Hybrid Lifts for Size and Strength

Build More Mass and Power with Hybrid Lifts and the Workouts That Utilize Them

     The best lifts for building size and strength are “big” compound movements.  If you want to build as much mass and power as your body is capable of, then you need to do heavy squats, heavy pulls (whether it’s deadlifts or one of the quick lifts), plenty of heavy presses (benches and overhead movements), along with some heavy curls.  The more muscles that you utilize in a lift then the better the lift.  This is the reason that squats, deadlifts, and the quick lifts—power cleans, snatches, and high pulls—reign supreme.

     Based on this, you could also argue that even better are “hybrid lifts” that combine two (or even three) movements in one lift.  A classic example of this is the “full clean” done by weightlifters.  As you clean the barbell, you drop into a front squat before standing up with the weight.  The full clean, along with the full snatch, though great movements, are difficult to master unless you have a good weightlifting coach that can show you the ropes.  And for the “average” lifter who is just looking to get as big and strong as possible, there are better lifts than the classic weightlifting ones.

     In this article, I’ll outline some of the best “hybrid lifts” along with how to incorporate them into a training program.  First, we’ll look at the lifts and then I’ll give you some workout ideas and programming suggestions.

The Best Hybrid Lifts for Size and Strength

     We’ll start here by looking at the lifts that work the most muscle groups at one time before moving on to some that target only a few muscles when doing them.

Total Body Lifts:

Power Clean - Front Squat

     Unlike the traditional full clean, you do this lift by starting with the power clean.  Once you’ve cleaned the weight, you then do a front squat with it.  Clean, squat, set the bar down, and repeat.  This movement works all of your back muscles along with your legs in a thorough fashion.  In addition to a barbell, this is also a good kettlebell movement.  You can clean and then squat double kettlebells, or you can alternate with a single kettlebell by cleaning and squatting using one arm and then, on the next rep, swap over to the other hand.

Power Clean - Overhead Press

     The 2nd option is a classic for lifters and strongmen going back more than a century.  Power clean the barbell, overhead press it, drop it back down to your shoulders, and then set it on the ground.  Repeat.  You can do this one with barbells, dumbbells, or kettlebells.  Using dumbbells or kettlebells, you can also do these as single arm movements.  Perhaps the most underrated movement not done by the majority of lifters is the one-arm dumbbell clean and press.  Alternate arms on each repetition.  You can also do these with thick-handled barbells or dumbbells.

Power Clean - Front Squat - Overhead Press

     You can also combine the above two lifts into one hybrid movement.  Power clean the weight, front squat it, stand up with the squat, and then overhead press it.  You can also start the overhead press before you finish the squat to really power up heavier weights.  And, again, you can do this with barbells, dumbbells, or kettlebells.

Front Squat - Overhead Press

     Instead of starting with the clean, you can take the barbell directly out the rack.  Front squat the weight and then overhead press it.

Back Squat - Behind-the-Neck Press

     You can also take the weight out of the rack on your back.  Do the back squat and then press it up overhead at the top.  If you want a killer combination, once you press it, keep it overhead and do an overhead squat before lowering the barbell down to your upper back.

Deadlift - Curl

     This article was precipitated by a conversation in the comments section of one of my recent articles with regular reader “Yakuza Goon.”  I casually mentioned the underhand deadlift/curl combination lift would be a good movement for doing multiple sets of low reps, and he commented that an article on hybrid lifts might be a good idea.  Which got me thinking—and led to what you’re now reading.

     To do this lift, start by doing a deadlift underhanded with your barbell curl grip.  Deadlift the weight and then finish it by curling it.  This is a heck of a power-builder for your biceps along with being a good back movement.  Word of caution: make sure that your biceps are warmed up well before doing it.  Do a few sets of regular barbell curls with a lighter weight before commencing with your first set.

     This one is also good with heavy dumbbells by doing a two-dumbbell deadlift/hammer curl combo.  You can also do it with a single dumbbell.  Do one set with one arm and a 2nd set with the other rather than attempting to alternate back and forth between arms on each rep.

Deadlift - Shrug

     The deadlift shrug is a forgotten movement that was favored by lifters back in the so-called silver era of bodybuilding. They would sometimes do it in classic 20-rep breathing squat fashion for packing on the mass (along with the GOMAD method of consuming abundant calories).  Take an over/over grip, deadlift it up, and then begin the shrug before you lock out at the top.  You can also do this with dumbbells.

Sumo Deficit Deadlift - Shrug

     The sumo deficit deadlift, because of the time-under-tension, is already a great trap builder.  Because of the relatively close grip, it naturally places more emphasis on your traps.  Combining it with a shrug at the top fries your trapezius muscles.

     This exercise is also good because the sumo deficit deadlift, by itself, is something of a hybrid lift.  Since you are starting with the bar so low, it naturally combines together a squat and a sumo deadlift.

Dumbbell Deadlift - Push-Up

     This is the size and strength answer to the popular burpee push-up among bodyweight trainees.  Get a pair of heavy dumbbells and deadlift them.  Once you lower them down to the ground, kickback into a plank position and do a push-up while holding onto the dumbbells.  Jump back up to your deadlift position and commence with your next deadlift repetition.  If you have trouble finding heavy enough dumbbells, try these with thick-handled ‘bells.  The thick grip will make the push-up harder, as well, and give your grip a great workout.

Upper Body Lifts:

Pullover - Press

     Popular among the golden era bodybuilders, this exercise is little-used among modern lifters but it’s a great movement for the chest/triceps/lats.  You can do it with a barbell, an EZ curl bar, or a pair of dumbbells.  Press the weight up, lower it back down, commence with a pullover, bring the bar back to your chest, and press once more.

Skull Crusher - Pullover

     In my book, the best exercise on the planet for the triceps due to the stretch and the time-under-tension for your tris.  Do the negative portion of a skull crusher and at the bottom of the movement, once the bar touches your head, do a pullover.  Bring the bar back up to the top of your head and complete the skull crusher.

Dumbbell Pullover - Press - Flye

     A combination of both of the previous movements, this was a favorite of the legendary bodybuilding writer Gene Mozee.  Grab a pair of dumbbells, press them up, bring them down to your chest, do a pullover with them, bring them back to a press, and at the top of the press, do a flye with them.  Repeat.  Mozee favored the movement on a decline bench.

Pull-Up - Dip (Muscle-Up)

     A popular exercise for bodyweight enthusiasts, the muscle-up combines a pull-up with a dip.  Take a false grip on a pull-up bar to make the transition to the dip easier.  You probably need the strength to do 10 to 15 pull-ups before attempting this one.  You can also start by using a low bar that allows you to touch your feet to the ground (or a chair or bench) to make the transition to the dip easier.

Workout Routines

     Hybrid lifts are great for high-frequency training (HFT).  You can treat your training as more of a “skill” or “practice” session than a grueling “workout,” though they can be used in more “traditional” training sessions as well.

     With hybrid lifts, you’re limited in the amount of weight that you can use by the most difficult part of the lift, such as the curl or the press.  You might be able to front squat 275 but if you can only overhead press 135 pounds, then you’re forced to use no more than 135 in the front squat/overhead press, for instance.  This can be good, however.  By using lighter weights, you can train the lifts daily on an “easy strength” style HFT program.  Even though you’re “pushing it” on the press or the curl, the shoulders and arms recover faster than larger muscle groups, and will also adapt to the HFT.

     You can also start your workout by doing your heavier compound lifts first and then finishing the session off with the hybrid lift(s).  So, you might do a few heavy sets of front squats with a max (or near max) weight and then finish the workout with some sets of front squats/overhead presses.  Same thing for other lifts such as the deadlift/curl.  Start the workout with a heavy deadlift session, move on to barbell curls, and then finish with the deadlift/curl lift.

     Now, let’s look at some specific programs.

The Easy Strength Approach

     If you’ve been training with heavy compound lifts for a few training cycles, it might be a good idea to try the following program.  Here, you will primarily use the hybrid lifts in your workouts.  This will give your body a break from the “all-out” squats or heavy pulls.

     You will do two different workouts here, alternating back and forth between the two.  Train at least 5 days each week.  I like a 3-on, 1-off, 2-on, 1-off schedule.  So, the first week, you might do workout A on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, and workout B on Tuesday and Friday.  In the 2nd week, it reverses.  You’d do workout B on M, W, S and workout A on T,F.  You can also just train as many days in a row as you want before taking a day off.  If you’re a naturally “intuitive” lifter, then this is a good approach.  Some weeks, you might train 6 days straight.  Others, you might only get 4 or 5 sessions per week in.

     Do the lifts as described above.  The workout sessions look like this:

Workout A

Power clean/front squat: 2x5, 5x2, 3x5,3,2, 6-8x1, and 1x10.  At each session, rotate between each set/rep combination.  The 1st workout, you do 2 sets of 5 reps with a relatively heavy weight, perhaps one where you could get around 8 reps for one all-out set.  At the 2nd session, do 5 progressively heavier doubles, working up to a hard, but not quite all-out double.  At the 3rd workout, do your first set of 5 with the weight used at the 1st session.  Add weight on the 2nd set for a triple, and finish with a heavy double.  At the 4th session, do 6 to 8 progressively heavier singles, working up to around 90% (no more than 95%) of your max single weight.  Finally, at the 5th session, do 1 easy set of 10 reps for an active recovery workout.  Repeat the sequence in the following workouts, and use it for all of the lifts in the program.  The key to “easy strength” workouts is to coax your strength slowly up.  Don’t force the weights to go up.  You will get stronger without really trying.  That’s why it’s called “easy strength".  It’s the best method of training that you’ve probably never seen done at the gym.

Power clean/overhead press: 2x5, 5x2, 3x5,3,2, 6-8x1, and 1x10

Front squat/overhead press: 2x5, 5x2, 3x5,3,2, 6-8x1, and 1x10

Workout B

Sumo deficit deadlift: 2x5, 5x2, 3x5,3,2, 6-8x1, and 1x10.  As mentioned above, even though this is not “technically” the hybrid combination of two different lifts, it is by its nature, since you must start with a deep squat to begin the lift.  Use a deficit high enough so that the top of your feet is directly under the bar.

Barbell curls: 2x5, 5x2, 3x5,3,2, 6-8x1, and 1x10.  This is the one non-hybrid lift that you will do.  It will prep your biceps for the following lift, however.

deadlift/curl: 2x5, 5x2, 3x5,3,2, 6-8x1, and 1x10

Dumbbell deadlift/push-up: 2x5, 5x2, 3x5,3,2, 6-8x1, and 1x10

     Stick with the program as written and don’t be swayed into doing more work.  The workouts will seem so easy that most lifters I’ve worked with just don’t feel as if they are doing enough.  They don’t feel that way after a couple of months, however, when they have surpassed all their previous bests in the lifts.  The frequency and the total workload over the weeks will build all the strength you need.  If you added anything, it could be regular front squats at the beginning or end of workout A.  But it’s not needed.

The Full-Body, 3-Days-a-Week “Moderate Strength” Program

     In this program, you will combine more traditional compound lifts with hybrid movements.  This is a “moderate strength” program because you will do a little more than the “easy strength” routine but not so much that you can’t train 3 days per week.  In the previous program, you did no more than 10 reps on each lift.  Here, you will do 15 on each movement.  Do the following program on 3 non-consecutive days each week, such as Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Barbell back squats: 3x5, 8x2, 5x3, 10x1, and 1x15.  This follows a similar protocol to the 1st program.  Start off the 1st session with 3 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps.  At the 2nd session, do 8 progressively heavier doubles, working up to a heavy double with 90-95% of your max double weight.  At the 3rd workout, do 5 progressively heavier triples.  At the 4th session, do 10 progressively heavier singles, working up to, again, between 90-95% of your max single.  The 5th workout is your “active recovery” session with 1 light set of 15 reps.  Follow this rotation for each of your lifts.

Bench presses or weighted dips: 3x5, 8x2, 5x3, 10x1, and 1x15.  Rotate back and forth between the two lifts from workout to workout.

Power clean/overhead press or power clean/front squat: 3x5, 8x2, 5x3, 10x1, and 1x15.  Rotate between each lift from workout to workout.

deadlift/shrug or deadlift/barbell curl: 3x5, 8x2, 5x3, 10x1, and 1x15.  Again, rotate between the two lifts at each session.

pullover/press: 3x5, 8x2, 5x3, 10x1, and 1x15

Weighted chins: 3x5, 8x2, 5x3, 10x1, and 1x15

     As with the first program in this article, don’t do any more than this.  Six big lifts are plenty at each session.

The One-Lift-a-Day Program

     If there’s a “problem” some lifters might have with hybrid lifts is that they are harder to program into a split training system.  If you train your legs at one session, your back at another, and your chest and shoulders in a 3rd workout, where do you place squat/presses, squat/cleans, clean/presses, or deadlift/curls, etc.?  One of the answers is to follow a one-lift-per-day routine.  At each session, just do one of the above lifts and train 5 to 6 days per week.  It really is as simple as that.  Some might worry, however, that there’s too much “overlap” of muscles at each session.  If you do front squats/overhead presses on Monday, cleans/overheads on Tuesday, cleans/front squats on Wednesday, and so forth, isn’t that going to lead to overtraining?  Well, that overlap is one thing that I actually like about this method.  Even though you’re training each lift only once per week, you’re still training the same muscles several of the days or, perhaps, each training session.  In my book, that’s a benefit.  Yes, you’ll be sore in a lot of the muscles you're training at your sessions—at least, at first—but your body will adapt.

     What follows is one example of a program you might utilize.  Follow it exactly as written or do something very similar.  Here is what it might look like:

Monday

Power clean/front squat.  Start the session by doing progressively heavier sets of 5 reps—what I refer to as ramps.  Take your time in working up to an all-out set of 5 reps.  The number of sets that you do will depend upon how strong you are.  If you can clean 225 pounds for 5 reps, you might do as many as 6 to 8 sets.  Something such as this: empty bar x5 reps, 105x5, 135x5, 155x5, 175x5, 205x5, 225x5.  If you can only clean 135 for 5 reps, then still do 4 to 5 sets working up to that weight.  Once you finish your last set of 5 reps, start doing progressively heavier triples.  Work up to a heavy triple, and then switch over to singles.  Again, do progressively heavier singles, working up to no more than 95% of your max single—90% might be even better.  Do as many singles as you wish with 90%.  After that, you can either call it quits, or you can drop down in weight and do 3 to 5 sets of 3 to 5 reps with a lighter weight.  If you had a max set of 5 at 225, you might drop down to 205 and do 3x5 with that weight.

Tuesday

Deadlift/curl.  For your 2nd session, select a slightly different movement instead of doing another variation that includes one of the lifts from the 1st day.  Again, do the same format as you did on Monday, using progressively heavier sets of 5s, triples, and singles.  Add back-off sets if you wish.

Wednesday

Power clean/overhead press.  Again, do the same progressively heavier ramp sets as the 1st two workouts of the week.

Thursday: OFF

     After 3 days of training, take a day off.  Relax as much as possible.  Take a walk if you need some activity.  A long, casual walk will do your body some good and help your muscles to repair.  Eat as much clean food as possible on this day to help you recover for the workout on the following day.

Friday

Front squat/overhead press.  On this workout, do a density session.  Warm up with a few sets, and then load the bar with whatever you would use for a hard set of 5 to 6 reps.  Now, do multiple sets of triples or doubles with that weight.  Select a total rep number such as 30 to 40 reps and do as many sets as you need until you hit that number.  If you chose 30 reps, then you might start by doing 6 triples.  Your last triple felt a little tough, so you now switch over to doubles and do 6 sets of doubles to complete your 30 reps.  If, at any time, the doubles feel hard, go to singles.  For example, if you chose to get 40 reps total, you might do 6 triples, 6 doubles, then finish with 10 singles.  Take minimal rest between sets, no more than 60 seconds.

Saturday

Dumbbell deadlift/push-up.  For your final session of the week, do the same “density” workout as Friday.  For this lift, you will be hampered by the number of deadlifts you can do.  You can also select a higher rep total, such as 50 reps, for this movement.

     On Sunday, rest again to prepare you for the Monday session.  In the following week, do the same lifts, trying to beat your numbers from the previous week.  Don’t worry, however, if, at any workout, you do less than what you had done in a prior session for that lift.  Your body will adapt and, eventually, your lighter “hard-to-get-through” sessions will be heavier than your previous “heavy” workouts.

     I like the “format” here.  You do 3 sessions of progressively heavier workouts early in the week and then switch over to 2 density workouts.  At the Wednesday session, you’ll probably feel fatigued, but by the time Monday rolls around the next week, you’ll start to feel better and better.  You can also choose different lifts for the 2nd week of training.  However, if you do that, don’t change to new movements every week.  Instead, have two different training weeks that you rotate between.  One option would be to rotate between a week of barbell sessions and a 2nd week of dumbbell or kettlebell sessions on the same lifts.

Final Thoughts

     In addition to the various hybrid lifts, you can also utilize movements that naturally work a lot of muscle groups.  The kettlebell swing is a good example.  It’s a “hinge” movement but one that also engages quite a bit of upper body muscles.  A popular old-school movement would be the Turkish get-up.  It works damn-near every single muscle in your body.  Those lifts, and others, I decided to not include in this article for the sake of brevity and an attempt to be concise.  But they are still viable lifts that should be considered.

     I could have added some more workout routines, as well.  I didn’t want to inundate you with too much information all at once, however, so I decided to stick with the three programs that are included here.  But another good program that would work well with hybrid lifts, just to give you an example, would be something such as Bill Starr’s heavy-light-medium routine.  Really, any full-body workout would be good for hybrid lifting.  Another idea would be to use them in a “conjugate” system such as Westside Barbell, where instead of just training the same lift or two at each session, you rotated between each one on your “max effort” day and then at another workout, you picked a couple of them to do in the “dynamic effort” fashion.  Again, I figured that would be too much to include here and a Westside-style template using these lifts would need an article of its own.  If there’s interest, I will write one further down the road.

     If you’re looking for more size and strength, then use some hybrid lifts.  When it comes to packing on mass and power, they’re as good as anything else out there.