Jeff Nippard's Powerbuilding Program vs Gavin Adin Training
About Our Team
Spider Chalk is performance chalk used in college weight-rooms, powerlifting gyms, and weightlifting facilities around the world. Used by over 500,000 athletes in 21 countries, we make better chalk for serious athletes. Our team committed to testing Jeff Nippard's program and Gavin Adin's to compare and offer an honest opinion.
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Gavin Adin's Raw Strength Program
Gavin Adin is a 5 foot, 6 inch tall powerlifter from NJ with over 500,000 social media followers (400,000 on TikTok alone). All of his many training programs are available through the app Gavin Adin Training.
The Raw Strength program has 3 Phases and 3 Blocks in each Phase. We completed Phase 1, Blocks 1 & 2.
Review
After a 6-week training cycle with multiple athletes including 4 males and 2 females, everyone's bench and squat went up significantly.
The volume was low enough to recover and the exercises were well-rounded. However one potential drawback is that the program lacks major lifts like shoulder press and pullups, and accessory lifts like curls. Our time in the gym to complete the lifts varied from 30 minutes to 45 minutes with no session taking longer than 45 minutes.
Remember, Gavin offers several programs through the app. Raw Strength is simply the one we followed. But we added in pullups/chinups and replaced goblet squats with heavy front squats to more closely match our training goals.
SUMMARY: Gavin has created a well-balanced strength & powerbuilding program. Based on SBD principles and expanded with some nice complexity, this program is best suited for intermediate lifters who want to see growth both in strength and size and have limited time in the gym. Also being under 45 minutes a day allows you to incorporate conditioning whether CrossFit, Hyrox, HIIT, or simple cardio.
For those looking to prioritize either chest, legs or arms, you could add a few muscle-specific movements. And for more advanced lifters who want 90+ minute sessions, there are other programs more suited available on the app.
Jeff Nippard's Powerbuilding System
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 solution 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 with multiple athletes, our testing resulted in serious strength gains and decent size. The main challenge with Nippard's program is the sheer volume causing major muscle breakdown. To illustrate the difficulty of the program, on week 3, all training participants failed at their required weight due to extreme muscle soreness.
Even using supersets, Nippards program is long and tedious. Most lifters don't want to spend more than 60 minutes per training session, and nuanced exercises like hip abduction is unnecessary for most common lifters who would benefit more from sticking to variations of compound lifts like squat, bench, press, clean, and deadlift.
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.
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).
Free Programs
There are alternative free powerlifting programs and a wide variety of free bodybuilding programs.
Beginners can try nSuns or Greyskull and build variations using those two as a foundation.