The 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program (Part 3)

This is the last installment of our four month series of programming for functional athletes who want to gain a ton of lean muscle mass, and keep their conditioning. This cycle will help you transition from this very high volume programming towards the next block which will be more strength oriented. Keep reading to get the PDF and awesome resources to help you on your way to more muscle mass!

As we mentioned above this program is a continuation of The 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program series. If you want to start from the beginning you can find part one here, and you can find part two here.

The 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program Part 1

This program is a great introduction to this style of hybrid training. If you have been doing a more traditional program where you do some strength work and then a WOD you could be in for quite a surprise.

Here is a snapshot of the total amount of work for the first day of part 1, based off of my personal testing.

You don’t really need to go crazy trying to decipher my terrible hand writing. The important point is that the first day is more than 100,000 foot pounds of work.

To put this into perspective, when I do Fran, it’s about 45,000 ft/lbs of work. Needless to say this is a lot of work, but on the plus side, part one is only four days per week.

Think of all the free time you’ll have for activities!

The 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program Part 2

This portion of the overall program is higher volume, but that is primarily driven by moving from a four day per week split, to a five day per week split.

If you want to see a more complete volume comparison between a traditional bodybuilding program and this hybrid program, then check out this review where we use math and science to compare the two.

Before we go further let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Why Should Athletes Gain Muscle Mass?

Functional fitness is a strength sport. It is the most endurance oriented strength sport, but a very clear relationship exists between higher levels of strength, and increases in sports performance. Check out this article for the research behind functional performance.

These are the two key factors that affect strength for athletes

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1. Muscle Mass
2. Neuromuscular Efficiency

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Neuromuscular efficiency is how fast and how well coordinated your motor units work during movement. This is primarily increased with practicing good technique and doing tons of reps at the targeted load. This leaves us with the other huge driver of strength, more muscle mass.

Ideally a functional fitness athlete who needs to gain muscle mass will spend months of their competitive season doing so, as it takes real time to physically make this tissue.

Now you see why this series of programming is four total months, and you will also see that nearly every gym day has reps that fall within these ranges.

Now that I’ve blown your mind with science facts, let’s talk about part three of the 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program.

The 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program Part 3

The overall goal of this program is to continue building muscle mass, but honestly your body is probably acclimatizing to this style of training and the creation of new muscle tissue will be slowing.

This program avoids that little issue by playing with the overall intensity, relative to one rep max, as it progresses through the 8 weeks. This new stimulus to your body will mitigate your body’s ability to adapt to hypertrophy training.

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It also has the added benefit of transitioning you back into a more “normal” functional style program. By the end of the program you will be doing some fairly heavy lifting.

In my professional coaching opinion the best transition from a hypertrophy cycle is straight into a strength cycle, and wouldn’t you know it, my most popular strength program will fit in nicely.

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Here is the PDF download for the 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program.

For those that are using the PDF, you’ll see that I’ve included the whole Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program. This section starts on week 1, cycle 3.

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Week 1

You’ll note that we’ve maintained the five day per week format from previous cycles. Here we are working with technical maxes, or TMs, which means the heaviest weight you can lift with nearly perfect form.

Week 2

The volume has been slightly reduced from the previous cycles, but by now you will understand that weights should be creeping much higher relative to your 1RM. This is by design.

It will take some time to retrain your body to use the new muscle mass, and convert it into useful strength. Once it does; however, your results will go through the roof.

Want to learn how to create your own custom program? Check out this ebook!

Week 3

As per usual, our third week is the most challenging and highest volume. I expect these workouts to take you about 70-80 minutes. Make sure you are taking a few minutes between sets so you are relatively fresh.

Week 4

This is our deload. You’ll note that we’ve switched the bulk of the work to EMOM style which should feel very good compared to before you started these hypertrophy cycles.

Week 5

This begins the last block of this cycle. We are definitely starting to train more like a power lifter and less like a bodybuilder, and that is by design. All the muscle mass in the world won’t help you if you don’t convert it to usable strength!

Week 6

We are using rep maxes RM here, which means that this is truly max effort, with acceptable form. You can have some slight form deviation but nothing crazy. Your back shouldn’t look like a question mark!

Week 7

This is the heaviest week in the whole 4 month long program. You should be feeling pretty good on these lifts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t PR on a few lifts, which is pretty amazing considering the goal of this style of training isn’t necessarily strength gains.

Week 8

This is our last deload of the program. We will be hitting some 5RMs and moving back into more traditional functional style training. From here you have a variety of options in choosing your next program.

Choosing Your Next Program

Choosing your next program is important. Your particular goals, and where ever you happen to be in your yearly training cycle have a lot to do with where you should go from here. These are my top three recommendations to follow this hypertrophy programming.

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1. For those looking for max performance (Competitors Cycle)
2. For those looking for a moderate program (Advanced Program)
3. For those looking to gain max strength (Strength Program)

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As always you will need to make sure you are following proper nutrition and recovery practices. There is nothing more amateur than someone who thinks that performance is only about what happens in the gym.

Final Thoughts

You now have everything you need to keep the gainz train rolling. You have 8 more hard weeks of programming. You know what you need to eat, and you know how to recover. Now get out there and start training!

If you have any questions or comments put them below where I can get to them the quickest.

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