How to Construct a Workout Plan
What is your goal?
As with anything, your goal should be the driving factor that guides you to move forward. When it comes to exercise, there are a few potential motives including general health/longevity, improved body composition, or even as a method to reduce stress or increase productivity. There is typically a lot of overlap from one goal to another, but sometimes pursuing one can be detrimental towards achieving another.
For example, if building muscle and/or losing fat is your primary goal, and you take it to the extreme, you can actually worsen your health and lifespan. Depriving your body of calories to reach and sustain a low body fat percentage can provide deteriorating stress to your body by challenging its natural limitations.
If your primary goal is to improve general health and longevity, a multifaceted exercise program consisting of a balance of strength training, cardiovascular training, and mobility/flexibility training would be most beneficial. This way, you can reap the benefits that each type of exercise has to offer without focusing all of your efforts on one discipline.
As a side effect of improved overall health, there is likely a lot of carryover if you wish to optimize your productivity while reducing stress. Since exercise has many cognitive boosting effects, daily exercise can be extremely beneficial to balance your workload. Exercising in the morning would probably be ideal for most people who wish to be as productive as possible throughout the typical 9-to-5 work day because exercising excites your central nervous system, thus “waking you up” faster in the morning to jump start productivity.
For most people, at least in the beginning, improved body composition is their main goal for working out. Strength training should be the foundation of an exercise plan for anyone seeking this goal, with cardiovascular or mobility training as minor (or even optional) components. Obviously, resistance training is necessary if you want to maximize muscle growth. However, even if your goal is fat-loss, the metabolic effects of strength training make it the ideal type of exercise for sustained progress. Cardiovascular training actually has the opposite effects, and can slow your metabolism, making sustained fat-loss increasingly difficult. In this article, I’m going to focus on this primary goal, but the same principles can be applied and adjusted depending on the needs of the individual.
The Foundational Movement Patterns
When constructing any strength training plan, you’ll want to ensure that you are covering all your bases, and challenging all of the major muscle groups in your body. The main muscle groups that come to mind are the chest, shoulders (deltoids), back, traps, biceps, triceps, forearms, abs, quads, glutes, hamstrings, and calves. You can also break down those main muscle groups if you want to dive into the details, but these are a good place to start.
Rather than initially thinking of specific exercises that hit these main muscle groups, it makes more sense to think of exercise-based movements that challenge your body in its entirety. The main four movements that hit all your major muscle groups are the “push”, “pull”, “hip-hinge”, and “squat”.
Starting with push, this is when you push the weight away from your body, which stimulates the muscles in front of your body (think chest, shoulders, and triceps). This movement pattern can be broken down further into the different planes, vertical (more shoulder dominant) and horizontal (more chest dominant). Some common examples of exercises that fall under this category are the bench press, dips, and shoulder press.
Next up is the other upper-body dominant movement, the pull. This is where you pull the weight towards your body, working your back, biceps, traps, and rear deltoids. As with the push, the pull can also be broken down into the horizontal and vertical planes. Exercises in the vertical plane will put a larger emphasis on your lats (think back width) and exercises in the horizontal plane will put a larger emphasis on your rhomboids (think back thickness). Some of these common exercises are rows, pull ups/chin ups, and pull downs.
The hip-hinge is a lower-body dominant movement where you sit back and drive your hips forward. It is a commonly neglected movement in a lot of exercise programs because the movement can feel kind of foreign at first, and may require additional practice to become comfortable with it. The exercises in this movement pattern primarily stimulate the muscles on your posterior chain (hamstrings, glutes, lower back), and often work your upper back muscles, core, and even calves. Some common exercises for the hip-hinge are the deadlift, hip thrust/glute bridge, or back extensions.
The last main movement pattern is the squat. This lower-body dominant movement is basic to learn, but extremely difficult to master! The simple act of squatting down mainly challenges your quads, but also your glutes and hamstrings to a lesser extent. If you do these exercises with a load on your back or in your hands (like in the traditional barbell or goblet squat), you also challenge your core to stabilize the weight, which can really turn it into a full body exercise. The common examples here are the weighted squat, split squat/lunge, hack squats (similar to a deadlift, but the weight is behind you), and the leg press.
If you put the pieces together, including a push, pull, hip-hinge and a squat into your program will challenge every muscle in your body! Incorporating each of these movements into your program, preferably a few times per week, is essential towards developing a balanced body composition.
Exercise Selection
In order to optimize your time spent in the gym, you’ll want to do the exercises that give you the most “bang for your buck”. This is where compound vs. isolation exercises come into play.
All of the mentioned exercises above that were listed as foundational movement patterns can be considered compound or multi-joint exercises. This means that in order to perform these exercises, more than one joint in your body is required to move to complete the range of motion of the exercise. This forces multiple muscle groups to activate at once to complete the exercise. If you think of the squat for example, both your hip joint and your knee joint have to bend for you to perform the exercise. The bench press would require your shoulder joint and your elbow joint to mobilize. This causes the muscles connected to each joint to contract to move through the motion of the squat.
Isolation, or single-joint exercises, are where you isolate a single muscle group, forcing it to do all (or at least most) of the work to move the weight from point A to point B. The concentration curl for your biceps is a classic example of an isolation exercise because you can stabilize the elbow joint, and solely focus on the contraction of the bicep (which is why you shouldn’t do cheat reps!).
When constructing a workout plan, the majority of the exercises that you select should be compound exercises because they offer the most benefits compared to isolation exercises. Compound exercises allow you to move the most weight, which therefore challenges your muscles to a greater extent. They also hit a lot more muscles at once, so can do the most work and maximize your time in the gym. They should typically be done before the isolation exercises in a routine, so that you can perform them when you are well-rested and at peak performance.
However, the overall demand (calorically, neurologically, and physiologically) to perform compound exercises is much greater than for isolation exercises, which is why you can’t ONLY do compound exercises. Your body can only handle so much stress, so isolation exercises are an effective way to continue to challenge targeted muscles without putting an excessive demand on your body.
Isolation exercises are also a great tool to develop a mind-muscle connection to actually “feel” the muscle working during an exercise. For example, if your goal is to build your glutes, the Romanian deadlift can be an awesome exercise. However, for many people it can be difficult to feel the glutes actively working during the movement. What you can do to improve the neurological connection, and actually feel your glutes working during the compound exercise, is to perform an isolation exercise for the glutes at low intensity immediately beforehand to active the muscle. Then, when you go into the compound movement, you can concentrate on the contraction of that specific muscle, and challenge it more effectively.
Creating Your “Split”
Now that we have established what kinds of exercises to include in your strength training routine, we need to decide how best to split them up throughout the weekly routine. A common way of doing this is by creating a “body-part split”, which is having a dedicated day for each body part (ex. Leg day, back day, arm day, etc.). If your goal is to build muscle or lose fat (and you don’t take steroids), this is NOT the most effective way of splitting up your exercises.
For natural weight lifters, when you train a muscle group, you can only stimulate muscle growth for up to ~48 hours before muscle protein synthesis drops off significantly. If you do a body part split, and only work out a muscle group once per week, you’re only simulating muscle growth for each muscle for only a couple days total out of the whole week! Spreading out the body-part specific exercises throughout the week and increasing the frequency at which you train each muscle can keep muscle protein synthesis elevated more continuously. Training multiple muscle groups per session is the best way to optimize your routine if you want to build muscle most effectively.
Depending on the number of days per week that you want to spend in the gym, you can split up your muscles-worked in a few ways. The objective is to stimulate each muscle group in multiple sessions throughout the week. The following methods are some common examples:
If you want to dedicate 6 days/week, you can perform a push/pull/legs split that cycles through the muscles for each foundational movement pattern twice per week.
If you want to spend 4 sessions in the gym per week, an upper body/lower body split or a push/pull split can be great options. For the upper/lower split, you would perform a few upper body movements on one day and then a few lower body movements on a consecutive day. Then you would take a day off, repeat the upper and lower days, and then take 2 days off before starting over again. For the push/pull split, you would follow the same daily schedule as the upper/lower split, but instead have one day that incorporates squat and push movements, and the other day with hip-hinge and pull movements.
3 days/week can be an effective alternative as well, and this is how I personally break down my training. I perform 3 full-body sessions per week, where each session utilizes an exercise from each of the 4 mentioned foundational movement patterns.
Lastly, 2 days/week may not be optimal for muscle growth, but it can still be effective. If your time is truly limited, performing 2 full-body sessions per week is certainly better than nothing, and you can definitely make progress!
Sustained Progress
Once you have established how you want to breakdown your routine, you’re ready to get started! Simply pick a few compound exercises from each movement pattern and spread them out throughout the week. Then you can fill in the gaps with a couple isolation exercises per session as you see fit.
Going into a session of training vs. working out demands a different mindset. The importance of each session really comes into play when your goal is to make progress. If you want to sustainably re-composition your body by continuing to build muscle or lose fat, you’ll need to continually make progress in the gym! Thinking of each session in the gym as a “training session” rather than a “workout” is the mentality that you’ll need for sustainable progress. Simply beating yourself down by performing lots of randomized exercises to burn calories and annihilate your muscles can only lead to results in the short-term. Long-term progress requires intelligently planned gradual increments over time, which is called progressive overload!
In order to keep the progress coming in the gym, there are few tricks that you can implement to create new adaptations for your body so it doesn’t’ “get used to” the same training stimulus. After adding more weight and reps to your exercises begins to stall, here are some things that you can do to continue to progress:
Mix up your rep ranges (periodize your training) – there are plenty of rep ranges that all build muscle. Including exercises in the 4-6 rep range (this range is best for compound exercises), 6-8 rep range, 8-12 rep range, 12-15 rep range, and even 15+ can all be beneficial for muscle growth***. Whatever rep range you’re not doing is probably the most effective for you to do right now!
Manipulate your rest periods – This builds off of previous tip, but it is another way to change the stimulus. You can vary your rest periods between sets of the same exercise from 45 seconds to 3 minutes. The lower end of the spectrum is better for muscular endurance and the higher end is best for muscular strength. Anywhere in between is fine for hypertrophy (muscle growth).
Adjust your rep tempo – You can adjust the rate at which you raise or lower the weight. Once you’ve become proficient at the technique of an exercise, it’s typically most advantageous to raise the weight ( this portion of the rep is called the concentric) at a fast pace or even “explosively”, and then to lower the weight (this portion of the rep is called the eccentric) slow and controlled. This method allows you to lift more weight, but also increases the length of time your muscles are under tension, which is important for muscle growth. However, changing things up can be good too!
Vary your exercise selection – Swapping one exercise for a similar variation in the same movement pattern is another trick to add to your arsenal. This can be as simple as hitting the muscle from a different angle (ex. Incline bench press vs. flat bench press), swapping from a barbell to dumbbells, going from a bilateral exercise to a unilateral exercise (ex. two arm row to a one arm row), or changing the exercise all together (ex. row to a chin up). Switching up your exercises too often can be detrimental though! There is usually a slight learning curve when re-acclimating to a different exercise, so it’s best to stick with one for a few weeks before mixing it up. Also, measuring your progress is important, and if you switch it up all the time, it’s difficult to keep track of your increments!
***When your goal is fat loss, it is even more important to lift heavy! Performing exercises at high-intensity in the lower rep ranges helps preserve muscular strength and tells your body that it NEEDs to hold onto the muscle. Doing lots of high repetition sets to “feel the burn”, doesn’t actually burn more fat!
Remember, if you’re already making continuous progress on your exercises, there’s no need to tinker! Only switch things up if you’re beginning to reach a plateau.
Another variable to take into account that could be stalling your ability to build muscle isn’t a factor that you can control in the gym, but in the kitchen! Check out my article on mini-bulks and cuts if you want to learn how to periodize your nutrition to optimize muscle gain and fat-loss in the long-term.
A Practical Example
I just threw a lot of information at you, and probably made things more complicated than they need to be! The key factors that you really need to take into account are the following:
- Strength training should be the backbone of your exercise program if your goal is muscle growth or fat loss
- Train the foundational movements (push, pull, hip-hinge, and squat) frequently throughout the week
- The bulk of your exercises should be compound exercises, supplementing with isolation exercises
- Progressively overload your muscles by making gradual increments over time for sustained progress!
Here is a basic sample full-body routine that applies these principles:
Monday
Movement Pattern | Exercise | # of Sets | # of Reps | Rest Period (sec) |
Squat | Barbell Squat | 3 | 6-8 | 120-180 |
Hip-hinge | Barbell Romanian Deadlift | 3 | 8-10 | 120 |
Push | Dumbbell Bench Press | 3 | 10-12 | 90 |
Pull | 1 Arm Dumbbell Row | 3 | 10-12 | 90 |
Isolation | Cable Triceps Pushdown | 3 | 12-15 | 60 |
Wednesday
Movement Pattern | Exercise | # of Sets | # of Reps | Rest Period (sec) |
Push | Barbell Bench Press | 3 | 6-8 | 120-180 |
Pull | Barbell Row | 3 | 8-10 | 120 |
Hip-hinge | Weighted Back Extension | 3 | 10-12 | 90 |
Squat | Dumbbell Lunge | 3 | 10-12 | 90 |
Isolation | Weighted Crunches | 3 | 12-15 | 60 |
Friday
Movement Pattern | Exercise | # of Sets | # of Reps | Rest Period (sec) |
Hip-hinge | Deadlift | 3 | 6-8 | 120-180 |
Squat | Dumbbell Goblet Squat | 3 | 8-10 | 120 |
Push | Dumbbell Shoulder Press | 3 | 10-12 | 90 |
Pull | Pull Ups | 3 | 10-12 | 90 |
Isolation | Dumbbell Lateral Raises | 3 | 12-15 | 60 |
Here are few more notes and tips when building a routine:
-Try to put the most physically and neurologically demanding exercises first in your routine when your most focused and the least fatigued. This can help optimize overall performance throughout your workout and reduce the risk of injury.
-Try to mix up the movement pattern for the first exercise of the day, when you’re at your freshest. This helps balance the exercises that you will perform best at for that day.
-Feel free to alternate exercises between sets to save time (often called supersets). Exercises that work opposing muscle groups work best. For example, pair your push and pull movements together and pair your hip-hinge and squat movements together.
-If you think you have any weaknesses or lagging muscle groups, shift you focus towards them! Adding more isolation exercises to add more workout volume (overall weight, sets, and reps lifted) can help bring them up to speed.
-You don’t need to do an exercise from each foundational pattern per workout, but picking a few should help cover most, if not all, of your bases!
-You can also customize the number of sets and reps as you see fit. It’s generally a good idea to start on the lower end, and then increase workout volume (reps, sets) as needed. Your goal is to stimulate muscle growth, not annihilate your muscles. Excessive soreness doesn’t mean more growth!
Good luck, and happy lifting!
References
Phillips SM (May 2014). “A brief review of critical processes in exercise-induced muscular hypertrophy”. Sports Med. 44 Suppl 1: S71–S77.