Jason Blaha Powerbuilding Training Lower Body Day – 5-20-2025!

Today’s Training Session:
-SSB Squat: 330 3×5
-3.5” Deficit Deadlift: 405 x6
-Barbell Calf Raise: 405 3×8
-Belt Squat: 200 3×8
-GHR: 3×10
-Reverse Hyper Extension: 310 3×10
-Hanging Leg Raise: 2 sets
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Hey everybody, it’s Jason Blaha here once again. It is time for a lower body day. But a quick reminder, if you guys will please click like down below, be greatly appreciated. If you’re not following or subscribe, please do so. And if you would be kind enough to drop me a comment down under the video, I would appreciate that. Um, so right now everything is going to be geared more towards hypertrophy. Obviously, I’m still going to have some stuff down at five or six reps. Um, because again, my background is in powerlifting. I will eventually compete again. Uh but notice that what we are doing, we are chasing long ranges of motion, more lengthened positions, stretch positions while I’m doing all this cardio to uh lean out and cut uh for the summer. Again, we’ve been doing it over a week now by two hours of list a day. Um sometimes a little more. So here’s the idea. Instead of coming in and trying to squat for 5500 lb, some of this stuff is like, look, let’s come over do narrow stance. Notice how close my feet are compared to say my power squatting. and we just go astrass, right? So, I pretty much am just bouncing off of my calves. So, I’m dropping all the way down. Um, again, bouncing off my calf. So, that that is my full range of motion of my knee using the safety squat bar. I’m like, you know what? It’s a little bit harder. I’m forced to use a little less weight, but it’s okay. It’s good upper back and I don’t have to worry about setting up. It’s just so much easier. I don’t have to come in and do any shoulder stretching or anything like that. Um, I can just come in and squat. So, that is one perk of the SSB. And it’s not like I’m going so heavy that I’m being limited. You know, obviously I can do 500 on a barbell. I can’t quite do 500 on this bar, but we’re not maxing out. So, the upper back isn’t the biggest limit when I’m doing full deep ranges of motion. So, notice again, um, and I think people forget that when we talk about knee angle, they forget that really narrow stances, parallel is actually much deeper knee angle than parallel is with a with a wide stance. So again, we’re not always even looking at hip angle. Yes, obviously we were below parallel, but we’re hitting pretty much the full range of motion of the knee, you know, whereas in when I I drop really deep on a wide stance sometimes. Um, and it’s not necessarily a deeper knee angle, even though the hip drops slower. So again, the idea is trying to maximize that quad development. So yeah, 330 for five was actually hard. And I know that’s laughable because you guys have seen me do do that with 405 on a on a normal bar, but we’re also not trying to sink the deepest range of motion and all of that. Use that bar. Same thing deficit deadlifts. I went to a bigger deficit today. I just did one set. U six reps with even 405 on a three and a half inch deficit is hard. Although I mean a couple months back I did pull on on just a two and a half inch. I did a 545 max and I did a pretty easy 585 normal single not long ago. So again, uh this is challenging though. So again, we’re forced to use some lighter weights on these full ranges of motion. Same thing for calf raises. I mean, I’ve done 500 for 10 without a plate. But if we step up on the plate, we get the deeper range of motion. Uh sets of eight. And the first set’s always really hard to find my balance. Um even eight reps is really hard. I don’t I don’t really have a ninth rep. These are limit sets. Um with 405 on these calf raises, right? I get a phenomenal calf stretch and stretch and pump. I mean, see them there. And uh yeah, works great for me. So, again, I’m doing a little bit of calf and quad pose while I got a little bit of pump. Um, but we’re just going to we’re going to keep working on leaning out. So, the idea here, let’s go ahead and do calf work. And and I’ve kind of said even though I’m not technically not a bodybuilder and my calves are good, I don’t necessarily need more calf, but we can make the argument for in a fat loss phase and I’m doing lots of walking and list cycling that calf weight matters. So if I build bigger calves just like I wear, those are the work boots I have on there. That’s what I usually wear when I walk. So again, changing that swing weight, uh, we just simply burn through more calories, more energy, higher metabolic turnover to build up your calves, okay? And we know this from from genetics on marathon running and stuff. People who have small calves genetically make better marathon runners, by the way. Uh, big calves are really, really good for power sports though, right? Anything where you got to push like sled work and everything, we see that. for pushing on a football field. Um, not necessarily sprinting, but definitely pushing. Obviously, squatting and stuff, powerlters, you know, big calves matter. But in terms of energy turnover, we might as well like I would say that to people, look, if you’re trying to get leaner, build your calves and quads up even more because you burn so much more energy doing your cardio and it’s cumulative. It adds up. Um, so again, we did the three sets of safety bar squats deep, one set of the deficit deadlifts, but I did do six total sets for posterior chain besides the deadlifts. And keep in mind, we train twice a week on all this stuff. So, two days of upper, two days of lower. So, this is all doubling up. The goal is to for me is to get 12 quality sets for every muscle. Now, so people say, well, what about the calves? Uh, technically the squatting and this stuff builds my calves, but I’m doing some direct work. like my my calves would be massive just from not even doing calf raises uh from this other stuff personally but we are doing direct work you know just like the triceps all that pressing we do matters but we still come in and do a you know really deep stretch position extension so a superset is I’m doing a lot of supersets right now um on the upper body all of it was supersets other than shoulders so I kind of did the same thing here I’m like I don’t want to superset obviously squats and deadlifts but um belt squats glute ham raises to conclude ham raises went ahead and just worked with about three sets of 10. Those are pretty much a limit. I don’t think I got 10 on the last one. It might have been like nine. Um, so again, taking these to that fuller range of motion to where I go all the way down at the bottom. So again, that we lock the knee so that we get that stretch position for that hamstring. We want to really stretch the hamstring on it. Um, so again, the idea a lot of these deeper stretch movements have a little more hypertrophic potential. All right. And when I’m in a cutting and I haven’t been doing some of these movements, if I can get a new uh more significant training response, the idea is maybe I will gain some muscle while using cardio to create a deficit. And that’s again the idea. Um any muscle that we can try to gain in a cut is always a good thing. And anyone says it’s impossible. Yeah, it’s totally possible. You just cut slow, you know, unless you’re really really lean. I get that if you’re super lean. I’m not super lean. like I’m nowhere near contest lean. This is not a concern, you know. Yeah, sure. If you’re you’re 10, 11% body fat, 12% even maybe, it might be really hard to gain any muscle while cutting without blasting a bunch of stuff, growing into a show bruise. So again, trying to stimulate muscle growth. That’s why we’re getting a certain amount of volume. We’re focusing on really thinking in terms of hypertrophy and and putting muscles into their their lengthened positions so that we get extra range of motion there, you know, in these situations where we can get more tension. It’s why we’re doing the deficit deadlifts, trying to do the deeper narrow stance squats. Belt squats are all the way as even this stuff trying to take it down to the longest range of motion at the bottom and then obviously coming all the way up. So again the idea try to stimulate any muscle growth we can build muscle build muscle while doing all that cardio keeping the diet clean. Um so again the goal is to try to recomposition if at all possible during the cut and that’s a best case. You know the idea in the other is a worst case is will it at least preserve the muscle we have and that’s still a win also. That’s still a win and we we’ll take that as a win and we should take that as a win. Uh but so again, three sets of belt squats superseted with three sets of glued ham raises. This alone I would be good to just quit at this point. This is obviously enough to stimulate growth, right? We got four sets for posterior chain. If we don’t count squats or any of that, but there is glute involved in all that. Um and then six sets for the quads, glutes, all that between the uh safety bar squats and the belt squats. But I came in after that and I did three sets of reverse hypers and I did two sets of hanging leg raises between. I’m not quite adapted to that much of them. I used to do them every day at one time when I was at my leanest I think on the channel. I was doing them a lot. So I do realize I need to build them up and I noticed my abs were like oh man I haven’t done them really in like a week. So my abs didn’t even like the first set. So then that second set it’s like no let’s not go overboard. Let’s not cramp our abs up. But but I do need to build them back up with in terms of volume, right? right? I can hit decent reps. Um, so again, what I did there, we do the reverse hypers, and I just did a set of those between the three of them. Uh, the first set of the reverse hypers, I forgot to be as strict as I’m trying to be. I’ve always got to remember that. I was used to do a lot more swinging. Now, I’m trying to be super super strict on them. So, it means I need to skill slow. And there’s always going to be some swing. I’ve had some people who are like, but there’s still swinging. It doesn’t matter. You can’t you can’t get rid of the swing. you have a weight on roller bearings with greased roller bearings with zer fittings. Okay, there’s going to be swing. Like notice it’s still swinging. When you walk away, it’ll swing for 60 seconds straight. The thing will just keep swinging. So, think about that in terms of when you’re lifting. So, again, the belt squats are good because again, I get some good grip training. Um, one that’s one reason I love I love hanging leg raises. Yes, they’re a full abdominal exercise. It works the whole thing, the entire muscle. And yes, the abdominal is one muscle. People don’t know that. They think six-pack is six or eight different muscle. It’s not. It’s it’s one muscle. Underneath it’s it’s all one. It’s that there’s some tendons that run across it that create that separation over the top of it. But down underneath when you get further down into the muscle, it’s just one sheet of muscle on the back of it. It’s just one solid connective muscle top to bottom. Right? Some a lot of people don’t know that. So your abs is actually a single muscle. Uh, but it works the whole thing, right? The upper and the lower get pretty evenly developed. Uh, we get some free grip training in there. And then it’s also just good for your shoulder health to hang. So, I’ll build these back up too over time. Uh, so again, I’ll I’ll see if I can get three sets next time uh on the next lower day so that we’ll build the capacity back up. At one time, I was doing 15 to 20 sets a week years ago when I was really at my leanest. And so, maybe we want to want to do that again just to build the abs up. So, I’m not worried about my abs getting too big. I looked back then. I was doing those all the time, like up to 20 sets a week, and my waist was way smaller than it is now. So, I’m not worried about blocky abs or any of that. I don’t use insulin, so not a concern. All right, guys. But that’s really all I have to say on that today. I hope it’s been informative, and I’ll talk to you guys and gals next time.