars for food, and your sole income comes from how well you place on stage for bodybuilding, do you think that individual is going to risk their career by trying a new training method, or trying a new diet, or being a part of a study?
Good luck. There’s no way, like Ben was saying, go look at the top people. None of those top people, though, would subject themselves to a study because they actually depend upon this to survive, at least financially.
So, yeah, studies are great at proving what we already know, or for using more general stuff for the general public, but for professional bodybuilders, there just won’t be studies because they’re professional bodybuilders. So, jumping into the training side, frequency, intensity, what was the other variable? Volume.
Volume. I think intensity is king, to be honest with you. Like, you can go in the gym and do a ton of volume, do a ton of frequency, and I just don’t think you’re gonna see the results that you want to.
I think there has been a really big shift lately into this whole RPE of things, and RPE, rate of perceived exertion, is great on the one hand because it allows you to try to quantify your intensity. However, I will say the average individual is a very poor reporter of their own perceived exertion because I will have people say, oh, you know, like RPE, correct me if I’m wrong, but RPE8 would be like you have maybe two reps in the tank. RPE9 would be one rep in the tank.
RPE10 is like you literally died getting the last rep with good form. A lot of people would be like, oh, that’s RPE9. I’m like, no, dude, you had five reps.
Like, if I grabbed your mom and put a gun to her head, you’d get five more reps here easy, maybe six, and it’s like a lot of people just don’t know if they haven’t been in, you know, really hardcore sports. They weren’t in the military or they didn’t get in fights growing up or have some really hard things happen to them at home, bullying, whatever it might be. If you didn’t have any of that, you don’t really have that deep, dark place to go into to find your intensity.
And so, I feel from a coaching perspective, that’s where I need to help people the most. Volume and frequency, like, okay, some people can make seven days a week to go to the gym. That’s great for them.
But like most people won’t. Most people will go four or five days. But if I can have you go to war four to five days a week for the majority of people, that’s how they’re going to have the fastest growth.
Now, were you asking as well about my own personal approach or direct where you want me to go?
[Ben:]
Sure. I do want to kind of touch on what you just talked about with intensity. I would agree.
I think training intensity is the most important value variable out of those three because I think I look at the natural side of things. I look at the enhanced side of things. If you want to be a top level bodybuilder, there’s nobody who’s a top level bodybuilder who doesn’t train with some degree of intensity.
Sure, there’s levels to that, right? Like you look at a Jordan Peters and you’re like, okay, that’s a different level of intensity than almost anyone else on planet earth. And then you look like other pro bodybuilders.
They’re still training very hard, but there’s levels to that. I think if you’re getting, you could say within a couple reps of failure to three reps of failure, it’s still a hard set, but taking that to zero reps or where you’re literally failing on the rep, that’s another level of hard. And it’s not saying that every set has to be like that.
It doesn’t, you can still see good growth from doing that, but it has to be at least close, right? We can’t have you being five, six, seven, eight, 10 reps away from failure. Yeah.
If you’re a beginner, a complete noob, you’re still going to put on muscle and that’s going to work. But there comes a certain point where you need to dial up the intensity. And like you said, I think the main problem with using a RPE or reps and reserve scales is you have to actually be able to demonstrate that you can take it there to failure so that you know you have a gauge of where that is.
Because if you’ve never done that before, you could think something is a certain subjective level and that’s okay. Everyone starts at a different place. Like you mentioned, people who are athletes, they maybe have that extra gear.
They know how to push themselves because they grew up doing that with sports. Other people have never really done that. So that could be a new thing for them, something that they have to learn.
But I think purely from like an efficiency perspective, if you’re training with higher degrees of like intensity and volume, I see as kind of an inverse relationship. Like if you’re training very intensely, you’re not going to be able to recover from as many sets of what you’re doing. And okay, maybe you could do 30 sets in the gym with like three or four reps and reserve and get the same results, but you could probably do like six sets.
I’m just throwing out numbers here, but like significantly less sets with a higher degree of intensity. So just from like an efficiency point of view, if you don’t want to be in the gym 24-7, I think it makes sense. You could argue from an orthopedic perspective as well, not doing as many sets, the more sets you do, the more chance there is potentially of injury or overuse.
And I think maybe that is to an extent why, I think there’s a couple of reasons behind this. I’d actually be curious to hear from you. So a body part split, also known as like a bro split or a pro split sometimes, is probably, I would say, I mean, you might have a better kind of like your nose to the ground a bit more here.
Probably one of the more, like, if not the most popular training split that a lot of pro bodybuilders will use, some sort of a body part split. I think maybe it’s changing a little bit more now where people are experimenting with higher frequencies, training muscles more than once a week. But this split is basically like you’ll go and you train chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, legs on Wednesday, arms on one day, shoulders on one day.
And I think, first of all, it’s just historically bodybuilders have used this for a long time. It’s worked. They’ve gotten good results.
I think regardless of whatever training split you follow, you look at the best bodybuilders, they’re training intensely. That’s like the main thing. But I think that may be part of the reason other than tradition or history that the bro split or the pro split, whatever you want to call it, body part split, has been used is when you’re moving such large loads, when you’re enhanced and when you are insanely strong.
First of all, warming up for that multiple times per week if you’re training that muscle group is an intensive process. And the joint and connective tissue wear and tear that you might have from training your chest three times a week, that might be too much for a lot of bodybuilders to handle. And so training it once a week, especially, I think if you have the ability through assistance to have more elevation of muscle protein synthesis for longer periods of time.
I mean, even for natural individuals, there’s not a huge difference between training once a week, twice a week, three times a week for a body part given you’re doing the same amount of volume. I just think there’s so many ways to go about it. I would like to hear kind of your perspective, like what splits have you historically used or tried?
Have you noticed differences between those? Do you tend to push clients towards one way or another? Or is it really just individual?
How many times a week is someone in the gym?
[John:]
A lot of good questions here. Um, so let me cover how it works with clients. So, and this is like kind of, you know, if you’re a coach, maybe this works for you, then this is something you’re more than welcome to take for yourself.
Whenever anybody signs up with me, I guess like, unless they’ve competed for multiple years and I know that they really know their shit. Like Ben, you might not get lumped into this group, but just about everyone else. I put them on a three-day split, a push-pull leg split, everyone, unless they have an injury or they can literally only train three days in a week, then I’ll give them upper lower.
But if they can go four or five days in a week, they’re going to get a three-day split. I do that for two reasons. One, they only have to figure out three days worth of training.
If those somebody a five-day split, they’re probably gonna have more variation with exercises. I’d rather start you off with the most bare bones, vital, important three days of exercises and get your training footage more frequently. Because a five-day split, you know, I get to see your training once per week with the three-day split.
If they’re doing five days a week, I’m almost seeing every body part twice. So, it’s gonna be faster turnaround time for them to get proficient because part of this is getting proficient. Like, I don’t know.
Do you do decline dumbbell bench press? Not very. Neither do I.
So, we would both suck at that for a couple weeks and then we get pretty strong. So, if I changed your exercises every couple weeks, then we’d both run into that same thing again where it’s like, oh, I was proficient with this. Now, I have to learn it again.
So, for me, for my clients, I like to literally everyone, even bodybuilders, I start them off this way. There’s usually form critiques that need to be had and then once they’re efficient, then I build it out based on them. Also, from a coaching perspective, this saves me from building someone a custom plan built just for them and then the next week they decide, I want to go do tennis instead and it’s like, okay, well, glad I built you this wonderful custom program that you’ve never even tried.
So, from a coaching perspective, I really do go for that three-day split and then build it out based on the individual from there. For myself, I spent a, all right, let me clarify there too. For competitors, their split will become whatever they are most lacking in.
So, you know, we’ll call myself a competitor. For me, I don’t need legs two or three times a week. If you know what I look like, legs are what I got.
Legs are what I’m known for. Thank you, mom and dad. I don’t think I worked excessively hard for them.
I think, I think I train hard. However, I don’t feel like I train my chest any less hard. It just doesn’t grow as fast.
So, you would need to build out your programming based on what you need from a bodybuilding perspective. So, for me, I did push pull legs even twice a week for probably half a decade. And what that led to was relatively big legs, okay chest and back.
Back was really just okay because I didn’t know how to train it. I didn’t know how to get the correct mind-muscle connection there. Shoulders and arms though, they were lacking.
And in my eyes right now, they’re still lacking. That might just be body dysmorphia. But I think that they could be brought up more.
At least side delts and arms. My rear delts are actually pretty big. Maybe because I didn’t know how to train back and I was hitting more rear delts.
Who knows? So, now, kind of the split that I’ve gravitated towards, it was push pull legs, rest, push pull, rest. And it has gradually kind of shifted into more of a whole push.
So, pretty much hit all upper body in two days. Pull day, push day. There are some arms in that at the end but I’m not hitting them fully fresh.
I’m mostly just getting a good pump. Trying to hit some PRs but like, you know, PRs after I’ve already trained my back for an hour or trained my chest and my shoulders for an hour. And then I’ll take a rest day.
So, pull, push, rest. And then strategically, I will do shoulders. And then the next day, today, I’ll do arms.
And then the third day, I’ll do legs. And then I’ll rest again. Now, the reason for this is I’ll have a full pull day, a full push day.
I really hammer chest and back on those. But I’ll still get some touch-up work done on my shoulders and arms. And then I have a whole day rest and recover.
And then I’ll come back in and I’ll really nail shoulders. And then I’ll really nail arms. And then legs, it’s almost like an afterthought.
It’s technically the fifth day, if you want to call it that. But really, it’s I’ve had a rest day and then two training days and it’s the third day. So, I have less intensity to give legs.
And honestly, I don’t need to kill them for myself quite as much. I’ll do one leg day that’s more accessories and machines. Like, I’ll even try and limit myself.
I’m like, okay, no heavy leg pressing, no heavy pendulum squats or hack squats today. Just do what you can with accessories to make it hard. And then the other one, I’ll go try and hit a PR on pendulums or something like that and really push myself.
But I look at it the way John Meadows used to say, you know, you get an allowance every week for recovery. So, go spend it how you want. Up front at the beginning of that week, I’m spending it on chest, back, the push and the pull days.
And then when I have a little bit of money left over, I’m going to give it to my arms, my shoulders. And then whatever’s left over after that will go to legs. I know for a fact for myself, if I take that Jordan Peters style like scary hard training and I do that on legs, I’ll be so wrecked the next three or four days that I won’t hit PRs on upper body.
I definitely won’t hit PRs on like a rack pull. So, for me, I’ve learned to kind of tone down legs a little bit. But that’s the split that’s working well for me.
I think let’s play this game. Let’s say I had to go down to just TRT only. I don’t think I’ll ever be non-enhanced.
I think, you know, medically I was prescribed TRT. I’m never going to come off. But if I went down to just TRT, what would I do?
I’d probably keep that split. I think it would still work well for me. Yeah.
I mean, I guess I’m trying to think how gear plays into this. Gear just allows you to recover from more to an extent. However, like you were getting into Ben earlier, like having those days like that arm day that I can really dive deep in arms, I think it allows you to train harder and into a way that requires more recovery to be able to grow.
I think it could work for a natural athlete as well. But it would work better for a natural athlete that’s already at the top end of their game. Someone that doesn’t have a whole, like when you’re already 95% of the way there, then that’s when you need to really go deep and hard on that muscle group to continue getting that stimulus to grow it.
When you still have a really long runway, you don’t have to go so far into one direction. It’s kind of how I view it. The biggest difference though, training as an enhanced athlete that I have found, it’s like to give an analogy, it’s like a car.
You just throw a turbo on your Civic or on your Volvo or whatever. Okay, now you got more output from this car, but like, is the transmission ready for it? Are the wheels ready for it?
Like you got 600 horsepower in a Civic, but you got stock tires, like you’re just going to spend. And so that’s one area that I’m really, really careful with my clients on and try to be as careful with is like, just because your muscles are strong enough to handle the set doesn’t mean everything else is. And for example, my hamstring, well, I don’t know.
I thought my hamstring was strong enough, but like clearly the connective tissue there was not ready for that lift. And so that’s where you really need to be careful. If you look at studies here, um, just about all anabolic steroids decrease the strength of the connective tissue.
I know some like, and it’s, this is getting really into the weeds and then I’ll, I’ll turn it over to you. But like some, some drugs, like I believe Winstral increases the number of like connective fibers that you have in your tendons. Like, and I know I’m getting like not super sciency here, but like, I don’t know, maybe you got 55 or per square inch and now you got a hundred, but each of those hundred are way skinnier than they should be.
So it allows breaks to occur more often. And it’s kind of the same across the board. And a lot of people are like, Oh, run Deca or run, you know, Nandrolone.
Cause that helps cushion your joints. I can anecdotally say my joints feel better when using this, but I think it’s almost more of like a painkiller or a number, or as soon as it’s removed, that relief is gone. And it’s not something you can stay on the rest of your life.
So I don’t view it as actually a problem solver. I view it as like a bandaid that just kind of covers up the potentially underlying issues. So you’ve got to find out how you can train even smarter and safer with heavier loads because your joints over time are able to handle less.
So it’s like kind of that weird, like catch 22. It’s like, Hey, you’re stronger, but the rest of you is weaker.
[Ben:]
So I’ve said a lot. No, that makes sense. And my personal take is I don’t think that there’s really too many inherent differences between proper training approaches for those who are enhanced or those who are natural.
Like sure. You can say like, maybe if you are taking something, you can use a less optimal training approach and get some results. But it’s like, you know, that’s, that’s the case.
You look at studies where they take groups of people and, or like there’s this famous study where they have people who don’t train and they put half them on steroids, don’t do anything. And then they have half that train. So it’s like, yeah, you could make progress that way, but of course you’d make better progress if your training program was proper.
So I don’t really think it’s a valid argument. And I think that the principles that you were kind of outlining when describing your own trainings, but like, okay, you probably want to prioritize the body parts that you want to grow the most, maybe towards the start of the week. Maybe you want to hit body parts that you want to prioritize more twice a week.
If they’re smaller muscle groups and they can recover from it, like your delts or your arms. These are things that make sense across the board. It’s not just something that’s like, oh, you know, only people who are enhanced can benefit from that.
And only people who are natural can benefit from this. And I think that on the, the, the natural side of things as well, it’s like, as you get closer to your genetic potential, you get stronger, you put on more muscle mass. You’re probably going to also get more proficient with training.
And the dose that you get from any individual set is going to be so much larger. And I think it’s the same when you’re enhanced the stimulus and the dose that you’re going to get from any particular set is so much higher, but so is the associated fatigue with that. And you were talking about, you know, if I was to go and do a leg day where I just kill myself on every set, you’re going to be pooped for three or four days and not be able to perform.
I think that’s a very good example of that is yeah. Like, because you can literally drive so much tension through your quads on every set of squats that you do, you can’t do like 10 sets of squats in a workout and expect that you’re going to be able to recover from that you know, systemically or locally. So I think that, yeah, as you get stronger, you have to be more mindful of dosage and moderating that.
And I have heard that for those who do have some assistance, being patient with progressions is that much more important, like you were mentioning, because your muscles will probably adapt faster than your joints and your tendons. And I think that it makes sense. Like the more kind of like patient you can be with drawing out that progression and not always just focusing on, okay, I could add 50 pounds to the bar this week, but do I need to do that?
Can I still get a good stimulus another way that is more protective and keeps you injury free? And I think that’s something that we’ve really harped on today is talking about like ways that you can keep training, delivering that stimulus to your muscles, but not putting yourself in unnecessary risky situations where you’re going to, you know, be more exposed to injury. One more thing that I wanted to talk on with progressions is do you feel like that there is more of an added value to the pump for those who are enhanced versus natural, or do you see it as a training variable that is just the side effect of the training that you’re doing and it’s not something that really makes a difference for anyone natural or enhanced?
[John:]
That’s a really solid question. So for both my natural and enhanced athletes, I’m very big on logbooking things for the majority. You know, I feel until you get to maybe a really advanced level, you almost need that logbook to know if you’re making progress or not.
Like just going in and getting a pump, like most people will half-ass that. However, training with my own coach, especially for smaller muscle groups like arms, it does seem to benefit to kind of more of that chasing the pump than just chasing weight. There’s so many, like, I feel one way, but also this, like, for example, I use less weight now on arms than I did two or three years ago.
I used to be curling, like, I remember logbooking 65 pounds in each hand for 12 reps. That’s a lot of weight, right? Well, also my elbows were killing me.
My form is probably solid. Like, I don’t think somebody would call me out in the gym and be like, oh, that’s bad form. But like, it could have maybe been a little cleaner.
But now, if the 45s are taken, I have no problem grabbing the 35s or 40s and really squeezing the fuck out of my arms, getting a good pump and focusing more on using that muscle versus moving weight from A to B and trying to beat a logbook. And my arms are better now than they’ve ever been. So, I feel like if you have really good mind-muscle connection, and yeah, that’s what brought my back up in the last two years is leaving my ego at the door, putting on weights lighter than some of my natural training partners and flexing the crap out of my, and it blew up.
So, I guess it’s hard to say, man. Like, some things, like a hack squat, you’re kind of locked into that position. If you’re doing eight plates on a hack squat, you’re going to have big quads.
Like, it’s just going to work. Could you go down to six and do a four-second negative or one-second pause at the bottom and really squeeze the hell out of your quads on the way up and get the same results? Maybe.
Yeah, I feel like I was really wishy-washy with that. But for me, I have gotten better results as an enhanced athlete in the last couple of years, focusing more on that mind-muscle connection and the execution of the movements in regards to how it makes my muscles feel versus just beating reps. I think some of that makes sense.
It’s like, if the goal is to be a bodybuilder and have bigger muscles, making sure you’re using the right muscles, flexing them hard, having control of them versus just kind of mindlessly going in there like, oh, I’m going to get 15 today and just focusing on that number flying through the set. But back to what you were saying, look at what the experts do. Go watch most pro bodybuilders.
You have some old-school guys like Branch Warren that would just throw around weight. Well, most guys are going in there and having really good control. Like, Nick Walker is an example that I tell people to look at.
He’s often the strongest motherfucker in the gym, but he’s very controlled with every single rep. So, yeah, it’s so funny. This is just not an exact science.
I guess that’s probably the best I can give you. There’s no one way or right way. But for me, focusing more on the pump with the logbook is kind of the backup.
I still want to get stronger over time, but I’m not killing myself just to get an extra rep here and possibly sacrificing form or sacrificing that mind-muscle connection.
[Ben:]
Yeah, I think if nothing else, the pump, as you were indicative that you are targeting the right area, because if you’re getting blood flow to that area, then that’s an affirmation that, okay, I’m actually working this muscle. Like if you’re doing curls and after you finish your set of curls, all you can feel is your forearms and your biceps don’t feel shit, then, okay, you probably weren’t executing that movement correctly or in a way that at least is going to produce the amount of bicep growth that you want. So we can at least say that you are doing a better job at actually executing that movement and delivering the stimulus to where you want it to go.
And I think that for smaller muscle groups, there are probably more degrees of freedom and more ways that you can eff it up. Like you were mentioning on a hack squat, you kind of just move the weight from A to B. There’s not too many ways you can really mess that up.
But in something like a curl, when you get the shoulder joint involved or with a lateral raise where your elbow position, your hand position, there’s so many ways that you can shrugging the weight up when you’re doing them. There’s more ways to mess it up. So I think like you were saying, you have to be a little bit more intentional.
And even if that means using less load, if it’s letting you target those muscles that you want to target, then, okay, you’re probably going to get a better pump. And it’s not necessarily that the pump is directly contributing. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.
We don’t necessarily know. But you can say that you’re at least targeting that muscle group. So this is not necessarily related directly to training in the gym, but it’s tangential.
And that is the value of cardio and steps as kind of an additional proxy for cardio or activity. Where do you see the value in this for your clients in general? I’ll give you my take afterwards, but I think we’ll probably have pretty similar opinions there.
[John:]
Yeah. Last closing thoughts on training, just because you kind of mentioned it, something that I’ve really gravitated to in the last couple of years is more machine-based. But almost basically exactly what you said, like a machine has its range of motion dialed in and you’re kind of locked in that.
So if you’re on like a machine preacher girl, it’s kind of hard to use your back and shoulders. So some people find ways, but for most people, you can get locked in. Same with a squat or a leg extension versus a barbell squat.
It’s like you’re locked in and forced to use the correct muscles. So what I’ve noticed as a coach is like most people do squats and have no clue that they’re doing half the reps. They could, they do a set of 15.
It’s like they got 30 in them, but then when they go to bicep curls, they’re using the thirties and it’s like, you should be using fifteens. I noticed that across the board generally. So, um, just wanted to clear that up with training and then yeah, into cardio.
So for my enhanced athletes and myself, cardio is a way of life. It is, it is how we keep ourselves alive. Um, I really, even for like my enhanced guys that are on the skinnier side that are really trying to grow, we don’t do any less than four sessions a week of 20 minutes of like moderate intensity cardio, getting your heart rate up.
Um, I don’t want just steps. I want something that actually places a little bit of load on your heart. Um, and myself included, like even right now in the off season, I’m still doing five days, really six or seven is probably more realistic because I’m so habit oriented.
Like just every day that I can go, I go do 25 minutes on the bike in the morning, get my heart rate up, get a sweat on. And it’s, it’s good for heart health. And you can even see it come back in your HDL and LDL numbers when you get your blood work done.
Um, from a performance standpoint, I don’t program too much cardio for my bodybuilders though. Maybe it would be worthwhile to have a couple of hit sessions a week, maybe in the off season, more so than in prep because stress and cumulative fatigue gets a lot higher in prep. But like for my athletes or people that have to perform, um, outside of bodybuilding, like, like other sports definitely have cardio in because it’s, it’s a big part of that.
But, um, the steps steps are for me more of, well, I don’t know. Some of it is like health, just almost health in general. If you’re stepping, you’re not sitting.
A lot of people sit way too much. So I program everybody in between eight and 10,000 steps a day minimum. Um, and sometimes I’ll push steps higher in prep, depending upon the competitor, especially for women, just because I’ve seen better results pushing their steps higher versus their dedicated cardio higher.
Um, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
[Ben:]
Yeah, I’m the same. I think if I were enhanced, I would definitely be doing cardio as frequently as you’re doing it and, uh, recommending that to my clients who were the same. But even if you’re not, I think that there are probably some benefits of, of cardio.
Uh, you know, even if you’re doing steps on top of it, at the end of the day, it’s kind of a cost benefit analysis. What time do you want to dedicate to this? If you have more time to dedicate to it, cool.
It’s definitely not going to hurt doing some intentional cardio. And I think that there are benefits from a cardiovascular perspective from, um, you know, a cognitive perspective. I find that getting outside, doing some steps or, you know, riding your bike, playing pickup basketball or pickleball, like whatever it is that you like to do that keeps you moving, keeps you active.
I think there’s a wide host of benefits to doing that. So I think it comes down to how much time do you have? And then what are your goals?
Like if you’re a competitive bodybuilder, okay, maybe you need to be more intentional with how you allocate your energy. So maybe you can’t go play pickup basketball two hours every night. If you want to make the best progress or, you know, you want to be a competitive bodybuilder and maybe your cardio needs to look a little bit lower intensity, more steady state, cause that’s going to help with your recovery in the gym.
But most people aren’t that. So I think the, just the more that you can move, um, the better. And yeah, I’m, I’m myself.
I had recently, I’ve started doing some more kind of intentional cardio and I actually like it. I like it more than I thought I would. Um, and before I was just like a steps on the guy, like I would be doing, um, 10,000 steps pretty consistently every single day.
And I think that, you know, for most people, that’s probably going to get you 80, 90% of the health benefits. But if you want that little extra bit, are you kind of like getting a little sweat on the morning? Like, I feel good when I start my day doing cardio and I’m sure that you feel the same.
So, uh, I think for, for most of the people I’m working with, it just depends. Also, if you’re in a fat loss phase, if you have extra time, you don’t want your food to be lower. Okay.
We’ll do, go do a little bit of cardio. It’s not like the most efficient way to burn calories, but it adds up. And, um, you know, some people actually enjoy doing it.
So it depends on the, on the person, but I think that both are good tools, um, with regardless of whatever your goals are.
[John:]
I agree. Um, I think there’s something to be said for your leg days. Might be able to be pushed a little bit harder if you have some dedicated cardio.
Um, and then also for me personally, I don’t always want to do my cardio in the morning, but I always feel better after I do it than before I started. Even if I wanted to, I always feel, I feel good after. So, um, yeah, I’m going to have to wrap it up about here.
I got to go train arms. I’m going to go for the pump today more than likely. And last thing to cut off training here.
I’ve been getting into this more, but lengthened partials, doing a lot of partial reps towards the end of like the last set, focusing more on that stretched position, holding stretches. I think that’s where training is going to be moving, uh, based on the studies, based on what I’ve seen anecdotally, uh, getting more of a stretch seems to be more important even than getting a contraction, which is weird to me, but we’ll find out. So hopefully by episode, we’ll have more info to share there.
[Ben:]
Yeah, for sure. I think especially on that stuff that is harder at that contracted position, like the back stuff, that’s always something that’s just felt kind of like intuitively good. Like, you know, you finish a row here.
I’m like, it’s not finished till I’m barely moving the weight anymore. So I think there’s kind of a lot of like hidden, like bodybuilding wisdom or like we were talking about at the beginning, like bodybuilders have been doing a lot of this over time intuitively. It isn’t to say they get everything right.
They get a lot of shit wrong, but you know, they also, you know, kind of know stuff just because it feels good. And I think as I’ve trained more, the more I listened to, okay, what, what feels productive, what feels good for me in the gym and contextualizing that within kind of the context of what we know. So, um, I’m gonna let you go now, John, thank you for joining us for another episode of vegan proteins, muscles by Brussels radio.
We’re going to need to get you on one more time to talk. We didn’t even touch on nutrition. We just talked about training today.
So um, I think we’ll have to get that on the calendar, but it’s been a pleasure as always. Uh, if you guys are not currently following John, you can find him on Instagram and pretty much everywhere at the bodybuilding vegan. Uh, so if you’re listening to this podcast, be sure to tag him, tag myself at Ben and Mitchell, and then you can find everything else from vegan proteins at vegan proteins.com at Instagram at vegan proteins and at muscles by Brussels. So thank you for listening to another episode. I’m Ben, this is John, and we’ll see you in the next one. Thanks for watching.
Thank you, brother.
