So, youβve gone to the gym a few times now, maybe youβve hit some of the machines and some of the free weights. In the mornings youβre getting up and feeling that tension in your musclesβthe tension that says that youβve been working hard. Or maybe you already have a training routine but want to step up your game with your own gym regime. The number of tools you can use at the gym, the amount of movements you can do with them, and the weights you can move them at, is overwhelming, to say the least. So, youβre left with the question, βHow many exercises am I supposed to do per muscle group?β.
This question is extremely loaded. What youβre asking is how much you should focus on each muscle groupβnot necessarily the number of exercises. When it comes to this, an exercise is an arbitrary term; its effectiveness can change based on the number of sets, the repetitions, and the amount of weight. You obviously want enough volume being put on your muscles to warrant some change in your bodyβs compositionβthat is, after all, why youβre going to the gym. But you also donβt want toΒ hurt yourself or over train. So, keeping in mind the arbitrariness of the term βexerciseβ when trying to account for the volume you should be putting your muscles under, we often use the idea of sets per week. But why is this important, and how do you choose to refine your workout volume? It all depends where youβre at, and where you want to get to.
Why are you going to the gym? The earlier you commit to your βwhyβ, the easier youβll hit your fitness goals. Whether your βwhyβ is strength, size, endurance, or weight lossβthe way you program your time in the iron temple will change. And with this change will come results. A bench press isnβt just a bar and a weight you have to lift, itβs a tool you decide when to use and how often. The decisions you make around this will set you on different fitness paths. So, before you buckle up and delve into the battleplan, youβre going to want to sit down andΒ decide what your goals are. A strategy is supposed to get you somewhere, but if you donβt know where youβre going then you might not like where you end up.
Not only will setting goals help you come up with a strategy to hit them, but itβll also keep you accountable for your routine. Especially when you set benchmarks, you can see the improvements over time in your body. And this will help during those times where it feels impossible to get up and go to the gymβthe times when itβs most critical that you summon all your willpower and train. These points in your trainingβwhere you feel the most tired, hungover, lazy, whateverβyour reactions to these moments will snowball, and youβll look back a year from now not recognizing the person who began training all those reps ago.Β
When it comes down to the science, at its core training is essentially about putting micro-tears in your muscle tissue. Although it might sound kind of gnarly, these tears are what cause your muscles to grow stronger and larger. The way you program exercise will inform how your body and your musclesΒ react to training. While itβs obviously important to train with a high enough volume to create these tears in the muscle fiber, itβs also just as important (but less obvious), that you need to give these muscle fibers enough time to heal in between workouts targeting specific areas. So, once you hit one muscle group, itβs generally a bad idea to train it again the next day. The days you allow your muscles to heal properly are the days that your musclesΒ actually grow and get stronger, so you want to organize training to make it as efficient as possible for your muscle development.
This means that itβs important to stay within a minimum and maximum training volume. Where things get more complicated is when we look at everyone individually. Each person has a very specific bodily compositionβand although some people can have similar makeups, your body contains a ton of intricacies and idiosyncrasies. In theory, the perfect workout routine would take into account all of theseβsomething that you can only come close to by getting a personal trainer.
Otherwise, weβre left with some general rules thatβll help us measure the frequency and intensity that you should be focusing on with each muscle group. The good news is that there is a general guideline for the minimum and maximum repetitions you should do in a week if you want to get closer to your goals. For larger muscle groups, youβre looking at 60 to 120 total reps per week. For smaller muscle groups, this translates to about 30 to 60 repetitions per week. These groupings can be further broken down to;Β
The reason you donβt need as many reps for smaller muscle groups simply comes down to the fact that they just wonβt benefit as much from a higher volume of training than other muscle groups. More importantly, however, is the fact that while youβre training those larger muscle groups, youβll already be indirectly training the smaller muscles. These smaller muscles get a lot of indirect volumeβfor example, thereβs a lot of chest exercises which also secondarily activate the shoulders and triceps. The amount of overlap with some exercises means that your optimal training volume is going to be different for different muscle groups.
So, what about the frequency of going to the gym? The way you split the repetitions throughout the week falls entirely to you, but obviously there are recommended ways of doing this. The most common splits are between 1 and 4 days, which give your muscles plenty of time to heal in between training. The more often you go to the gym in a week, the less reps you do in that specific training block since itβs being split up between more days. The intensity of the volume, however, can vary from day to day.
So how do you know how often to go? That depends entirely on your experience level and your goals (which weβll go over in-depth further below), but itβs important to remember that itβs the reps per week what you should be focusing on when training with weights. You can split these reps however you want when it comes to individual training blocks, but there are recommended ways to do this. But hold on a second. Not only have we hit you with a lot of numbers, but a wide range of them to boot. What do those numbers mean to your training routine, specifically? Well, that comes down to fitness level and what youβre working towards.
As a beginner, youβll see a lot of muscle and strength gains in the first few weeks of hitting the gym. Your body will still be getting used to the movements and the pressure youβre putting your muscles through. In most cases, itβll be enough to stick to the lower end of the 60-120/30-60 rep spectrum for the week. This will prevent you from potentially hurting yourself and will also allow you to focus on form and the correct movement and muscle activation necessary to get the most out of the exercises.
In terms of how you want to split the exercises per muscle, itβs recommended to do a full-body routine when in the gym. As we mentioned, as a beginner your muscles will be experiencing new tensions and forces and therefore you should see a large amount of improvement at the beginning. Doing a 3-day split each week will help you in avoiding burnout and will lead toΒ better muscle mass results (if youβre just starting out) than a once-per-week workout.Β Β
So, youβve been going to the gym regularly for a while now. Youβve been sticking to pumping iron, and now your movements and form are perfect. Youβll definitely have seen a slow down in building muscle mass, and you quickly had to escalate the weights to heavier and heavier ones. But youβre getting more serious about this and youβve gained an understanding of how your muscle groups act with one anotherβitβs time to change your training regime.
Youβll be wanting to stick to the middle-higher end of the set range per week most likely, as your body gets used to the weights and the movements. In terms of how you want to split this however, the difference lies in which body parts you focus on in each training block. For example, this could look like upper body exercises on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and lower body exercises on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdayβwith some rest days sprinkled in there. Itβs a good idea to also include cardio or some type of aerobic exercise in the programming. Most people include this on their rest days.
The more advanced you are in your bodybuilding; the fewer days itβs generally recommended you do. For an intermediate bodybuilder, 2 to 4 days is recommended. And while you could split it up between upper and lower body days, you could also look at a more specific muscle group each gym day. For example, this could look like:
This will give you a well-rounded full-body workout throughout the week that allows you to give the appropriate focus on each individual muscle. Itβll also give you time to activate those muscles that you may have been ignoring, or at least putting too little attention on.
Advanced bodybuilders take a different approach to training. If youβve already got a ripped physique, youβre going to adapt much more slowly than a beginner or even an intermediate weightlifter. Therefore, more advanced bodybuilders usually ascribe to HIT, or programs such as body-blasting.
This type of program βblastsβ one body part with a large amount of sets (think 20 or more) per workout. You essentially hammer out one muscle group a week. For example, powerlifters can do a basic bench press for 3 hours per workout, even though they might have done less than 18 reps. This is because they typically do a 1RMβRM meaning repetition maximum, or, the maximum weight you can lift for a defined number of repetitions.
While itβs definitely not recommended that you begin with a bodybuilderβs training routine, it can be helpful to visualize the point youβll get to if you stick with it. Keep in mind the GPO principle, or, the gradual progressive overload principle. It simply states that if you gradually progress the load you place on your body, itβll work to adapt to that load. Essentially, if we lift more weight, we get stronger, if run further, we gain endurance. Itβs a very simple principle but important to keep in mind. The secret is consistency. You donβt want to put too little load on your body and tread water, and you also donβt want to put your body under too much stress, so it hasΒ time to heal and strengthen.
While the importance of how far along you are on the progressive overload spectrum canβt go understated, itβs also important to understand what specific goals youβre working towards. It can be something as simple as general health or weight loss. On the other hand, you can have a specific goal in mindβmaybe you want to be able to lift something with ease, or you want to have a particular physique. When it comes down to these types of goals, there are defined paths you can go down on to make the effort you put in as efficient as possible. These can be broken down into the categories of endurance, hypertrophy, and strength.
If your training towards an endurance goal in order to increase your work capacity and stamina, youβd benefit from doing more exercises per muscle group. This will condition your body to be able to do more work for a longer period of time. Youβll probably want to stick to lighter weights so you can do more reps per set.
Also, donβt forget theΒ importance of cardio and other aerobic exercises. These types of exercises condition your bodyβs ability to work for long periods of time, even when it comes to anaerobic exercises such as weightlifting.
The secret to gaining strength is doing multi-joint movements (such as the bench press or deadlift). However, since they place a lot of stress on your nervous system, youβre not going to be able to have a volume as intense as with a hypertrophy (muscle building) goal in mind. Therefore, youβre going to want to be doing these compound exercises at lower reps. These compound exercises act on a variety of different muscle groups, which further lowers the amount of exercises you have to do.
An example would be the bench press, which activates your pecs, triceps, deltoids, and lats. While the deadlift mainly works on your hamstrings, back, glutes, and quadriceps.
If youβre looking mainly for the aesthetics of ripped muscles, then this training program is what youβll be aiming for. Youβll want to do 2-4 exercises per muscle group, which will include both compound and isolation exercises. We touched on compound exercises above, but isolation exercises target a single joint and muscle groupβusually one of your smaller muscle groups.
Think of isolation exercises as the chisel when working on your body. Theyβre the exercises that will be able to correct any imbalances, and ultimately fashion the body you want. You want your physique looking in a specific way? Say no more. Thereβs an exercise to lift that muscle, push out this other one, and voila before you know it, youβll be turning heads wherever you go. However, as keen as you might be to jump headfirst into muscle growth, as a beginner it will be beneficial to stick to lower weights and higher reps to ease your body into the stresses.
Sometimes it can be scary, sitting down and telling yourself that youβre going to do 80 repetitions, with a number of sets, targeting a muscle group every week, no matter what. Itβs something that can often keep people from going to the gym, or at least prevent people from setting goals. Thereβs an attraction to a relaxed exercise routine where you can do whatever you want. Thereβs no looming responsibility, or promise, that you set for yourself to work towards. This can benefit the amateur since it gets them in the gym with no strings attached per se. But if youβre looking to take yourΒ fitness to the next level, as you should be, then dedicate some time to really ironing out your plan, so pumping iron makes you yearn for something.
