Structuring your workout

What follows is criteria that I have come across that has structured my current workout. My goal is to build muscle. Women, you can use these points as well. I will be making other posts related to workout goals and how various workout approaches meet those goals, but women need not fear that the following points are going to drive them to being outrageously muscular. Its just not going to happen! Also, this post is not focused on an intense fat loss program or goal. Using cardio to burn calories and a diet plan to facilitate fat loss will be discussed separately.

CRITERIA:

1. Train small muscle groups with large muscle groups. Developing (or maintaining) muscle requires the presence of the body’s hormones such as testosterone and growth hormone. Working out influences the activation of these hormones. The larger the muscle group the greater the release of these hormones and the ability to effect muscle repair and growth. By working out small muscle groups on the same day as a larger muscle group, the small muscle group gets the benefit of the greater hormone activation, more than if one worked out the small muscle group on its own day.
2. Training muscle groups more frequently to increases growth.
3. Make sure you give the muscle groups enough rest and recovery in between workouts. Information I have gathered suggests large muscle groups (back, legs, chest) should have 48 hours recovery before their next workout. Small muscle groups should have 72 hours.
4. Don’t work out more than 2 days in a row without a rest day. Your body as a whole needs rest and time to repair. Your body uses up a lot of its nutritional and biochemical resources during your workout days. The recovery day allows your body as a whole to replenish. Take for example creatine or ribose levels. Creatine and ribose are key to the muscle’s development and utilization of ATP which is the muscles key source of energy. You’ll see that I wasn’t quite able to meet this criteria completely while training each muscle group twice within 7 days. I take a day off after 3 days. But, I ensure that I make my workouts properly intense rather than endurance (I explain next).
5. Keep your workout sets intense, not endurance. One of the difficulties of trying to train small body parts with the large and training your muscle groups twice in 7 days is that one could mistakenly pile all their previous workout routines into one and end up with a 3 hour workout each day. You don’t want that. For one thing, a workout that has a lot of sets, a lot of repetitions, very little rest between sets and lasts for over an hour tends to activate the body’s cortisol. Cortisol is the body’s hormone that signals it to store fat. My workout now lasts a little less than 1.5 hours. So the trick is to follow an approach to intensity like that of Dorian Yates. Fewer sets and repetitions, but take the set to failure. One might do a light warm-up set, then a moderate weight set, then a heavy set to failure. If its the first exercise of the workout, one might use 4 sets. You also want to provide sufficient recovery time between sets. This allows time for muscle energy recovery so that the next set can be equally intense and helps prevent the activation of cortisol. It was not uncommon for Dorian to wait 4 or 5 minutes between sets. Doing sets quickly without recovery time only attempts to work the muscle without enough energy and one won’t be able to reach the needed intensity (in terms of weight used or number of repetitions) to stress the muscle enough to set the stage growth. As far as the number of repetitions, I am familiar with 6 for strength goals and 8 to 10 for bodybuilding generally speaking. If 9 or 10 are no longer repetitions I reach failure at, I add more weight so they are failure repetitions.

Incorporating the criteria above, I now have the following workout. It is a 4 day cycle including a rest day, then all over again. Each body part gets hit twice in 7 days:

1. Day 1. PUSH DAY Chest, tricepts, front delts, medial delts (deltoids are shoulder muscle groups)
2. Day 2. PULL DAY  Back, bicepts, traps, rear delts
3. Day 3. LEG DAY   Quads, hamstrings, calves
4. Day 4. REST DAY

Below is a sample workout routine. See that the number and variation of exercises is spread over three cycles. So for chest, I am not doing incline, decline, and flat bench bar exercises all in one workout. If I did, combined with the other small body parts, the workout would be too long. They are performed within 5 days of each other. The large body part (chest, back, legs) are performed first in the workout. So for example in day 1, chest is done first, then tricepts. The tricepts have already received a good workout, pre-exhausted before their workout, and don’t need a lot of additional different exercises. I tried to make the exercises in any body part workout complementary and not duplicative.

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4
Chest	Incline Bar Flat Dumbel Fly
Tricepts	Close grip bar Press down drop set
Front Delts	Dumbel Raises
Medial Delts	Cable Raises
Back		Narrow weighted pull ups Bar Bent over rows		Day Off
Bicepts		Preacher w/cable (outer) Dumbell supineflex
Traps		Dumbells
Rear Delts		Dumbells
Legs			Sqaut Hack Squat Stiff Leg Deadlift
Calfs			Smith Machine

 

	Day 5	Day 6	Day 7	Day 1
Chest	Decline Bar Hammer Incline
Tricepts	Seated Cable Ext. Rope Press Down
Front Delts	Behind the neck
Medial Delts	Hammer
Back		Weighted Wide Pull Ups T-Bar		Day Off
Bicepts		Hammer Cable tower
Traps		Hammer
Rear Delts		Dumbells
Legs			Squat Leg Press Leg Curl
Calfs			Donkey

 

	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5
Chest	Flat Bar Incline dumbel fly
Tricepts	Cable V-handle press downs
Front Delts	Smith
Medial Delts	Dumble raises
Back		Cable pull down wide bar Dumbell rows		Day Off
Bicepts		Straight Bar Dumbell Hammers
Traps
Rear Delts
Legs			Sqaut Hack Squat Stiff Leg Deadlift
Calfs			Smith Machine

 

So, with the example above, I’m sure you can devise a workout plan that incorporates the equipment you have and takes advantage of some of the age long known criteria.BTW, don’t forget your nutrition and sleep! Workout, nutrition, and sleep go together. One won’t work without the other!

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