It's simple, easy and effective - and in no time at all, your strength will increase dramatically. Get started with the Big 3 Workout Today! Return to Blog. Text us at: Big 3 Workout: What is it and is it right for me? September 10, What Is The Big 3 Workout?
Is It Right For Me? These lifts are: Deadlift - Deadlifting is, quite simply, the best lift you can do for your whole-body strength. This compound lift requires a strong back and core, and also engages your arms, shoulders, and legs.
This means that it helps strengthen just about every part of your body at once. They use specific programs of progressive overloading , lifting heavy weights for only seconds at a time, to make their muscles grow. Meanwhile, aerobic exercise such as walking, running, and cycling builds slow-twitch muscle fibers and long, lean muscles overall. If your legs are already larger than you want, it is probably due to stored fat rather than muscle.
If you've ever lost 20 pounds or more, you may have been amazed at how your body changed in areas where you didn't realize you had stored fat. Meanwhile, you might not get the results in the areas you wish would. Your body might prefer to keep fat on your thighs and hips rather than your stomach, or vice versa. When you exercise your leg muscles, they will grow a little, but you will mostly see the effect immediately after exercise as the muscles swell to bring in nutrients and expel waste.
This effect goes away after 30 minutes to an hour. As the muscles recover, they build new fiber and also use it more efficiently. The result is unlikely to be visible as a larger muscle, but rather a leaner, toned muscle. If you exercise enough and watch your diet, you will lose fat as you gain muscle. Overall, your legs can get smaller and leaner. If you lose enough fat weight, you begin to see the lean muscle defined.
Sprinters and speed-skaters may have large muscles, but they are engaging in short sprints with explosive muscle action that relies on fast-twitch muscle fibers. Their hard work can result in larger muscles. Bodybuilders have to work very hard with strength training to build large muscles. Their diets are very strict to reduce body fat so the muscles are more defined.
But, remember the marathon runners, they also have very low body fat but their leg muscles are not bulky. To get slimmer legs, you need to reduce your body fat. You must burn more calories per day than you eat. It is difficult to do that with exercise alone, although that is part of the equation. Your workouts will build lean muscle that is necessary for health and fitness.
Cardiovascular exercise such as brisk walking, running, and cycling will result in burning stored fat. Personal trainer Lorra Garrick suggests these workout changes build lean muscle and burn fat:.
Looking to start walking off the weight? Our free guide offers tips, workouts, and a printable schedule to help you get on the right track. These are true minimalist programs that recommend only doing the big compound barbell lifts. Just like how fixing one bug in the code often births another, we ran into unexpected problems. Then we talked with Greg Nuckols, founder of Stronger by Science , about this idea of finding the best lifts for gaining overall muscle mass and strength.
Marco and I are pretty damn good at helping people bulk up, but Marco cut his teeth helping athletes get bigger, not powerlifters. By the end of this, we thought we had found the answer. We thought we had improved on these classic programs, adding in all of these advantages without any downsides. But we had flown too high and been blinded by the sun.
The wax soon melted, sending us hurtling down into the roiling waves below. It worked well. But we ran into some issues with the barbell row. If we trained both lifts with similar fervour, we wound up massacring our lower backs. Starting Strength and StrongLifts both evade this problem by only doing deadlifts once or twice a week and only doing a single set per workout. However, the deadlift is a much better lift than the barbell row.
It stimulates way more overall muscle growth. Swapping out the deadlift for more rows is like trading a gold coin for an arcade token. So we got rid of the barbell row. We still include rowing in all of our programs, and we have a full article going over the many benefits of the barbell row. Chin-ups are the main upper-back lift, deadlifts the main lower-back and spinal erector lift, and rows are used as needed as a lighter accessory movement. The reason this works so well is that the barbell row is more upper-back dominant in higher rep ranges.
But when we do sets of 15—20 reps, our lower backs can support the weight quite easily. So if we start our workouts with heavy squats or deadlifts, then do lighter barbell rows afterwards, all of those fatigue issues disappear. The workout program becomes quite a bit more manageable. After demoting the barbell row to an assistance lift, our workouts became quite a bit more manageable.
Fatigue stopped becoming as much of a problem, and our upper backs saw even better muscle growth. That gave us our 5 big compound barbell lifts:. Every workout no longer starts with squats.
We can compare our results from doing various different programs. We can identify and overcome plateaus. We can give our lifts a proper hierarchy. Instead, we can test our rep maxes. After all, going from an 8-rep max of up to shows just as much improvement as going from a 1-rep max of up to Moving forward from that, though, I think it makes more sense to count them as another deadlift accessory. This list is incomplete. We could also add in throws, planks, twists, and all manner of other movements that help build a formidable physique.
However, these can often be folded into the above movement patterns. For example, a one-handed overhead press will develop your obliques as a throw would. The same is true with forearm training. Better to add in some forearm isolation exercises , such as wrist curls and extensions.
Are these lifts for men or women? We tested this system on both men and women, and it worked great in both cases. They often chose to emphasize different muscles, but the system accounted for that. If someone wants to use the deadlift to develop their upper back, they might choose a conventional deadlift and add plenty of barbell rows as an accessory.
On the other hand, if someone wants more hip growth, they can choose a Romanian deadlift and then add in plenty of hip thrusts as an accessory. Men and women are often going to choose different programs , but this system tends to work equally well for both. The best compound lifts change as we become more advanced. A beginner will get more benefit out of a goblet squat than a front squat.
The same is true with the other lifts, too. First of all, make it your own. The idea is to choose the lift variations that will best help you become big and strong and with minimal risk of injury. For example, if you have a long spindly spine, conventional deadlifts will be harder for you. If you were a powerlifter, that would mean choosing a sumo stance.
But if your goal is to build a thicker and stronger torso, then sticking with a conventional deadlift might be a better option for you. We want to teach you how to choose your lifts based on your goals , going over the advantages and disadvantages of each. You can then pick the variation that suits you best and then keep track of how your strength progresses on those variations over time.
We can also choose assistance and accessory lifts for those main lifts, allowing us to build a bigger Big-5 total. If you want a customizable hypertrophy training workout program and full guide that builds these principles in, check out our Outlift Intermediate Bulking Program.
His specialty is helping people build muscle to improve their strength and general health, with clients including college, professional, and Olympic athletes.
Thanks for another awesome article — I love all the content you put out and the new site is looking very aesthetic. Thanks, Kevin! We needed a brand with some room to grow. Our intermediate program is designed to be flexible and tailored. So we need an article teaching you how to pick which squat variation you want to focus on, and what accessory exercises will go best with it.
We also need an article about how to approach accessory exercises in general. And an article like this one that goes over the purpose of all of it. That way we can release a simple program with some great default recommendations, but if people want to know the rationale behind it, if they want to further tailor the program, or if they have more nuanced questions, we can address them here in these articles, and in the comment threads that go along with them.
My pleasure, man! The dumbbell overhead press is great, too. The other thing with the dumbbell press is that it helps to do it with a huge range of motion, bringing the dumbbell all the way down to your chest and then pressing it as high as you can overhead.
But you might already be doing that. And you can add in some lower-body drive to that variation as well, when it helps. Thank you for the comments. I really like the bony2beastly site as well. Are you guys going to add more articles to the Outlift site? Thanks and keep lifting! Bony to Beastly is for skinny guys, Bony to Bombshell for skinny women, and then Outlift is at a more intermediate level, for people who already lift weights and who are no longer skinny anymore.
Maybe, but we might keep the content confined to lifting. Great article, it is tough to sift through thousands of practical muscle hypertrophy tips and methods which make no relevance for many hardgainers! What is your take on high rep, lactic acid buildup-focused training i. You can build muscle brilliantly with sets ranging from 4—40 reps, and the higher end of that definitely has merit. You might not need to go quite that high, but certainly spending some time doing sets of 15—20 can be useful.
Some lifts are better for that than others, mind you. Doing squats for that many reps might tax your cardiovascular system more than your strength, and so it might not be the best way to bulk up your quads. With something like curls, though, yeah, absolutely. You can be even more extreme with it, too, using techniques like blood-flow restriction BFR. You might want a higher training frequency, too. Less of a powerlifter training style, more of a workhorse training style.
As opposed to having everyone—regardless of their fibre composition—experiment with both approaches. If your goal is to gain size, I think your best bet will be to do a mix of different rep ranges and training styles, either doing a routine that includes a mix of rep ranges or alternating between different styles of training. We combine a mix of different proven training styles the shotgun approach , and we have a mix of different proven training routines the trial and error approach , allowing people to gradually hone in on what suits them best.
Push-ups tend to be better than the bench press for bulking up until you can do about twenty of them in a row—in a single set. Once you can do around twenty push-ups, you might find that your cardiovascular system or pain threshold limits you more than your muscle strength does, and when that happens, your sets will start drifting further away from muscle failure, and will start stimulating less muscle growth. It can also get pretty unpleasant.
If anything, push-ups are a mechanically better lift. The only problem is loading them ever heavier. Right now, doing up to 15 reps per set, and up to 80 reps per workout, I think push-ups are going to be perfect for helping you build muscle.
You may want to do both. We have an optional Phase 0 for beginners, and then Phase 1—5 are great for both novice and intermediate lifters. It will help you build a sturdy foundation that you can keep bulking from. It also includes everything you need to know about the bulking diet and lifestyle, as well as some great bulking recipes. Thank you. Hey Fleischman, I guess that depends on how you define a squat. The lower part of a deadlift has a deep hip angle and a shallow knee angle, making it more of a hip-dominant movement.
The lower part of a squat has a shallower hip angle and a deeper knee angle, making it more of a quad-dominant movement. With that said, the quads do engage at the beginning of a deadlift, especially if you start with lower hips or use a sumo stance, and the hamstrings do engage during a squat, especially if you sit back into your squat. And our glutes and lower backs are worked quite hard by both lifts. Thank you very much. This reply has helped me understand the differences between the lower part of Deadlifts and Squats.
Yeah, check out our article on isolation lifts. If I am doing a full-body workout 3x per week, how often should I do the Big 5? Should I be doing each of those on all 3 days along with assistance and accessory lifts? It really all depends. For someone newer to lifting, or newer to learning the big compound lifts, repetition can help. It might make sense to do the five big lifts 2—3 times per week to learn and improve your technique.
Instead of doing front squats 3x per week, it might be better to choose a main lift e. On the other hand, if you want to specialize in a certain lift or to accelerate growth in a certain muscle group, you might want to do even more. If you want bigger arms, say, then maybe remove the accessory lifts for your deadlifts and squats to free up time and energy for some extra biceps curls and triceps extensions at the end of every workout. Shane, I have read the entire article and each of the individual articles for the main lifts with assistance and accessory.
I am still unsure on how to apply them. Can you provide a little more detail to your answer to Mike? For example, there are 5 main lifts and you recommend doing the Deadlift once. There are tons of different ways to organize the lifts into a training program. Our Outlift Intermediate Bulking Program comes with four different ways of doing it, with two 3-day versions and two 4-day versions. And each is customizable. For each main lift, maybe you supplement it with one assistance and one accessory lift.
These lifts overlap with one another to a certain extent. So with our overhead press, maybe we do that on the Friday, before doing our dips. And then for our accessory, maybe some lateral raises at the end of our workout on Monday or whenever. It can sound a bit complicated, but if you start every workout with 1—2 of the big lifts, then add in another 3—4 smaller lifts, you can build a good program fairly easily.
You can combine the lifts together in a number of different ways. Just spread the work out for each muscle group, aiming for 4—8 sets or so per muscle group per workout. I hope that helps, and maybe we could write an article about programming hypertrophy workouts in the near future. Could you do the bench press as a main lift, the overhead press as an assistance lift, and then some skullcrushers and lateral raises as accessory lifts?
There would just be less emphasis on the chest, shoulders, and triceps that way. We like having it as its own separate lift to give more priority to both the chest and shoulders, which a lot of guys are eager to develop—and rightfully so. We have the deadlift to focus on the spinal erectors and traps, and we have the chin-up to focus on the upper back and biceps. Both work a number of the same muscles, but we still count them as separate main lifts. We take the same approach with our legs, too.
You could choose low-bar squats which have a lot in common with hip hinges or trap-bar deadlifts which have a lot in common with squats as your main lower-body lift and then add in some assistance and accessory lifts to balance it out. But we prefer having a dedicated squat and hip hinge as main lifts. So a minimalist program might have the trap-bar deadlift, bench press, and chin-up as the main lifts.
But we prefer to have the squat, bench press, deadlift, overhead press, and chin-up. We feel it makes for a more well-rounded program. Great article and website, the best I have read. I am training 3 days a week, and want to do only the Big 5 lift. What programme would you suggest? More like 3—5 sets of 6—15 reps. Ahhh, I see. For instance, start with 2 sets per exercise per workout.
Then in the next week, move up to 3 sets per exercise. If that goes well, try adding a fourth set to some of the main lifts, still doing 3 sets for the smaller lifts. And then every month or two, drop back down to 2 sets per exercise to give yourself a break. Not sure if I am following this. If I do the big 5 in different days, like 2 on Monday, 2 Wednesday and 2 Friday 5 sets of 5. Not sure I see a difference if I do 3 sets of 6. I am also doing sets of 10 reps of assistance and accessories each day.
Thank you,. What I wanted to know is it okay to do all of the big 5 exercises day, for the recommended 5 sets Per exercise, three times a week? Hi Simon, Sorry. As you gain muscle size, you will become stronger. After all, bigger muscles are stronger muscles. Kind of lol. I really thought the big 5 were supposed to be heavy, lower rep. Thanks for all the advise! If your goal is to gain muscle size and general strength, though, then you might be better served by lifting more like 6—8 reps per set on the big lifts rather than 3—5.
You can adjust your routine to suit your body and your preferences. So when doing, say, biceps curls or lateral raises, yeah, best not to be doing sets of 5 reps. Better to be doing sets of 8—30 reps. Thanks for the advice on assistance exercises, I am still looking for clarity on overall volume, is 75 sets per week for the big 5 plus assistance exercises too many? It may or may not be, it might change, and it will depend on which exercises you choose.
I recommend starting with fewer sets and gradually working your way up, as mentioned in the other comment. I know that might sound confusing, but it will make more sense once you try it and get used to it.
Great article! It is good when someone speaks the truth, which is so obvious, but can not be seen from the guys and gals. It is clear that most people hit the gym with one main goal- to become better looking, which includes more muscles and less fat. Definitely Starting Strength, StrongLifts and their clones are going to help you become bigger and stronger, but their primary goal is to make you better in sports like powerlifting.
Pushing so hard and so much the lower body is great for your squat and deadlift abilities, but in one moment you are risking to turn into some kind of T-Rex. The only thing I wonder about is what would happen, if I superset the big lifts I still stick to the barbell row, too, so I have 6 main exercises? Arnold loved that way of training. I personally think the pump is great and the fat lose is easier.
But is going to happen in the long run? Yes, adding a sixth lift is perfectly fine. Supersetting your lifts? Go for it.
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