The Science Behind Sam Sulek’s Training

Sam solic is by far the biggest Fitness influencer in the world at the moment so I decided to analyze every single workout he's done this year so far he's done 460 sets 15% of those sets were for his chest 20% for his back and 16% for his biceps interestingly only 11% of Sam's total training was for his quads yet 25% went to his triceps one quarter of Sam's total training is triceps training yet Anatomy research tells is that the triceps are less than 4% of total body muscle while the quads are by far the biggest

muscle in the body at almost 30% of total body muscle also Sam trains to failure 96% of the time but almost all of his sets not taken to failure were for his forearms so if we ignore the forearm work fully 98% of Sam's training was done all the way to muscular failure I also examined the range of motion he used on every set the most common rep range he used and using all this information in this video I'm going to to provide the most analytical science-based critique of Sam sik's training on the internet I'm going

to do that by highlighting three good things that you should definitely apply to your own training and three bad things that I think are either a waste of time or will give you suboptimal results now I'm going to start with the bad stuff but keep in mind that I will be going over the good stuff as well and there's one thing in particular that I think Sam does better than any Fitness influencer that I'm aware of and I'll get to that later in the video first after watching days worth of Sam solic videos the first

thing I noticed is that his technique could be better Sam is obviously a big proponent of what he calls ego lifting which is when you simply try to move the weight allowing yourself to swing and sway rather than being really strict with your form and Sam definitely does more than his fair share of cheat reps now I would say that I'm actually less of a technique junkie than most science-based coaches I think that you can still get solid gains with so-called bad form as long as you're pushing yourself hard but I still doubt those gains

will be optimal in fact I recently published a study on optimal training technique for muscle growth and we discovered that there are two main things to focus on when it comes to lifting technique the main thing is that you need to use a range of motion that gets the muscle into a deep stretch on this point I'm giving Sam a B minus Sam doesn't always use a full range of motion for sure but that's okay as long as you're getting the muscle into a deep stretch and while Sam often does get the muscle fully stretched

there are too many times when he doesn't to get an a rate for example on the incline press here he's stopping at least 3 or 4 Ines away from his chest which isn't the end of the world but it isn't ideal I'd rather see him strip the weight back and touch the bar to his chest so he can really feel that deep stretch in his pecs and here on preacher curls you can see that he's cutting out the bottom quarter of the range of motion where his biceps would be the most stretched and we now

have two studies showing that on this exact exercise the bottom half of the curl is the most anabolic part of the range of motion so if you're cutting out the bottom part I would say that you're missing out on some potential gains in fact whenever I do preacher curls these days I just stay in the bottom half the entire time the other thing we found in our study is that it's important to control the negative rather than just letting the weight freef fall so when it comes to controlling the negative Sam gets a B+ he

usually does control the negative pretty well even when he uses some momentum to get the weight moving but there are also just too many examples of him letting the weight free fall to get him an a grade ideally as he gets closer to failure he'd make a conscious effort to resist the weight on the negative always being in control especially on that final rep where muscle activation is the highest overall I'll give Sam a b-grade on training technique the next thing I quickly noticed is that Sam will more or less just completely Wing his workouts

he doesn't have a structured training plan he hops in the car roughly Maps out a workout in his head on the way to the gym and then he'll even often improvise the workout in the moment based on how he's feeling the problem with basing your workouts around whatever you're feeling that day is that it's really hard to guarantee that you're actually progressing if you're just picking different exercises at random you'll quickly hit a plateau and start spinning your wheels in the gym in fact I would say that this is the number one thing that causes

people to fall into that dreaded lifetime intermediate category after getting past the Newbie phase in order to keep making progress after your first year of lifting it's crucial that you use Progressive overload all Progressive overload means is that you add something to your workouts over time that's usually done by adding some weight or a rep to each exercise but if you're just randomly switching exercises in and out what'll happen is when it's time to hit that same exercise again you end up just doing the same weight and the same reps that you did last time

this is truly a progress killer now elephant in the room Sam is clearly still making gains just fine and an intuitive approach to training can clearly work for some people especially if you have gr genetics or supplemental enhancement in fact the supplement aspect of this is pretty big with the right anabolic enhancement you can make gains even while training suboptimally in fact research shows that you can build muscle without even training at all as long as you're taking the right substances enhancing is kind of like getting a second newbie phase where really anything you do

will work but even with enhancement once you eventually reach that plateau again you have two options get smarter and more structured with your training or increase the dose of anabolics obviously the safest solution is to get a plan put it on paper or put it in your phone and track the weight and the number of reps you do I personally do this for every exercise but even just doing it for your heavy compound lifts would make a huge difference so for example you can track your squats presses and heavy pulls and then kind of wing

it for the lighter isolation stuff like curls lateral raises and chest flies now to Sam's credit you do want to give yourself the freedom to switch exercises in and out if you're feeling pain or if you're just really in the mood for something different for example Sam immediately switched his chest workout to a back workout after feeling his chest tighten up in this workout on January 8th I think that's a smart move but for the most part you do want to keep most of your exercises and most of your workouts the same for at least

a month or two so you can make sure that you're adding some weight or some reps to those exercises also to be fair Sam could totally be tracking his workouts off camera but I didn't hear any mention of that from any of the videos that I watched and I definitely got the impression that most of the time he's just completely winging it overall I'm giving Sam a C+ on program structure third Sam uses a body part split or what many would call a bro split this is where you train only one muscle per workout so

he'll do chest one day then back the next day then he'll do an arm day and then a leg day there's two main issues with this first as you can tell it ends up being very disproportionate in terms of how much volume each muscle gets so far this year Sam has done 113 sets for his triceps and only nine sets for his calves and just six sets for his glutes and his tricep volume is more than double his quad volume despite the quads being eight times bigger now Sam has said that he's trying to focus

on his triceps right now but this is fairly normal for a bro split because you have at least three upper body days for every one leg day yet from an anatomical standpoint your legs have way more total musculature than your upper body and it's not even close so unless you already have great leg genetics your legs may start to lag behind on this split there's also an issue with junk volume in this workout from January 21st Sam did 13 sets for for his chest plus two drop sets but the best studies tell us that you

tend to max out the amount of growth that you can get for a single muscle somewhere around six to eight sets per workout so after you've done six to eight sets for a single muscle in one workout any more sets that you do after that probably aren't doing much this is why some people call it junk volume so rather than wasting all that energy doing 13 sets in one workout for one muscle I'd suggest splitting that volume in half and putting six sets on one day and seven sets on another day day now it's possible

that because Sam is just so big he can use more volume in a single workout than you or me and I guess it's worth mentioning that probably 90 plus% of ifpb Pros do follow the same split as Sam so it could be that if you get to that unnaturally high level of muscular development the rules change or that with enough enhancement the rules don't really matter anymore that said when I spoke with Dr Mike isrel about this someone who I'd consider an expert on both the natural and enhanced side of bodybuilding he said that enhanced

guys would also also be better off following a more science-based training split that could be a push pull leg split or an upper lower split or even a full body split I think that those are all better options for the vast majority of people again because they allow for a more even distribution of your volume across your body and they're less likely to lead to so-called junk volume overall I'm going to give Sam a C+ on his training split okay let's dig into the good stuff first to his credit Sam trains very hard this is

extremely important if your goal is to maximize muscle growth beyond the beginner stage and I do think that simply training hard is more important than any of the previous stuff I talked about you can optimize everything else on paper if you don't push your sets hard it doesn't really matter that said too much of a good thing can be bad and in this case I think it might be Sam goes to failure a little too much for my taste like I said Sam has done 460 sets so far this year and 440 of them were

all out sets to failure I do think most people would run into recovery issues with that much failure training for me only about 30% of my training is taken to failure I usually do three sets per exercise and I'll take the last set all the way to failure on my first two sets I leave one or two reps in the tank keep in mind one or two reps in the tank is still very hard training I see people leaving 10 plus reps in the tank all the time at my gym even serious dedicated bodybuilders but

yeah I think a combination of failure and non-failure training is smarter than just going to failure all the time that way you still regularly get to remind yourself what failure feels like but you're not doing it so much that it hurts your recovery but even though he does take it a too far in my opinion I'm still counting Sam's High effort as a good thing because he seems to genuinely enjoy failure training he does seem to be recovering from it for the most part and even though he has had a few injuries it's hard to

say if that's due to failure training per se or the super high loads that he's using or something else so even though I'd personally tone back on it failure training is still far better than sandbagging your workouts and not putting any real effort in so given his preference for failure training and what seems to be adequate recovery I'm going to go ahead and give Sam an a grade on effort the second good thing is that Sam uses smart rep ranges when I analyzed the number of reps he did on every set this was how it

broke down 11% of his sets were in the 0 to3 rep range 40% in the 4 to7 rep range another 40% in the 8 to 12 rep range and 9% was above 13 reps so clearly the majority of his training is coming from a moderate rep Zone from 4 to 12 reps and for hypertrophy I think this is great all rep ranges can in theory lead to similar muscle growth however doing too much High Reps can be very exhausting and doing too much Low Reps may give you unnecessary joint strain I think I do a

little more High rep work than Sam does just because there are studies showing that using a variety of rep ranges is better than only doing one rep range but overall this is pretty bang on for someone whose main goal is muscle growth I'm going to give Sam a a grade on his rep ranges lastly and most importantly Sam clearly loves training probably more than any Fitness influencer that I'm aware of he's super consistent he does exercises that he enjoys and he has a good time in the gym obviously hard workouts require discipline and there will

always be days when you don't feel like going to the gym but finding ways to make your workouts more enjoyable is always a good thing and Sam clearly has that mastered and he gets a a double Plus for sustainability and enjoyment and even though I was kind of tough on Sam in this video because I wanted to give him a rigorous science-based critique All Things Considered I think Sam deserves a b-grade for his training overall even though there are areas that could be more optimized I personally rank sustainability and enjoyment and effort so highly that

his high score there does boost his overall grade from me and even though I didn't get a chance to talk about Sam's diet in this video comment below if you'd like me to do that in a future video and in the meantime you can download my nutrition app macroaxis like having me as your own personal nutrition coach but for a tiny fraction of the cost I use macr Factor myself for all of 2023 to cut 30 lbs of fat and now I'm using the app to guide my bulk for 202 4 and you can see

from my habits dashboard I haven't missed a single day so far this year I think the main thing that separates 2 weeks for free or you can check out the first link in the description box down below thanks again guys so much for watching don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one