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Maybe because you want to improve even more on your athleticism, jumping, throwing, sprinting etc.

Tell him upperbody is just one small cog in a very large wheel.

Do the research if you want, but it's clear that heavy squatting releases the most growth hormones and testosterone levels in the body, which will help assist your upper body workouts to get you getting bigger and stronger faster.

lulz

That's as bro as bro science can get. If you "had to squat", explain chicken legs?

yeaa ive heard the hormone misconceptions before..and the kid like most of the general population dont care about athleticism

well, it's not like there isn't any "leg drive" in bench pressing..

picture a bench press with legs up in the air (core benching), legs on the ground flailing (no leg drive), and finally legs on the ground properly (leg drive)..

the third will allow you to lift more weight and thus achieve more hypertrophy/strength etc.. the stronger your legs are, the more you will be able to gain some benefit from them in the movement. you're not going to be getting as much contribution from weak chicken legs.

leg extension does benefit shoulder flexion (ant delt/pec major etc) through cross-flexor/extensor reflex so..

so that's my advice to him.

Well there are many benefits.

For one, squats build core strength. Secondly, the power you get (whole body power) is still hip initiated in general, and core generated/managed. Thirdly, a good leg strength base is the foundation on which upperbody is based on in terms of good stability for good power generating. And quartedly, the more lean muscle in general you have the more irradiation effect you have.

Where I'm going here is sports. If you do pullups/chinups/pushups etc just for the sake of good looking, then all I said is pretty much nullified.

yeah but big upper body and tiny legs makes you look like a fucking idiot.

All things being equal** you'll actually make better strength and size gains in your upper body if you don't train legs.  Leg training burns up a ton of calories, burns up a ton of nervous system energy, and requires a lot of adaptive resources. You only have so much to go around.  

Same goes for cardio, HIT etc. Anything that burns calories and requires energy takes away adaptive resources that could be used to fuel strength and size gains.

As a personal example, when I was 23 I experiencing bouts of rapid and irregular heartbeats and for 2 months I couldn't train legs. I kept doing the same upper body workouts I'd been doing before but they were a lot more effective simply because I didn't have legs to worry about.  I made more upper body strength gains in that 2 months then I had in the previous year and a half combined. The workouts were exactly the same as before, they just worked a lot better.

**Here's the thing though: Things are rarely equal. Most people don't  train their lower body hard enough to impact recovery. One lower body workout a week certainly isn't gonna do that. People that train legs (and whole body lifts like deadlifts) are usually more dedicated and have their shit together. They're more likely to have a good diet and much more likely to be consistent about their training. Thus, they make better gains everywhere in the long term because it's more important to them. The average frat bro might put more on his bench and curl in the few weeks he's prepping for spring break, but in the long term the guy doing the full body lifts will win out simply because he's doing more things right and it's more important to him.

The hormonal effect of full body lifts really isnt' worth getting worked up about from an anabolic perspective. From a catabolic (fat-burning) perspective it cetainly is. Full body/lower body lifts burn a lot more calories and can drastically increase things like AMPK and GH. If you're looking to stay lean their is a big differnce, but for size and strength those things are actually a disadvantage.  

Quote from: LBSS on March 07, 2011, 09:01:55 am

yeah but big upper body and tiny legs makes you look like a fucking idiot.

That is a physical (observable) characteristic of some of the top sprinters in the world: Broad shoulders, narrow hips, relatively long, skinny legs.

touche. allow me to revise my statement: big upper body and tiny legs makes you look like a fucking idiot unless you are a demonstrably ridiculous athlete, e.g. a world-class sprinter.