In part 2 of this series, we look at how you can divide your training throughout the week…

Your options

There are 2 approaches when it comes to planning your training week – whole body workouts and split routines. Whole body workouts do just what it says on the tin – train all of your major muscles in a single workout. Exercises are selected that offer the most “bang for your buck” like squats, bench presses and rows as you don’t have a lot of time to do a huge number of exercises. Here is an example of a typical whole body workout…

1. Barbell back squats
2. Barbell bench press
3. Seated cable rows
4. Leg curl machine
5. Dumbbell shoulder press
6. Lat pull downs
7. Lying EZ tricep extensions
8. Bicep cable curls
9. Stability ball ab crunches
10. Back extensions

Note the order of the exercises; similar exercises are kept apart from each other and follow a loose legs/push/pull sequence with arms and core exercises at the end.

This workout would most likely be repeated 2-3 times per week on non-consecutive days and lends its self to those wanting general muscular endurance and all round fitness. As good as this workout is, if you keep doing the same reps, sets and exercises you’ll eventually plateau and stop making progress. To keep your workouts (and your fitness levels) progressing, you can change a number of factors in your workouts. These are called the training variables and include…

Increase your weights – small regular increases win every time and will make you stronger
Increase the number of sets your perform per exercise – more work = greater benefits
Perform more reps – adding a rep a week whilst keeping the weights the same is a great progression
Reduce your rest time between sets – knock off 5 seconds a week to increase the intensity of your workouts
Choose different exercises – bored of the chest press machine? Try the bench press
Change the order of your exercises – if you always do legs last, try putting them first in your workout
Use more complex exercises – squats are harder than leg presses, chin ups are harder than lat pull downs
Incorporate a training system like drop sets or supersets into your programme for variety
Use a Swiss ball, medicine ball, Bosu or TRX to spice up your workout

After a while (many months and maybe even years) you may may find that they simply can’t fit all of the work you want to perform into a single workout. When this happens, the next choice for programme design is likely to be a split routine. Split routines break your body down into various parts which are trained on different days of the week. This has the advantage of allowing a greater volume of work to be done for a particular muscle or set of muscles that would be possible with the whole body system outlined above.

There are numerous options you can choose from when it comes to split routines, a few of which are outlined below, but it’s important to know that whichever one you choose, missing a single workout can unbalance your whole training week AND your physique so make sure that you can stick to whatever split routine you select.

In the final part of this series, we’ll provide you with example split routines…

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