By: Kevin Larrabee, CSCS

The picture on the far right is what I look like right now. As you can see, I was able to put on some decent mass after I dropped about 12 pounds of fat. The reason I began this project was to see abs, but these last 14 weeks I have also wanted to put on some more mass in my lagging areas (biceps, triceps, lats, abs). Two weeks ago I bitched to Leigh that I missed training with the guys at Cressey Performance and just trying to get strong. After going back to an upper/lower split I soon realized that I wasn’t going to get the visual results that I wanted. Will training for strength get you bigger? Yes, it will. Will it get you the same results as what I was doing before for size? No.

On Monday I e-mailed the Fat Loss Trouble Shooter herself, Lepel Hil…I mean Leigh Peele to get her honest opinion. What would she do with me if I was her client? Now, per Leigh Peele’s advice and “two cents” I decided to continue to put more mass on. I really want to fill out my frame before I really diet down to shred the fat away and see abs. Here is what she had to say:

Gaining mass and size when you are eating and lifting heavy and even going for strength only can still put on some size but you have to have that added benefit of eating. When you don’t have that, yeah you might gain some strength but size, isn’t going to happen on a large level and mostly will fall to dominate muscles (back/quads for you).

If you want to up the “jacked” look in your abs during THIS style of eating, then you need to focus on ab work, and split focuses in general.

For 90% of my clients I would go with full body workouts 3x/week or an upper/lower split because those are the most effective templates for getting people lean and strong. But for this I will be doing a body part split. WAIT!!! It’s OK!! This isn’t Bodybuilding.com I swear! Are you still here? Good. Let’s continue…

So yeah, chest/tris, back/bis, legs, and a day where I address my lagging muscle groups. Since I did full body today I will be doing Back/bis on Wedneday, lower body on Friday and the lagging muscles on Saturday hopefully followed by some food with the guys.