Since I'm in charge of my own workout programming and design, I've gotten asked a lot of questions of how I do this. What workouts to do, how to progress, etc. Now, you guys know me by now hehe so of course the first thing I'm going to tell you is:
DO YOUR RESEARCH.
But really, I've been lifting weights for almost 2 years now and between the stalking on Instagram (y'all know you do it too), following blogs, looking up lifting sites/forums, research articles and studies, watching videos etc I have learned A LOT. Lifting is my passion, hobby, interest whatever you want to call it but my point is I actively pursue more information about it. I love learning new things about lifting and strive to always continue my education.
It takes a lot of time to learn the ropes but my advice is just continue researching more about it, reaching out to people in the fitness industry, and trying things out for yourself.
I already know I'll get asked this question so I'll go ahead and share some of my favorite fitness people that I learn from: Layne Norton, Bret Contreras, Strong Lifts, Sohee Lee, Emily Duncan, Erin Dimond, and Katiesfitscript are some of my favorites. They post great content including exercise ideas, form tips, and nutrition.
My second piece of advice when designing your workout is very straightforward: know your goals. A lot of people might think well you go to the gym and start lifting and that's how you'll get stronger, lose weight etc. Well, they're not drastically off the mark but I beg to differ a little bit because there's a difference between training hard and training smart. Also, different styles of lifting like rep schemes, sets, volume, intensity and rest intervals will get you different results. So today I'm going to give a brief outline of what that looks like.
There are essentially 3 categories that a lift can fall into: hypertrophy, strength, and endurance. Hypertrophy sounds like a big fancy word but it just means muscle growth. A lot of the time (not always) but a majority of people who are lifting weights in order to lose weight or "tone" (I hate that word haha!), they are doing hypertrophy lifts. When you think of the traditional bodybuilding-type lifts like 4x8 that is training for hypertrophy. Supersets are also common for hypertrophy lifts.
So if you want muscle growth (hypertrophy) then you want to do a moderate number of sets like 3-5 and stick with the 6-12 range for reps with about 45-60 seconds for rest. Or just go ahead and do supersets instead of doing rest intervals.
Strength is usually what I end up training a lot because personally that's how I like to train. Again, I don't have any specific goals....yet hehe but I have some ideas in the works so strength is my main focus right now. I'm pretty happy with all the muscle I've built over the past two years so I'm working on strength.
Strength is lower reps with higher sets than hypertrophy. I usually do about 5-8 sets of anywhere from 1-5 reps depending on what percentage of my max that I'm using. The higher the weight, the lower the reps. Usually, the number of sets and reps are inversely related in order to control for volume. It honestly just depends on how much I need to lift that day and the way I break down my reps. What I usually do is have a set volume of weight that I need to move that day like say for deadlifts so I'll know that I need to do x amount of total weight so I'll break that down into x amount of sets with x reps per set.
I track my total volume for each workout for each week so that I can make comparisons from week to week. Ideally, you want your volume to increase each week because that means you're gaining strength and able to move more weight each workout. It can also show me my weaker lifts, and where I need to improve most. Obviously I'm not going to compare my lifting volume for deadlifts to bench press because I can work with thousands of pounds (total) during a deadlift workout than benching.
Calculating volume is super simple! The equation is this: # sets x #reps x #weight used = volume. Here's an example from my deadlifts:
5x5 @ 165lbs
5 x 5 x 165= 4,125
Keeping track of volume enables me to compare what sets and reps I used the week before and how much I should bump up each week. I also know that when I can get to a certain volume then it's time to try for a PR. I don't have this down to an exact science yet but I'm fairly familiar with my own personal window of strength. For example, once I got to being able to do 155 for 5 sets of 5 reps, I was fairly certain that I could get over 200lbs for my 1 RM (rep max). I compared my volume, strength gains, and rep schemes from previous weeks in order to determine what max I should try for. It's all about training smart for your goals and planning out the science. I know that I'm such a huge nerd but this is honestly so fun for me! I love playing around with my own programming and learning more about my body.
The third category a lift can fall into is endurance. It basically means what it sounds like: increasing your muscle's endurance (their ability to produce force over longer periods of time). Just like with endurance running, you have to lift longer in order to gain endurance. I don't mean longer as in you don't gain endurance unless you've been lifting for a long time but the number of reps per set. Endurance is usually a rep scheme of 12-20 with a moderate number of sets like 1-3. Again, you have to make sure you control for volume so you don't want to do 8 sets of 20 because that might result in overtraining. Intensity and volume should always be inversely related.
Now, you do not have to simply pick one of these options and just stick with it because you think that you can't do both strength and hypertrophy lifts in one week. Heck, I do them in the same workout haha! I usually focus on 1 strength lift (usually squats, deadlifts, bench, cleans, hip thrusts) per workout and then build my accessory work around it. My accessory work is usually hypertrophy, endurance-based, or even just with my bodyweight. Since my strength-based lifts are higher in intensity I steadily decrease the intensity of my workout as I get to the end. I always do my heaviest lift first so that I have the most energy for it, and then I do my accessory work so that by the time I get to my last set of exercises it's usually with either light weight or my bodyweight.
An example is one of my lower body days (quad focus):
5x5 front squats
5x12, 10, 8, 6, 2 leg press (warm-up set of 15 reps)
4x8 smith machine lunges
3x7-7-7-7 leg extensions (7 regular reps, 7 reps w/ iso pause, 7 half reps at the bottom, 7 half reps at the top)
3x20 jumping leg press (very light weight 20-30lbs)
circuit (3x): 20 box jumps, 20 pulsing goblet squats, 20 walking lunges, 20 step-ups
As you can see I start out with my heavier sets first and then work my way down with moderate hypertrophy work until I get to the circuit at the end where I use maybe a 10 lb plate max. I design most of my workouts this way and it's what works for me! I find that it allows me to keep strength high throughout the workout and that allows me to keep good form.
I also want to point out that lifting cannot be entirely contained in neat little boxes. What I mean by that is if you're concerned that strength lifts won't help you build muscle or that hypertrophy lifts won't help you get stronger then that's not the case. You can in fact get stronger each week doing hypertrophy lifts because our bodies are designed to adapt to the stress we place on them (resistance lifting is a form of stress but can be a good form). Meaning, if you lift a certain amount each week then your body will learn to recruit more muscle fibers in order to increase its ability to adapt to the weight you are lifting. The same can be said for strength and muscle growth. Your muscles can still grow while doing strength-based lifts but it's simply that it might not occur as quickly as if you were to focus on hypertrophy lifts. There's no magic number of reps or sets that anyone can figure out to tell you this is how you'll definitely grow muscles, gain strength, etc. Like everything else with our bodies, it's all trial and error and extremely variable upon the individual.
My biggest piece of advice is this: do what you love. I didn't intentionally step away from the traditional bodybuilding lifting regimen with different splits each day and the standard super sets of hypertrophy rep schemes but over time I slowly drifted into my current lifting splits. I joke around and call myself an OlyPowerBuilder but that's basically what I am haha! I began planning my workouts based on my favorite lifts, my chosen rep schemes, and I ran with it from there. I love, love, love squats and deadlifts so I work those into my lifts about 3x a week and bench press has grown on me, too. I hate working biceps and triceps so I don't #nobisfortheguys #sorryimnotsorry but I do a lot of upper body work including back and shoulders. I have also begun to fall in love with Olympic lifting so I work on my cleans and cleans and presses along with my accessory work which is what I would say is the closest thing to bodybuilding lifting that I do now.
My point is that none of this ever happened intentionally but I realized that if I didn't like to do a certain lift or body part then I really had no obligation to focus on it. I mean, duh, but at the same time I thought that was how it was "supposed to be". So many people on social media would talk about how this certain body part was their least favorite to work or that this workout was their least favorite to look forward to each week or that it was a struggle to push through. And then I realized that I didn't have to set up all my lifts to look like that. I learned more about compound lifts, which I had always found intimidating, but I quickly learned that I thrived on them. I also quickly learned that my body best responds to them.
I am not saying by any means that people who like to do isolation work are wrong or that it's the wrong way to go but all I'm saying is that I found it wasn't for me. I like doing squats multiple times per week with accessory work thrown in. I typically do my deadlifts and follow it up with hamstring and back accessory work, and my cleans and presses are on the days I do some shoulder/upper body work.
I'll do a separate post explaining my current workout splits, but I simply want to get the message out that it's okay to train differently and experiment. Do what you love and I promise the workouts will all fall into place. I could not be happier with my current program design and every day I look forward to my workouts. I love training more as an athlete and to mix in a little bit of everything.
So. This was extremely long-winded but my take-home points are:
1. Keep on doing research. You can never learn too much!
2. Know your goals
3. Plan accordingly to your goals
4. Don't be afraid to experiment and try out different lifting styles
5. Above all, make sure it's what you want to do
I hope this was informative and that you enjoyed reading it! Have a wonderful weekend :)
My second piece of advice when designing your workout is very straightforward: know your goals. A lot of people might think well you go to the gym and start lifting and that's how you'll get stronger, lose weight etc. Well, they're not drastically off the mark but I beg to differ a little bit because there's a difference between training hard and training smart. Also, different styles of lifting like rep schemes, sets, volume, intensity and rest intervals will get you different results. So today I'm going to give a brief outline of what that looks like.
There are essentially 3 categories that a lift can fall into: hypertrophy, strength, and endurance. Hypertrophy sounds like a big fancy word but it just means muscle growth. A lot of the time (not always) but a majority of people who are lifting weights in order to lose weight or "tone" (I hate that word haha!), they are doing hypertrophy lifts. When you think of the traditional bodybuilding-type lifts like 4x8 that is training for hypertrophy. Supersets are also common for hypertrophy lifts.
So if you want muscle growth (hypertrophy) then you want to do a moderate number of sets like 3-5 and stick with the 6-12 range for reps with about 45-60 seconds for rest. Or just go ahead and do supersets instead of doing rest intervals.
Strength is usually what I end up training a lot because personally that's how I like to train. Again, I don't have any specific goals....yet hehe but I have some ideas in the works so strength is my main focus right now. I'm pretty happy with all the muscle I've built over the past two years so I'm working on strength.
Strength is lower reps with higher sets than hypertrophy. I usually do about 5-8 sets of anywhere from 1-5 reps depending on what percentage of my max that I'm using. The higher the weight, the lower the reps. Usually, the number of sets and reps are inversely related in order to control for volume. It honestly just depends on how much I need to lift that day and the way I break down my reps. What I usually do is have a set volume of weight that I need to move that day like say for deadlifts so I'll know that I need to do x amount of total weight so I'll break that down into x amount of sets with x reps per set.
I track my total volume for each workout for each week so that I can make comparisons from week to week. Ideally, you want your volume to increase each week because that means you're gaining strength and able to move more weight each workout. It can also show me my weaker lifts, and where I need to improve most. Obviously I'm not going to compare my lifting volume for deadlifts to bench press because I can work with thousands of pounds (total) during a deadlift workout than benching.
Calculating volume is super simple! The equation is this: # sets x #reps x #weight used = volume. Here's an example from my deadlifts:
5x5 @ 165lbs
5 x 5 x 165= 4,125
Keeping track of volume enables me to compare what sets and reps I used the week before and how much I should bump up each week. I also know that when I can get to a certain volume then it's time to try for a PR. I don't have this down to an exact science yet but I'm fairly familiar with my own personal window of strength. For example, once I got to being able to do 155 for 5 sets of 5 reps, I was fairly certain that I could get over 200lbs for my 1 RM (rep max). I compared my volume, strength gains, and rep schemes from previous weeks in order to determine what max I should try for. It's all about training smart for your goals and planning out the science. I know that I'm such a huge nerd but this is honestly so fun for me! I love playing around with my own programming and learning more about my body.
The third category a lift can fall into is endurance. It basically means what it sounds like: increasing your muscle's endurance (their ability to produce force over longer periods of time). Just like with endurance running, you have to lift longer in order to gain endurance. I don't mean longer as in you don't gain endurance unless you've been lifting for a long time but the number of reps per set. Endurance is usually a rep scheme of 12-20 with a moderate number of sets like 1-3. Again, you have to make sure you control for volume so you don't want to do 8 sets of 20 because that might result in overtraining. Intensity and volume should always be inversely related.
Now, you do not have to simply pick one of these options and just stick with it because you think that you can't do both strength and hypertrophy lifts in one week. Heck, I do them in the same workout haha! I usually focus on 1 strength lift (usually squats, deadlifts, bench, cleans, hip thrusts) per workout and then build my accessory work around it. My accessory work is usually hypertrophy, endurance-based, or even just with my bodyweight. Since my strength-based lifts are higher in intensity I steadily decrease the intensity of my workout as I get to the end. I always do my heaviest lift first so that I have the most energy for it, and then I do my accessory work so that by the time I get to my last set of exercises it's usually with either light weight or my bodyweight.
An example is one of my lower body days (quad focus):
5x5 front squats
5x12, 10, 8, 6, 2 leg press (warm-up set of 15 reps)
4x8 smith machine lunges
3x7-7-7-7 leg extensions (7 regular reps, 7 reps w/ iso pause, 7 half reps at the bottom, 7 half reps at the top)
3x20 jumping leg press (very light weight 20-30lbs)
circuit (3x): 20 box jumps, 20 pulsing goblet squats, 20 walking lunges, 20 step-ups
As you can see I start out with my heavier sets first and then work my way down with moderate hypertrophy work until I get to the circuit at the end where I use maybe a 10 lb plate max. I design most of my workouts this way and it's what works for me! I find that it allows me to keep strength high throughout the workout and that allows me to keep good form.
I also want to point out that lifting cannot be entirely contained in neat little boxes. What I mean by that is if you're concerned that strength lifts won't help you build muscle or that hypertrophy lifts won't help you get stronger then that's not the case. You can in fact get stronger each week doing hypertrophy lifts because our bodies are designed to adapt to the stress we place on them (resistance lifting is a form of stress but can be a good form). Meaning, if you lift a certain amount each week then your body will learn to recruit more muscle fibers in order to increase its ability to adapt to the weight you are lifting. The same can be said for strength and muscle growth. Your muscles can still grow while doing strength-based lifts but it's simply that it might not occur as quickly as if you were to focus on hypertrophy lifts. There's no magic number of reps or sets that anyone can figure out to tell you this is how you'll definitely grow muscles, gain strength, etc. Like everything else with our bodies, it's all trial and error and extremely variable upon the individual.
My biggest piece of advice is this: do what you love. I didn't intentionally step away from the traditional bodybuilding lifting regimen with different splits each day and the standard super sets of hypertrophy rep schemes but over time I slowly drifted into my current lifting splits. I joke around and call myself an OlyPowerBuilder but that's basically what I am haha! I began planning my workouts based on my favorite lifts, my chosen rep schemes, and I ran with it from there. I love, love, love squats and deadlifts so I work those into my lifts about 3x a week and bench press has grown on me, too. I hate working biceps and triceps so I don't #nobisfortheguys #sorryimnotsorry but I do a lot of upper body work including back and shoulders. I have also begun to fall in love with Olympic lifting so I work on my cleans and cleans and presses along with my accessory work which is what I would say is the closest thing to bodybuilding lifting that I do now.
My point is that none of this ever happened intentionally but I realized that if I didn't like to do a certain lift or body part then I really had no obligation to focus on it. I mean, duh, but at the same time I thought that was how it was "supposed to be". So many people on social media would talk about how this certain body part was their least favorite to work or that this workout was their least favorite to look forward to each week or that it was a struggle to push through. And then I realized that I didn't have to set up all my lifts to look like that. I learned more about compound lifts, which I had always found intimidating, but I quickly learned that I thrived on them. I also quickly learned that my body best responds to them.
I am not saying by any means that people who like to do isolation work are wrong or that it's the wrong way to go but all I'm saying is that I found it wasn't for me. I like doing squats multiple times per week with accessory work thrown in. I typically do my deadlifts and follow it up with hamstring and back accessory work, and my cleans and presses are on the days I do some shoulder/upper body work.
I'll do a separate post explaining my current workout splits, but I simply want to get the message out that it's okay to train differently and experiment. Do what you love and I promise the workouts will all fall into place. I could not be happier with my current program design and every day I look forward to my workouts. I love training more as an athlete and to mix in a little bit of everything.
So. This was extremely long-winded but my take-home points are:
1. Keep on doing research. You can never learn too much!
2. Know your goals
3. Plan accordingly to your goals
4. Don't be afraid to experiment and try out different lifting styles
5. Above all, make sure it's what you want to do
I hope this was informative and that you enjoyed reading it! Have a wonderful weekend :)
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