How To Design A Work Out - Part 1, dividing things up.

Thisentryis part 1 of 5 in the series SERIES - How To Design A Workout

This post is part of a series

How To Design A Work Out - Part 1, dividing things up.
How To Design A Work Out - Part 2, the exercises.
How To Design A Work Out - Part 3, cardio basics.
How To Design A Work Out - Part 4, cardio options.
How To Design A Work Out - Part 5, the little details.

Last week we talked about finding the right gym for you. This week we’re going to talk about what to do at that gym.

First thing you need to think about is your workout layout or schedule. What I mean by this is, when are you going to be working out and how often? Will you be at the gym every day? Every weekday? once a week? Ideally, you should go at least three times a week, so I’m going to use this number as we design our workout. However, I’ll try to lay things out so you can modify them to your own schedule. For example, I usually work out 4 times a week which means my schedule looks slightly different than one we’re going to discuss here.

So let’s assume we’re going to the gym three times a week. This is a simple Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. In these three days we want to get our three cardio sessions plus work out all our major muscle groups. We’ll discuss cardio later this week, so for right now, let’s figure out what part of our body we’ll work out each day. There are two things to consider:

Ideally, you won’t exercise the same body part two days in a row.
You want to get to each major section of your body at least once a week.

We don’t have to worry about the first rule as much since our schedule assumes a day break between each workout, but we do want to make sure we give our entire body a workout every week. With that in mind, what are the major parts of your body? Well, different people will divide these slightly differently but I like to think of them as:

Upper Arms
Shoulders
Back
Abs
Chest
Legs

For a more detailed breakdown, click on this link.

This grouping works out well for us because we came up with six groups for our three days, which means two muscle groups per day.

Now, how do we divide these up? Well, even though we’ve divided these by body area, some of these groups do share quite a bit. For example, a lot of chest exercises will also work on your shoulders, where as a lot of back exercises will also work on your legs. So let’s try and make sure these similar groups end up on different days. That way, you get to workout certain areas twice on different days. For example, you’ll workout your shoulders on Monday, but then you’ll also get a decent shoulder workout on Wednesday when you work on your chest.

Here’s a sample schedule