Jeff Nippard's Powerbuilding Program
Jeff Nippard is a 5 foot, 5 inch tall powerlifter and bodybuilder from Canada with a huge Youtube and Instagram following. He designed a popular program for athletes looking to put on both size and strength in one single program. The program itself has a tremendous amount of variety split into 4 training days. Each day expect to spend upwards of 90+ minutes in the gym based on the number of exercises, sets and reps.
Review
Having completed a 4-week training cycle, our testing resulted in serious strength gains and decent size. The main challenge with Nippard's program is the sheer volume and intense weight causing major muscle breakdown. To illustrate the difficulty of the program, on week 3, both training participants failed at their required weight due to extreme muscle soreness.
SUMMARY: This is a program for athletes who have the time, desire, and availability to spend hours each day on their workouts and even more hours each day on recovery. I imagine since Jeff is a professional bodybuilder, his schedule revolves around his sleep, meals, and workouts. For those who must work a job or have family obligations, Nippard's program would be extremely difficult to maintain long-term.
Our Advice
For those who want to attempt Jeff's program, think of altering it either by cutting out a few exercises or lowering the weight/reps. This way you can progress at a slower pace and allow your body to recover before attempting to increase the weight.
Kizen Powerbuilding Program
The Kizen Training 12-week Powerlifting Program is authored by Omar Isuf, Bart Kwan, and Mike Farr.
Silent Mike is a Reebok sponsored athlete with a large Youtube following, Bart owns Barbell Brigade gym and an apparel brand of the same name, and Omar is a popular online personal trainer.
A 6 day program designed more for physique than strength, Kizen is extremely popular with bodybuilding athletes who want to still maintain a respectable 1 RM.
Review
With an extreme bias toward bodybuilding exercises and an absolute obsession with triceps, Kizen is not a well-rounded program in our opinion. For athletes who want to train all the parts of the body or desire to focus on complex movements like squat, bench, deadlift, clean and press, this program doesn't achieve those goals. However, for the 100% aesthetic-minded athlete, perhaps Kizen would meet your expectations. The volume is high but each exercise is superset with another opposite muscle group to balance out the training session and limit the time in the gym. But even with the superset function and the opposing muscle philosophy, the program seems incredibly gimmicky and shortsighted when compared to a well-rounded training program. To us, this is the danger of following a program designed by social media stars who also own apparel brands and supplement companies and may be looking at this program as a side-hustle or way to simply market their main brands.
Further evidence of the limits of the Kizen program is the fact that all 3 program designers have forsaken the Kizen Training website and social media pages, choosing instead to focus their efforts on other more lucrative projects (like apparel and supplements).
Our Advice
There are better powerlifting programs and much better bodybuilding programs. Unless you want to check the box and be able to say you followed the Kizen program, we suggest following a better program like nSuns or Greyskull.