With the coming of summer I find myself with a lot more free time on my hands, and I would like to spend some of it at the gym. I am thinking of switching from a day on / day off schedule to one where I work a different part of the body one day each week, ie 5 or 6 sessions a week. My questoin is this: should I set my schedule such that synergist muscles get at least a day off before they become the target muscle? For example, if I do chest exercises on monday, should I wait until wednsday or thursday to do trciep exercises, since they are also involved in presses and the like? Any help or advise would be most appreciated!
In short, yes. But read the rest. I’m not a cerified trainer but I have have worked out off and on for five years and have had a lot of success.
I don’t know how much you know about working out, but I am going to address it as a whole.
First you need to determine what exactly you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to gain mass or definition? Are you also trying to burn off fat? How about cardiovascular exercise?
Also, what body type are you? One classification I know of divides people into three groups: Ectomorphs, Endomorphs, and Mesomorphs
Ectomorphs are tall and skinny (think Conan O’Brian) and usually have a higher metabolism, have a harder time bulking up but an easier time getting defined.
Endomorphs are a bit on the pear-shaped side with a bit of extra fat (think Jack Black maybe?) and usually have a slower metabolism, find it easier to bulk up but a bit harder to burn off the fat and get/show definition.
Mesomorphs are predisposed to having an athletic, muscular body and find it easier to get results when working out. I hate these guys. I know one guy who eats like an idiot and hardly works out and yet he looks like an underwear model.
Anyway, picture a triangle. If each point on the triangle is occupied by one of these catagories, almost everyone’s profile would consist of a combination of the three definitions and they could be represented graphically by a point that exists somewhere within the body of the triangle. Where you exist on this triangle will tell you how you need to adjust your workout for your body type.
Basically, most people structure their workout to focus on one muscle group per workout. A typical division might be legs, arms, chest, shoulders and back, not neccessarily in that order. There are variations on this theme, however, and you can mix it up to an extent.
The idea is that when you have completed one cycle the first muscle group worked in the cycle is ready to be worked again and you can repeat the cycle. If the cycle is too quick, the first group won’t have time to heal properly and you will over-work yourself. If the cycle is too long the benifits gained by working a group will be lost in the “downtime” and you won’t get anywhere. Properly balancing these factors is a constant game you will need to keep your eye on. Remember that properly resting your body is as important as the workout itself. Because I tend to be ectomorphic, I have to work very hard to achieve my general goal of bulking up. Typically, I go to the gym five or six times a week and try to complete three cycles every two weeks, give or take. I also rest one day after each cycle.
You pointed out that when you work your chest you are also working your arms indirectly. This is an important point because it highlights the fact that some muscle groups cannot be worked without working others, while others can be worked much more independently. For that reason I like to work my arms a couple days after I have worked my chest and my back. That way my arms are fresh. However, some guys work their triceps on the same day they work their chest BECAUSE their triceps have already been stressed by the chest exercises. Just make sure you work your chest first as the chest is much more dependent on the triceps than vice-versa. And make sure that any one muscle group has the right work/rest cycle speed. As you can see there is no single “right” way to do it (but many wrong ways) and it can be said that working out is as much an art as a science.
Some principles to keep in mind:
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Higher weight/Lower reps tend to emphasize bulk over definition. If you want to bulk up, make sure you are keeping the number of reps in your sets in the 6-10 range. Too much weight will bring the number of reps down too low and the benefits will diminish. If you are doing more than 10 reps in a set then you are placing more of an emphasis on definition rather than bulk, but maybe that is what you want. keep in mind that these are generalizations and are a bit different for everyone and are dependant on your body type.
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When you are working a muscle group, make sure that you have as many different excercise types in your arsenal as possible. This will promote even, well-rounded muscle development. Remember that guy with the mullet and the tank-top who has huge, funny-shaped biceps but skinny-everything-else? All he does is bicep curls with a barbell in his basement yet he thinks he is Arnie. Don’t be that guy. For example, when it comes to working my chest I do bench press with a barbell or with dumbells. I vary whether I do them on the flat bench, incline, or decline bench. I also do flys with dumbells or flys on a machine. I have over a dozen chest exercises in my arsenal. I don’t do these all on the same day, but If I did three or four on one day, the next time I worked my chest I would do three or four different chest exercises.
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Learn how to do the exercises properly and safely. If you don’t, you will look like a dork, diminish your return, and you could hurt yourself big-time. Ever seen a guy blow his rotator cuff with a couple hundred pounds in the mix? Not cool.
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Keep track of your progress. Write it down in a book. It will blow your mind how much you can improve. In some excercises I have increased my strength by a factor of 4. Without any “juice”. Which brings me to my next point.
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Stay off the juice unless you are fully educated as to its associated risks and you are willing to deal with and accept them.
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Proper Diet, sleep, and cardivascular exercise routines can greatly enhance your success levels. Don’t ignore them.
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Be consistent and disciplined. Results will come slowly but steadily. If you know you should go to the gym on a certain day but you’d rather just sit on the couch and watch “Judge Judy”, get off the couch! NOW!
Anyway, good luck to you!
Building muscle is a function of 2 things only. Protein and intensity. That is, weight lifting intensity.
Diet first… protein, protein protein. Body builders try to get about 2 grams of protein per pound of body weight. That’s a bunch. You can build muscle with half of that. Check labels. A can of tuna has about 32 grams of protein. Eat a few cans a day to pump up your protein totals. Chicken white meat, eggs and other meats are high protein. Beans also have high protein. You can work your butt off with weights however, without protein you’ll add no muscle.
Your workout should be intense. Sets should be done to failure. The best way to obtain intensity, is, in my opinion, by doing negative reps. That is, you start with the weight that you can only do about 8 reps. You fail on the last rep. Then you reduce the weight and do your second set. Same on a third set if you do 3 sets.
A word about the number of sets… It’s been tested at least twice that I’m aware of (at The University of Florida) … that you can build muscles by doing just one or very few sets as well as those who do more sets… if you lift to failure on your sets. By failure I mean snot bubbles, body shaking… can’t lift it another inch… Again, it’s about intensity. I do the bench on a Smith Machine because it’s self spotting and it’s safer when your arms fail…
Protein and intensity. After a workout, that only lasts, for me about 40 minutes… I rest only a few seconds between sets… I have a totally drained feeling. My teeth feel tired. I feel like I have to race home in order to eat. If I don’t feel that way then my workout wasn’t intense enough.
Intensity and protein, I’m sure of it. Everything else is just preference.
One thing about heavy/light weights… I disagree with the post above. Light weights = “toned or definition.” Heavy weights add “bulk.” I know this is common “knowledge.” However, a muscle only reacts to 2 things… work or lack of work. Work and the muscle gets bigger. Don’t work it and it gets smaller. Those people referred to as “defined” are just people with not a great deal of muscle but with very little body fat covering their muscle. Like swimmers. I’m sure I could prove it by weight training someone using low weights,…until failure… and feeding them enough protein. But why?
If you’re going to switch to a daily workout, you’re probably better off to work out your top half on one day, and your bottom half the next.
It’s going to be very difficult to work on your back or chest without using your arms-- and if you’re going for maximum rest on your extremities, you’ll need to take an extra day in there.
I disagree with Alex-NC… his recipe for extra protein sounds like an expensive way to abuse your kidneys and encourage gout in your old age. And while exercising to failure is an effective way to build muscle size, it can be psychologically draining. Personally, I lose some motivation when I fail at an exercise (like when I kept falling over in yoga class yesterday doing some balancing poses because my buttocks still hadn’t recovered from two days of dragonboat racing) and I need to feel a certain level of success and marginal improvement in order to come back fresh the next day.
One thing: expect to be much more tired from doubling your time spent exercising. Don’t be afraid to take a couple weeks to expand from three times a week to six.
are your goals to increase strength or put on mass?..there’s a big difference in training techniques. This is probably the main thing people do wrong in the gym. They say they want to get stronger and train to do so, but what they really want is to put on size\body build.
I gotta go, but I’ll give you some pointers tomorrow.
I would try the push-pull-legs-off split.
First workout day, you do chest, shoulders, and triceps.
Second workout day, you do back, biceps.
Third workout day, you do legs.
Then take a day off, and start over. Always take Sundays off no matter where you are in the cycle, and do abs every other workout.
So Monday is push, Tuesday is pull, Wednesday is legs, Thursday off, Friday is push again, Saturday is pull, Sunday off, Monday legs, Tuesday off, Wednesday push, Thursday pull, Friday legs, Saturday and Sunday off, and then start over.
Resist the temptation to do a whole bunch of sets on each workout day, and make your split workout as long as your regular ones. That way lies overtraining. Five or six sets (including warmups) per bodypart is plenty. If you can do more than that, you aren’t working hard enough.
Don’t overeat protein. It isn’t necessary, regardless of what those who are in the business of selling protein powders (hint hint) would have you believe.
Regards,
Shodan
Don’t neglect the squat and deadlift! These are great exercises that work the largest muscles in your body, and offer tremendous potential for growth.
There are a couple of different mainstream theories on what to train with what. the most common training split is back with bis, chest with tris, shoulders with abs, and then legs…all separate days. The thought behind this is that, for example, training chest will use your tris so by the time you finish with your chest workout, your tris are pre-fatigued and therefore you don’t need to work them as hard.
The other train of thought is that, using the previously mentioned example, you’ll never get a good triceps workout if you pre-exhaust it by training chest. The splits these people use are chest-bis, back-tris, shoulders-abs, and legs again. This is the polar opposite of the first theory. A lot of times you’ll see people train chest-back, arms, shoulders-abs, then legs. I’ve even seen professional splits where they train quads with chest, hams with back, etc, etc.
Personally, I rotate my splits every couple of months. One of the keys in any body building type training is to constantly train differently. Whether that means different splits, different exercises, etc, etc…variation is very important…plus it keeps you from getting bored. I subscribe to Muscle and Fitness magazine mainly to get ideas for new exercises, splits, and training techniques.
If you are in your early 20’s, you can probably train each body part twice per week…more than likely, once per week is more than enough. You don’t get stronger and bigger when you are in the gym, you get stronger and bigger when you are away from the gym recovering from your workout. If you find yourself feeling tired or are still sore from your previous workout of the same body part, you are over-training…which will cause you to not get stronger or bigger. Personally, instead of doing each body part twice per week, I’d recommend doing cardio instead of the second workout to keep the fat off.
As far as diet goes, protein is important in building muscle and maintaining existing muscle. The amount of which is debatable. I personally take in about 1.25 grams per pound. Protein is made up of amino acids, certain amino acids cannot be utilized unless other amino acids are also available…hence you have protein quality - the more amino acids, the better the quality. The best quality is egg protein followed by whey. Whey tastes a lot better, is cheaper, and has a very good amino acid profile. Your body can only take in 35 or so grams of protein at a time…so don’t take 200 grams at once. Your body doesn’t like to turn protein into fat, but it will…it can also use it as an energy source if you neglect carbs. The best time to take it is right after your workout with some carbs. Your body is like a sponge after you workout…therefore it is a good time to take creatine too.
Supplements. Most give you expensive urine. The only thing you need is protein and I recommend creatine. The cheapest protein powder is powdered milk but it tastes bad so I recommend buy one of the 5 pound containers which will cost around $25. You should be able to find 90 days worth of creatine (5 grams per day) for about $15. You don’t need to load creatine (taking 20 grams/day for the first five days). Creatine will help you to lift heavier weights more times which means more micro-fiber muscle damage which means more repair which means more muscle growth. It will actually bring more water into your muscles giving them a fuller look and you’ll look more “cut.” In last month’s Muscle and Fitness there is an article explaining why muscles fail and when and what supplements can help off set the reasons why they are failing (such as lactic acid build up)…creatine is one of the supplements that offset muscle failure…take creatine for a month, then stop for week, then go back on it. don’t take too much as it can hurt your kidneys if you over do it.
An excellent way of building muscle is to pre-exhaust superset. For example, to train chest, you’d do your flies first because they are isolation excercise then upon failure, immediatley start with the bench press. The bench press brings in the triceps, front delts, etc to further fatigue the chest muscle. Your limitation is more the pain from the burn vs the muscle failure. The better the fatigue, the more the muscle will want to grow. you won’t necessarily get stronger doing this, but you will put on muscle. You can apply the same principal to other body parts as well. Another good technique is drop sets. For example, you’d do squats until failure, immediately take off half the weight and keep going…you can switch excercises doing drop sets too…for example, do a preacher curl until failure than take half the weight and do straight bar curls or dumbell curls.