Dad Bod To Father Figure

This 4-day Upper Lower Hybrid Program was designed by Adam Pecoraro, who is the head coach at The Fit Life. He’s a No BS online fat loss coach who works primarily with men who want to lose over 20lbs while eating good food and without spending hours in the gym every day. Adam prides himself on helping his clients achieve their dream physique as simply and with as little changes to their lifestyle as possible. Adam holds a degree in Exercise Science with a concentration in nutrition from the University of New Mexico and conducted research in muscle memory at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.

Adam designed this program to target each muscle group twice a week like in a traditional upper lower workout, but with the intensity of a push pull legs program.

Why a 4-Day Upper Lower Program?

Five or more days in the gym is not only unnecessary, but it can actually hinder the gains you’re working hard to make. The body needs rest in order to grow and transform, but when you constantly beat it up in the gym, it never has time to recover.

Any more than 4 workout days requires you to completely change your lifestyle and devote a consistent amount of time and effort to your training, which most people simply cannot commit to. Not only is this lifestyle extremely difficult to maintain, it won’t make enough of a difference to matter.

A 4-day split works well for most people because it allows for more freedom and flexibility, while providing enough volume to move the needle. And, as long as the intensity is high, you’ll never need to choose between having a life and having a great physique.

This program divides the body into two main groups: upper and lower. The upper body includes the chest, back, shoulders, arms, and abs, while the lower body includes the glutes, quads, hamstrings, and calves. You’ll train each main group twice weekly, while adding in cardio as needed and depending on your physique goal.

The suggested frequency is two days on and two days off, while alternating upper and lower days as follows:

Monday - Upper

Tuesday - Lower

Wednesday - Rest (Or Abs/Cardio)

Thursday - Upper

Friday - Lower

Saturday - Rest (Or Abs/Cardio)

Sunday - Rest

This is an efficient way to ensure that each muscle group receives sufficient frequency and volume, while allowing both your body and mind adequate rest and recovery between sessions. It’s not necessary to be in the gym 7 days a week and can actually be detrimental to your progress, so if you choose to do abs and/or cardio on rest days, make sure to reserve at least one day completely for rest. Even when you do cardio on a day you don’t go to the gym, it shouldn’t be so intense that you feel drained at the end of your session. Otherwise, it’s just another workout day.

How to Progress In This Program

Be sure to warm up well before each workout. Walk on the treadmill to get the heartrate up, steadily increasing the speed and/or incline for 15-20 minutes until you’re only slightly out of breath, but not sweating or tired. Then, begin each exercise with a weight that’s about 60% of your starting weight. For example, if you’d normally start your first set of a dumbbell bench press with 75lb dumbbells, you should start your warmup with 45lbs. For a squat, if you’d normally start your first set with 225lbs, maybe warm up with 135lbs, and so on.

When it comes to your first set, start with a weight that allows you to perform the movement with good form, while still feeling challenging on the last few reps of the set. You should never be struggling with the weight to the point of failure, but you should come close enough on your last rep.

RPE means “rate of perceived exertion,” which is a fancy way of rating how difficult the exercise is in relation to the weight you chose. Really think about it though - is it really that difficult? An RPE of 10 means that you basically almost died and you couldn’t have performed another rep even if you’d wanted to. RPE 9 means you could probably have gotten one more rep, RPE 8 means you could’ve done two more reps before failure, etc.

What should your nutrition look like on this program?

Whether you’re trying to gain or lose, you still need to eat enough calories for your goal.

What does that look like? I have a free calorie calculator here (mobile only) where you can have your starting macros and calories calculated in front of you. Then, download MacroFactor (code ADAM for a 14-day trial) and input them. No more guesswork!

If you don’t have a digital kitchen scale, I’d suggest Renpho. They’re very affordable and their products are great quality. Weigh everything you eat at home and track it using MacroFactor.

To build muscle and gain strength: You need to eat in a calorie surplus, which means consuming more calories than it takes to maintain your current body composition. This number is different for everyone and will depend on your age, training experience, activity level, gender, weight, height, etc., which are all taken into consideration when you use the calorie calculator above.

You should aim to gain between 0.15 to 1.5% of your body weight per month, depending on your training age in the gym. A beginner will have the most potential to gain weight quickly and fairly easily, while a more experienced lifter will gain significantly less and at a much slower rate.

Prioritize protein: You can lift as much weight as you’d like, but if you’re not consuming enough protein to aid in growth and recovery, you’ll never gain muscle. You should aim for 0.7-1.2 grams per pound of body weight per day for optimal muscle growth, which can be calculated for you above. Remember that more protein is not necessarily better, and that eating as much protein as possible will not speed up the rate of muscle gain.

Eat a variety of nutrient dense foods: Vary fruits and vegetables that you like, prioritize unprocessed whole foods, lean proteins, and eat complex carbohydrates like bananas, rice, oats, potatoes, etc. These foods provide the energy and nutrients your body needs to fuel your workouts and build and repair muscle tissue.

Clarifications

Warmup: Before starting a workout, I usually walk at a brisk pace for 10-15 minutes on the treadmill after my 10-minute walk to the gym. You can skip this if you want.

What’s important is that you warm up the muscles and joints before lifting heavy. For an upper body workout, I usually do a set or two of lateral raises to warm up my shoulders, and if I’m doing chest, I’ll also do a set of lighter weight incline press before starting my working sets.

The same applies to lower body, except I take extra time to warm up every part of the leg from the ankle joint to the knees, to the hip joint before I even start my warmup set with light weight. Both days are important to warm up for, but for me personally, I’m more prone to lower body injuries than upper, so I take extra care to make sure my body is prepared.

Weight: Use your best judgment to choose a weight that allows you to leave 1 or 2 reps in the tank by the last reps. This means that if you had someone pushing you, you’d be able to do 1 or 2 extra reps, but nothing more. It’s hard to determine true failure, and if you feel unsure or like you’re going to hurt yourself, don’t even attempt a heavier weight. Again, use your best judgment.

As the reps decrease, weight should increase. For example, 55lbs for 12 reps, 65lbs for 10, and 75lbs for 8.

Reps: Unless otherwise noted, 12 reps means that each body part needs to perform the exercise for 12 reps, whether the exercise is single arm or not. For example, a single arm rear delt cross for 12 reps means 12 reps on each arm. If you want to think of this as 24 reps, you can, but just remember that the number you see is for each arm.

When you see several numbers, such as 12/10/8, that means that you should do 12 reps the first set, 10 reps for the second, and 8 reps for the last set. Note that the weight should increase accordingly as mentioned above.

Sets: Warmup sets do not count towards working sets, so only start logging exercises after you finish your warmup.

A superset is when two exercises are performed back to back, so try to take as little rest as possible in between sets, if any at all. However, this type of high intensity work doesn’t allow for heavy lifting, so you could take a small 15-30 second break in between if you want to increase the weight.

Equipment: If the gym is busy, cable or barbell exercises can be substituted for dumbbells and visa versa. If you don’t have a certain machine, use the barbell or dumbbell variation, or even swap it for a different movement if you prefer.

Exercise Order: The program is written in a specific order for a reason - heavier compound movements are performed first because they require a lot of energy and isolation movement at the end because they’re easier and require less effort. However, if the gym is busy, you can modify the order of exercises to cut down on wait time.

Lagging Body Part: You can choose an exercise for any body part that you feel is hard for you to build and follow the rep and set scheme provided to you. Ideally, this would be a muscle group that you didn’t already work the previous day, but it could be if you plan to rest for the next two days.

Cardio: As muscle building is the main focus of this program, you should add cardio to increase your activity level for fat loss and for cardiovascular health. This means that you shouldn’t be running 10Ks on your rest days, as they’re meant for REST. If you decide to add cardio to your program, start with 20-30 minutes of jogging or rowing at a speed that makes you sweat, but still allows you to carry on a conversation. Any mode of cardio is fine, as long as you enjoy it!

Who is Adam Pecoraro?

Adam has coached hundreds of average Joes who knew next to nothing about nutrition or training into strong, athletic super heroes who know exactly what to eat, how much to eat, and how to train to maintain their new lean physique. He loves coaching his old self, which is the guy who lacks confidence and hates taking off his shirt in public, and makes it his mission to save that guy from making the same mistakes.

Every day, Adam receives messages from people thanking him for helping them turn their lives around, but helping them succeed and start living up to their true potential is thanks enough!

Ideally, you’d start day 1 after a true rest day where you didn’t do any intentional physical activity and you’d end day 4 with the intention of resting for two consecutive days (or at least one) before restarting. Even though they may not seem like it, these are relatively short workouts that could be done in under an hour if you push it, but it shouldn’t feel easy at any point.

Adjust RPE as needed.