Designing a Bodybuilding Program

At first when you start training you will probably do best to start with just a simple full body routine, hitting each body part with just one or two exercises. This is especially true if you are slightly overweight or out of shape as it will ease your body into the workout gently. However at this point there are still certain things you need to consider when designing your training program. For example – how many resting days are you going to take, and how are you going to space them? At this point you won’t need too many and can probably make do with having around two to three days off a week. Where possible you should avoid chunking these together so that you never have two consecutive ‘off’ days (though some people like to book the weekend as their off day). Another thing to consider is your own personal life and commitments and where you can fit your training around that. Use your off days sensibly then to ensure that you’re working out on the days where you will have excess time and energy.

Split Programmers

However this period of going gently using full body routines shouldn’t last more than a couple of months (some people would advise skipping it all together, but a split shift tends to have too many periods of inactivity for the muscles of a beginner to stimulate growth). Once you do start having to spend an hour to get each muscle group hurting its time then to use what’s called a ‘split routine’ or ‘split program' and this is where a whole lot of other problems come in to make designing the program a little more tricky.

Basically, you need to train until every muscle group is hurting a lot to have any chance of growth, and after a while even by using the tricks above to make your workouts more intense, you won’t be able to do this in a full body session. At this point you need to do several exercises for just one muscle group in order to fully train it and that means you’re going to need to spend about an hour just on your biceps and just on your pecs. Fortunately once you’re working out for this long each time you’ll have reached the point where you also need more rest – without about a week being normal.

A split program then features just one or two muscle groups on a day and doesn’t train that muscle group again directly until the same day next week. One day then you might train your pecs and do press ups, bench press, pec flies, pullovers and clapping press ups (with drop sets and forced reps on every set) and then the next day you might do biceps and do bicep curls.

One thing you need to bear in mind is that you will always be using some of your other muscles to a degree. For example, you might be on your lats day, but most lats exercises involve pulling either up or down and so they’re going to effect your biceps too. In other words you can’t really train lats without training biceps. This is fine but it means that you should try to ensure your lat day isn’t straight after your bicep day. Similarly when combining body parts to work out on a single day you should try to use those that compliment each other – such as biceps and lats – so that you don’t limit your options for what you can do next week and so that you can hit both with just one exercise. To help group muscle groups together and avoid doing similar muscle groups consecutively you can observe what’s called ‘push-pull’ which describes half of the muscle groups as being involved in pushing exercises (pecs, triceps, lats etc) such as the bench press, and half being involved in exercises where you pull (lats, biceps etc) such as the pull up and row.

At the same time you will want to include complete rest days for the sake of your own sanity and for your own spare time, and you will also want to again arrange your exercise routine around your daily commitments. There are hundreds of examples of split routines that can be found online and elsewhere, but it’s important to make sure that the one you use is tailored to your body type, your strengths and weaknesses and your weekly schedule.