PB3 with lower body hypertrophy focus?

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

I’ve got a baby due in December so would like to spend the next 4 months of guaranteed consistent training bringing my legs up. I’ve typically trained quads with ~8-12 hard sets per week on average, and hamstrings with ~6-10 hard sets. I’ve responded well in the past to blocks where I’ve increased the volume of certain muscles groups to 16-20 sets. Obviously, doing 16-20 sets for every single muscle group would either be too much volume overall to recover from, or I simply wouldn’t have that amount of time to train. So a block where I increase leg volume (quads+hams) to say 25-30 sets (quads+hams combined) while putting some other muscle groups on the backburner seems to be a reasonable approach.

I’m 12 weeks into the PB3 template and been enjoying it so far, increasing my maxes by around 5-15%. I would like to re-run the programme to continue to work on my maxes while also putting a little more focus on lower body hypertrophy. Would it be appropriate to modify the PB3 programme to focus on leg hypertrophy by switching out some of the pressing volume (there’s a fair bit of it imo) for extra leg volume? I’d plan to keep the lower rep squats and deadlifts, but maybe instead of doing 3-4 sets on exercises such as belt squats, leg extensions, and leg curls, like they are programmed in PB3, increasing the volume on these exercises to 4-5 sets, and maybe add an additional lower body exercises (such as single leg work) in place of a pressing exercise.

So the lower body volume for the week would on average look something like this:

High bar squats - 4 sets of ~4 reps
Paused squats - 3 sets of 6 reps
Belt squats - 4-5 sets of 10-12
Leg extensions - 4-5 sets of 12-15
Lunges - 2 sets of 15-20

Deadlift - 3 sets of 4 reps
RDL - 3 sets of 8
Leg curl - 4-5 sets of 10-12
Single leg calf raises- 4 sets of 8-12
Calf raises machine - 4 sets of 15-20

I would run the above with a small calorie surplus and aim to gain around 8-10lbs over the next 4 months.

Does the above approach seem reasonable? or are there any additional adjustments you would make? ​

2

Tom,

Interestingly, my programming looks a lot like PB3 right now. I’ve found that as of late, I don’t need as much upper body volume for my chest and back to respond, but prefer the extra resources for leg for squat and DL strength. I would allocate it a bit differently for you given the hypertrophy goal, e.g. not adding the volume to squats on day 1 or deadlifts on day 2, but adding an extra set to the supplemental pull on day 1 and supplemental squat on day 2, adding 2 extra sets for the isolation exercises at the end of days 2 and day 4, plus the calf work as mentioned. I don’t think I’d add any more single leg work for calfs. Rather, I’d add more isolation stuff in if anything- e.g. adductor/abductor work, single leg hamstring curls, etc.

I’d leave the rest of the programming the same.

-Jordan

3

Thanks! Makes perfect sense. Keep up the great work!