Learning how to program an exercise routine is one of the most important things in a fitness journey. If you are able to create your own programs then, you will never need to pay for or, copy an exercise routine from anyone else. All of your routines will be specific for you and your goals. And your understanding of the human body will also increase significantly once you learn how your muscles interact with each other. In this article I will introduce the basics of programming and, how to start building your first program.
-Assessing Your Biomechanics-
This is an often-overlooked aspect of creating a program, but it can make a world of difference in your progress. To put it plainly, there are a few different ways our bodies lengths differ from one another, and these small differences will determine your exercise selection. These often vary exercise to exercise and, they are simple to discern if you know what you are looking for. Let’s go over a few tests to help determine our biomechanics.
-Bench Press Test-
This test will discern whether your arms are long enough to get adequate stimulus from pressing movements. Simply take a bar, broomstick, or any bar like object and lie on your back flat on the floor and lower the bar down as far as you can. If the bar lands about six inches above your chest, you have very long arms and, your triceps should receive a good amount of stimulus from pressing. If the bar lands closer than that to your chest, it would be a good idea to add in extra triceps work and, you should also know that your natural bench press ability is high. Having shorter arms inherently decreases the range of motion required for the lift, thus making it easier to complete. Although this does rob you of a lot of the triceps benefits.
-Squat Test-
Here we will test for long femurs. By squatting down and looking in a mirror, you should be able to see how much longer your femur, the upper thigh bone, is than your lower leg bone, the tibia. If it is so long that it is hard for you to sit comfortably at the bottom of a squat without falling backward, or you experience butt wink, your femurs are long. This means that your barbell back squat will be more akin to a hip hinge than someone with shorter femurs. Now this isn’t inherently a bad thing, all it means is that you have to modify your squat to allow for better knee flexion to be able to properly stimulate the quadriceps. To do this, simple elevate your heels. This can be done with plates, slant boards, or weightlifting shoes. These will compensate for your long femurs, artificially shortening them and allowing for more knee over toe flexion thusly biasing the quads.
So how do we use this information? We will be using it to determine our exercise selections day to day. For example, on a day where we would want to prioritize chest and triceps development, someone with longer arms would find sufficient stimulus from a main pressing movement like a bench press, and some minor triceps accessories like a French press. Whereas someone with shorter arms would need a press and some more accessories like a rope press down, and a French press to properly stimulate the entirety of the triceps. This will help prevent lagging body parts, as well as helping target specific body parts which will be integral to your training.
-Splits-
Common workout splits include, Push-Pull-Legs, Full-Body, Upper-Lower, and Bro splits/Body Part splits.
All of these splits come with their own pros and cons, so let’s start by breaking down what makes these splits some of the most popular.
-Push-Pull-Legs-
A Push-Pull-Legs split, or PPL as I’ll refer to it from now on, is probably the most common workout split for the average gym-goer. It separates the body into three sections, choosing to train one section each gym session. For example, you would perform a Push Day Monday, a Pull Day Tuesday, and a Leg Day Wednesday, Resting Thursday, then repeating.
So, what muscles do we train during these sessions? On a Push Day, you would normally train your “pushing” muscles. These are the muscles that you use during most horizontal and vertical presses. Including the Chest, Sholders, and Triceps. On a Pull Day, you would of course train the “pulling” muscles, often used in rows and curls. The Back, and Biceps. Finally, the dreaded Leg Day in which you will be training the legs. Including the Quads, Hamstrings, and Calves.
Now on the surface this seems to be a pretty good split and, for most novices it will be efficient in growing you to a certain point. There are some flaws in this split though once you start to dig deep, and the most obvious being that there is no day where you train your abs. Another flaw is that it’s not great for maximizing the growth of smaller muscle groups like the muscles of the upper back, forearms and the calves. Another aspect I, and thousands of other gym-goers, dislike is the Leg Day. Training the entirety of your legs in one session is a grueling task and, the horrors of it has led to a generation of chicken legged gym bros who think training legs has to be akin to a torture session. For these reasons I personally would not recommend a PPL split for anyone, as there are much better alternatives.
-Full Body-
Speaking of better alternatives, Full Body training is one of the best and my current split. This training style is so effective because, when programmed correctly, you won’t have any lagging muscle groups, your sessions will be varied and fun, and they will be time efficient leading to a big bang for your buck. Full Body training is somewhat difficult to program though, making it sometimes tough for novices to understand. Don’t worry, we’ll get into how to program your very own later.
This style of training lets you have a nearly endless number of different sessions where you can mix and match exercises that you like. Training this way is also more effective in increasing blood flow and heart rate as your body must pump blood all over the body to different muscle groups. It’s also a great template to incorporate supersets leading to further increased cardiovascular health and performance. This split is great for anyone, from complete novices to experienced gym-goers. It is amazing for building a solid foundation in novices that will make it easier to for them to pursue whatever fitness goals they have in the future, and for the experienced it is a great way to spice up training, round out the physique and, increase cardio.
This split can be performed at a number of different frequencies. Anywhere from 1-7 days a week depending on your personal goals and situation. I would personally recommend performing 3-4 Full Body high intensity sessions a week for the best results. Though you can easily increase and decrease this number to suit you. Keep in mind that fewer sessions will mean more exercises per session as to properly stimulate growth. This can lead to long and grueling sessions if performed less than about 4 times a week frequency. So, if you have the choice, I recommend higher frequency.
Now there are some flaws in this training style that I have to bring up. The major being that it can be very strenuous and, if not properly programmed, can lead to overtraining. The other is that it’s lack of specificity doesn’t lend it to a powerlifting centric program if that’s what your focus is on.
When programming a full body routine, your focus should not be on performing as many compound lifts as possible like you may imagine. Instead, you should pick 1-3 compound exercises (depending on overall frequency) and fill in the rest of your work with isolation or close to isolation exercises. For example, if you chose to do bench press on one day, you could also do a hip hinge like an RDL, and a rowing exercise of any kind, as these compound exercises all work different muscles. Then simply fill in the rest of your plan with isolation exercises that work muscles the compounds do not. This will keep you from overtraing certain muscle groups as well as keeping your joints healthy by not placing to much stress on them in a singular session.
To break this down even further we have to look at our training in a weekly context. To be able to efficiently target each muscle group we need to hit some of them more often than others. For example, a large muscle group like the chest can be trained only twice a week and experience great growth. While smaller muscles like those of your upper back (Traps, Rear Delts, Rhomboids, etc.) should be trained almost every session to see maximal growth. For a simple rule of thumb, I usually attempt to train larger muscles twice a week, and smaller muscles three times a week. Larger muscles include the Shoulders, Chest, Quads, and Hamstrings. Small muscles include the Neck, Arm muscles (Biceps, Triceps, Forearms), the Core (Abdominals, Obliques, and Lower Back), the hips muscles (Abductors, and Adductors), and the Calves.
Overall Full Body is one of the best training styles out there and, if you haven’t given it a chance yet, I greatly recommend trying it out.
-Upper-Lower-
An Upper-Lower split is simply a split in which you train your upper body exclusively on one day, then the lower body exclusively on another. One thing this split requires is a specific frequency. Most of the time you will need to perform this split on a 4 day a week frequency. This is because you most likely will be performing exercises that require you to break your body into 4 groups.
Here we run into our old friends, the Push, Pull, and Leg days. Except this time Your leg days will be split into Quad focused days, and Hamstring focused days. Now I do prefer this to a normal PPL split as, you don’t have the dreaded full leg day but, we run into the same kinds of issues.
Small muscle groups that require a lot of work to grow, are completely neglected on days where they are not the main focus. Leading to them lagging behind other muscle groups that don’t require the same volume.
For these reasons, I cannot recommend an Upper-Lower split in this traditional sense. Although there is a split very similar to this, that remedies the problems and, is actually one of the best splits out there that we will be talking about shortly.
-Bro/Body Parts-
Popularized by steroid users, body Part splits or Bro splits are another very common routine and, is often seen as more advanced than others but, in actuality, this split is complete garbage for natural lifters. As someone who use to perform a bro split, I can assure you that they are almost entirely a waste of time.
So, what is a Bro split? Put simply is it a split where you will attempt to isolate certain muscle groups to certain days. These days are often split like so. A Chest Day, Back day, Leg Day, and Arm Day. Now what makes this so bad? Well, if you’ve been paying attention so far, it should seem pretty obvious. There are no days for the abs and, we have a full leg day. Once again this will lead to lagging muscle groups and, a distain for training legs.
For steroid users, the extreme specificity combined with their enhanced recovery time, allows them to train almost every day with this kind of split. Hence why it is very popular among them. As natural lifters though, our bodies have to be better maintained and our rest is much more important. Making this split a no go.
-Gentleman’s Split-
You may have never heard of this split but, let me assure you it is one of the greatest splits for advanced lifters. So, what is a Gentleman’s split? Put plainly a gentleman’s split is an Upper-Lower split that is much more practical. To create the gentleman’s split, we take the template of an Upper-Lower split and simply add in everything that it’s missing. This means removing the exclusivity that is present in an Upper-Lower split.
So, instead of an Upper only day, we would have an Upper focused day. Meaning we would focus on training the upper body with compound movements, then we include other exercises that work the lower body and of course include isolation work for smaller muscle groups.
For example, on one of our upper focused days we could do Bench press and Dumbbell Rows, then add in some split squats for the legs then add in some isolation work. For a Lower focused day, we could do a barbell back squat, then add in some shoulder press along with our isolation work to finish it up. As you can tell the ways you can mix and match these sessions is almost endless. As long as you hit your targeted muscle groups for their recommended frequency, you will find success.
I do have to say that this split can be very taxing much like a Full body split, and in some cases even more so. It can also be very difficult to program and requires at least a 4-day frequency if not more. Which is why I recommend this program more for the advanced. If this split works for you though, it can be one of if not the best split.
Hopefully you are able to understand the concept of the Gentleman’s split, but this will be far from the last time you hear about it from me. In my next article I will be discussing supersets and, how to incorporate them into different workout splits including the Gentleman’s split.
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-Programming-
Now that we understand the concept of workout splits and biomechanics, we can begin learning how to program with them. So first of all, what do I mean by programming? Programming is the act of putting together exercises within a split that will allow you to grow either bigger, stronger, or a mix of both. To do this we need to program ways to progressively overload. So how do we do this? Well to know how we first need to understand the different ways muscles can adapt.
-Hypertrophy-
The most commonly sought after adaption to weightlifting, hypertrophy is simply the process of growing bigger muscles. Hypertrophy is caused by lifting with sub-maximal loads for a maximal number of repetitions within the currently understood hypertrophy range which is 5-30 reps. Any lower or higher will be insufficient stimulus and are only useful in non-hypertrophy related adaptations such as strength and rehab. Now this is a large range, so how do we know how many reps to do for each exercise? Well for each person the number may differ slightly but, in general smaller muscle groups usually are able to withstand and respond quite well to very high reptations (15-30) and larger muscle groups prefer slightly lower ranges (5-15). The only way to really find your perfect rep range for each exercise is to go test them for yourself. Some cues used commonly are the burn, a sense of tension, and a pump all in the target muscle. If all of these things are present and you are able to safely push close to or fully to failure, you know you have found your range for that exercise and that the hypertrophy stimulus is fantastic.
-Strength-
Another popular adaptation, strength work is just as important as hypertrophic. Strength is your ability to lift maximal loads and is important for increasing the effectiveness of your other muscular adaptations by increasing overall tonnage. Tonnage being the total amount of weight you lifted in a single session and, a concept I will cover in more detail in later articles. To increase strength, we simply need to lift as heavy as possible for as little reps as possible to stimulate adaptation. A set focused on strength would look something like this: 4-6 sets of 2-6 reps, warming up with lighter weights, then moving up in weight until our top set which should be close to, if not a personal record. Then potentially performing back off sets (Sets with lighter weights) as you see fit.
-Pre/Rehab Work-
Prehab and/or Rehab work is usually completely overlooked by most but, is very important in keeping your joints, tendons and ligaments healthy. Work like this is usually done with certain exercises that put tension on certain joints, tendons, and ligaments. You will perform these exercises with extremely high repetitions (30+) attempting to force as much blood into these areas as possible, to promote as much healing and strengthening as possible.
-Programming Continued-
Now that we understand how our muscles adapt to exercise. All that’s left is to select our exercises and figure out our progression scheme.
-Exercise Selection-
Exercise Selection is probably the most important part of any program. It’s integral to select exercises that are high value and fun. If you don’t enjoy your exercise, you won’t continue to do it. So even if some exercises aren’t ‘optimal” that doesn’t mean you should throw them out if you really enjoy them. High value exercises are time tested and provide a high stimulus to fatigue ratio. To make this clearer, we will be ranking exercises into three tiers. These tiers are not meant to signify the effectiveness of an exercise. They are simply tiered to represent their stimulus to fatigue ratios. They are also not universally in the same tiers; some people may place certain exercises in higher or lower tiers than I have and, my placement might not be in line with your own. For me, a T1 exercise would be compound movements that would provide high stimulus but are also highly fatiguing. A T2 exercise would be a movement that has a great stimulus, with low-moderate fatigue. Finally, a T3 exercise would be an exercise that has good stimulus and is not very fatiguing. These exercises are all valuable in their own rights and, will be used in tandem with each other to provide fantastic results.
While I can’t go through every exercise and what tier they are in here, I will show you how to discern them for yourself. The main way you can discern these tiers from each other is by noting how many muscles they use. A T1 exercise will work two-three or more muscle groups at once. These are exercises like the big three (Squat, Bench, Deadlift). You will usually only do a single T1 exercise per session if at all, as they are extremely fatiguing and are often strength oriented which means they can be left out of a hypertrophy focused program. A T2 exercise will work usually two muscle groups at once or are intense isolation and, are often variations of the big three. Such as Stiff Leg or Romanian Deadlifts, Front Squats, Larsen Press, Overhead Press, and Barbell Rows. You will usually perform one to three of these per session depending on if you are also performing a T1 exercise that day. T3 are isolation exercises, working only a single muscle. Such as Bicep Curls, Triceps Pushdowns, Calf Raises, Sit Ups, etc. These will usually be done two to three times a session as they are not as fatiguing.
If you are interested is finding more exercises and seeing how I tier them, I will be creating another article containing this info soon, so stay tuned.
-Progression Systems-
Progression Systems are another completely overlooked aspect of programming. If you were to ask the common gym bro what progression system they are using, they’d probably look at you bewildered completely unaware of one of the easiest ways to progressively overload. There are a few different progression systems but, here I’ll go over two time tested and easy to implement systems.
-Double Progression-
Double Progression is a simply a progression system that sees you progressing in weight through mastery of reps. For example, after warming up with lighter weights, you would perform an exercise for three sets with a rep range of 10-15 at 50lbs. If you were able to complete all three sets getting the max reps on each at that 50lbs with good form, the next session you would add 5lbs or less and work until you master that weight. This is an extremely simple system, but that is the beauty of it. It uses hard numbers that can be easily tracked and doesn’t require too much brain power to implement. Making this an extremely effective progression system.
-Dynamic Double Progression-
Dynamic Double Progression is a little more advanced of a system but, I will attempt to make it as clear as possible to understand. So, this system is based off of your RPE or rate of perceived exertion. Basically, just how hard your sets feel. Making this a difficult system to implement for novice lifters who don’t understand how much work they can really do yet. For this system, you should be using an RPE of about 8 or 9. Meaning your sets should be very difficult and only one or two reps away from failure. Our goal is to have each set match that RPE. So, for example if you did an exercise for 3 sets and 8-10 reps and you got 9 reps on your first set with 100lbs, you would then remain at 100lbs for your second set since you didn’t hit the bottom of the rep range. Now if you perform this second set and get only 8 reps, you will then drop the weight by ~5lbs and perform your third set hoping to reach 8 or 9 reps while still at an RPE of 8 or 9. So now let’s move forward and say that the next time you did this exercise you were able to compete your first sets max reps with that 100lbs, you got 9 on the second set and then 8 on the third. Now if this was a regular double progression you would simply stick with this weight until you got all 10 on each set but, with the dynamic double progression you would actually move up in weight your next session. Adding 5lbs to your first set, you perform it and only get 8 reps. Since that is the bottom of our rep range, we would then lower the weight back down and perform our final two sets with that weight. As you can see, this system is much more difficult to use but, the results are undeniable. Many elite weightlifters use this system to bust though plateaus and, if you are able to understand it and implement it correctly you could do the same.
-Putting it all Together-
We have made it to the end my friends, and now armed with this knowledge you are ready to create your own first program! Begin by assessing your goals, are you focused on gaining strength, size, or a mix of both? This will determine some of your exercise selection. With strength goals you will use lots of T1 exercises with lower rep ranges and higher weight and some T2 and T3 exercises to round out our physique. For size we will focus on T2 and T3 exercises with maybe one or two T1s with higher reps and lower weight. Next is our biomechanics, to know whether you need to implement extra arm work/leg work. Then we will pick the split that works best for us. Now we create our lifts. Making sure to work each muscle group at least twice a week, and up to three times a week for smaller muscle groups. We then select a progression system and get to work! Run your program for four-eight weeks and monitor your progress closely. You should see steady gains as long as you are working hard, and that’s it!
After finishing this program, create another! Take what you liked about your last one and keep it, cut what you disliked, re-assess your goals, and try new exercises progression systems, or splits. Programing is a beautiful thing, and mastery over it will yield unbelievable results. Learn, grow and put in the hours. Just taking the time to read and understand this article has put you ahead of %90 of the population, so spread the knowledge! The weightlifting community needs you! Make your dreams and goals a reality and destroy your limits, it’s time to get out there and put in the work!
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