Plan Your Workout

The guide to building muscle shows you how to structure your workouts for the best results:

Deciding on the number of exercise to do in each workout and the order to do them in has a massive impact on its effectiveness. Get it right and you target specific body parts, and maximise muscle fatigue and growth. But get it wrong and you could be wasting your time.

What comes first?

Deciding which exercises to tackle first in any work out is a fairly simple process. ‘Your energy is higher at the start of the session so you should kick the session off with compound exercises, which includes squats, bench presses and deadlifts; says strength and conditioning coach Gerry Convey. ‘These are the moves that hit more than one big muscle group and will create the most muscle fatigue and trigger the best muscle-building hormonal responses.’

Compound moves also use a lot of muscle mass and are therefore draining on the neurological system- another reason to put them at the start of the workout, says Allan Collins, technical director at Juice Performance. ‘The only thing that trumps the likes of squats and deadlifts are compound exercises done quickly, such as cleans or snatches.’

What’s nest depends on whether you’re doing a whole-body work out or a ‘split’ routine that targets specific muscle groups. ‘if you only have time for three workout a week I’d recommend doing total-body workout’, says personal trainer Toby Giles. ‘Follow the compound exercises with one upper-body exercise then one lower-body exercise.’

If you train different body parts in each session, you should follow the compound exercises with isolation exercises such as biceps curls and leg extensions. ‘Ordinarily, you should work different muscles from those you worked in the compound moves to avoid pre-fatiguing the muscle,’ says personal trainer David coulthard. ‘For instance, you use your triceps when chest pressing, so moving on to a triceps Kickback after a chest workout wouldn’t be an effective way to target the triceps muscle group.’

Alternatively, to give your muscles a short, sharp shock to bring you off a training plateau, choose a more demanding option:

Post-exhaustion training. ‘This is when a compound exercise such as a squat is followed with an isolation exercise such as a leg extension to post-fatigue your quads,’ says Collins

The equipment you’re using will also play a part in dictating the structure of your workouts. ‘The smaller the muscle mass, the easier the exercise is to do and the later in the workout it should be,’ says Collins, ‘But if you use a weight machine, these are easier that free weight, so you should place them later in the workout too.’

How many exercises?

Choosing the right number of exercises to do is more complicated. You want to make sure you’re targeting the muscles from plenty of different angles and with different movements to make sure they keep adapting and growing. The solution would seem to be to ‘do loads of reps and work out for two hours’. Nut after 45 to 60 minutes of lifting weight your body releases more of the hormone cortisol, which breaks down muscle tissue, so working out for that long is counterproductive.

‘I’d normally do three or four exercises in a workout as a minimum and then, as you progress, go up to ten exercises,’ says Collins. ‘The number of exercises should be inversely proportional to the number of sets that you do. For instance if I did a whole session of cleans then I’d do lots and lots of sets.’

The number of exercises will change depending on whether you’re doing a whole-body workout or a split workout that targets specific muscle groups or just the upper or lower body. ‘A total-body workout regime will work each muscle group with greater frequency so the number of sets of each exercise only needs to be three,’ says Giles. ‘This means you can fit up to ten exercises into your hour-long workout,’

Although split training requires four to five workouts every week, the frequency with which each muscle is hit is lower. ‘This means you need a higher set range of four to five, which only gives you time to do five or six exercises,’ says Giles.

Special tactics

There are some tricks you can use to keep your weightlifting programme on track. ‘You should work your muscles through as many planes frontal and transverse planes,’ says Collins. ‘You may not pile on the muscle doing lower-intensity multi-planar exercises but they are good for preventing injury and helping your body to function better as a unit’.

Include some core exercises, because a strong core helps you lift more weight but is easy to neglect, especially if you’re short of time. ‘Starting with standing compound exercises such as the deadlift, squat, push press and bent-over row means that you’ve already done your core work because it plays such a crucial supporting role in these exercises,’ says strength and conditioning coach Simon Harling.

If you have a bit of time at the end of your workout, spend a few minutes fully fatiguing your abdominal muscles in three planes of motion. You can then head for the showers knowing that you’ve used your time efficiently to give yourself bigger and stronger muscles and a rock-hard six-pack.

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