Tips For Creating A Muscle Building Workout
Sometimes we know what our goals are, but we don’t always know how to get there. There can be many different paths to choose from, some being more efficient than others. When it comes to choosing a workout plan that best fits our goals as an individual, we must also keep in mind the importance of proper nutrition. The “80/20” or whatever ratio you’ve been taught is still key when it comes to our fitness goals whether it be to build or to lose.
It’s difficult to show how to structure a workout without having a specific goal for it to work towards, so for this Sunday I chose to go through muscle building.. keeping in mind eating enough protein and calories in general is important. You can’t build muscle without it!
I’ll show a basic framework of what a basic muscle building workout would look like, also keeping in mind everyones goals and what works for their bodies are different so your muscle building workout may still look different than this, this is just a framework I have created that tends to be successful.
One thing that tends to work no matter what workout is starting with your compound lift. Mind you there are methods that do the opposite and can have benefits but for the most part this is what works best. Priming the muscles that are required for this lift specifically and warming up related to that movement will help, but the cardio most definitely will be saved until afterwards. We want our muscles ready to be exerted but we don’t want them tired, hence warming up the right muscles but not depleting them.
When we are focusing on muscle building single side training is important as we talked about last week for creating balance within the body and relieving any asymmetry. Focusing on one side at a time makes us use more core stability and when we get to our second and third exercise depending on what workout we are doing we want to do different muscle groups, hence the push and pull isolation. This can also just be two different muscles instead of the push and pull, again just a framework I’ve found gives results.
Followed by our push and pull we also want to make sure we do some type of lateral movement, now we have made sure we have worked the body in all planes of motion. Using the push pull and lateral idea usually ensures we do an exercise for each muscle group automatically, again depending on what workout exactly we are doing.
After that we always want to isolate the core at least once, this can be paired with another exercise for isolation or a different core exercise, still considering our plains of motion and different types of movements. If we do do 2 core exercises we want to pick movements that will cover it as a whole, instead of putting crunches and leg raises together, try pairing the plank and Russian twist to fully work the central abdominal muscles as well as the obliques, glutes and lower back.
Of course don’t forget to stretch! I didn’t add anything specific here because we don’t always have a lot of time for this portion but picking at least 1 or 2 for the areas worked will help the muscles feel less tight and keep from becoming so.
Here are an example of a “leg day” and a full upper body workout based on this structuring:
A reminder that these are just examples! I’m not recommending these to anyone and there are TONS of different combinations that will be better from person to person… one of the fun things about exercising and why I love being a Personal Trainer is just putting different workouts together for different bodies. Its kind of fun!
Hope that helps!
Happy exercising,
Robyn