Designing a muscle building program is a lot easier than people make it out to be. There are so many combinations of routines that you can choose with different exercises and rep and set ranges. The first thing you need to do is asses your goals. Are you training for size, strength, power or all?
The answer to the question is going to give you your first criteria for your program and that is the set and rep range. Generally speaking you can classify power, strength and size into three different rep range categories. One to five reps for power, five to eight for strength and then eight to twelve for size.
Now don’t take this as set in stone! This is a rule of thumb and there can be exceptions to these. However for the most part you won’t go too far wrong by using these numbers as a guide. The best way to build muscle is to use the eight to twelve rep range generally speaking.
If you were goals were strength size and power then you would need to incorporate all of these rep ranges into your routine. To do this you could have separate weeks for each one. Week one could be your power week, week two could be your strength and obviously week three could be your size week. Dependent upon which of these was your main priority you can have two weeks for size and one for strength.
As you can see there are already a lot of combinations to choose from! Don’t fret though, make your mind up on one and track your progress to see how it goes.
Next you are going to need to decide on exercise selection. Go over to exrx.net and pick some exercises out from each body part section. Your aim here is to ensure that you are training your entire body equally. Don’t put too much emphasis on just one body part just because you want a big set of guns! Not only does it not work this way, but it can also lead to an unbalanced and injury prone physique.
Once you’re happen with an exercise selection decide upon your split. Do you want to work each body part on its separate day or work them all together with less volume for each? Both can be very effective but generally I advise people to separate their exercises into push pull and leg categories. By doing this you are minimizing any risk of overtraining and also keeping your body movements separately which I have found to be optimal for building muscle.
So far we have our exercise selection, our rep ranges and our body part splits. What’s next? Volume. This is where you need to decide how many sets you want to do for each exercise. Again, make sure your balancing your routine so that you’re not doing more volume for one muscle group. As a rule of thumb I would aim for at least twelve sets per workout day and no more than twenty.
After you have decided all this you should have the foundations of a solid workout routine. My advice now is to track your progress and see what works best for you. By doing this you can see how well your body responds to different training approaches.
Good luck with your training!
