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Check out these 5 ways to organize your resistance training to get strong and build muscle consistently each week.

A great way to stay consistent and make gains is to get onto a program that focuses your training on specific muscles or movements in each session.

In this week’s episode of the Coaching Corner Podcast, we’re talking about 5 different options for scheduling your workouts according to your experience level and goals.

(00:00):
When it comes to resistance training, it's one of the best ways that you can keep your metabolism high and increase your daily calorie burn if your goal is to burn fat. And it's also the pathway to developing that toned look that a lot of people are after. A lot of people don't just want to lose weight and be skinny. They want to look strong and healthy and resistance training is the way to do that. So there's lots of reasons to do resistance training.
(00:33)
Hey there, Jayd Harrison here, AKA Jaydigains. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. In today's episode, I'm excited to share with you five different ways that you can organize your resistance training. This is one of my favorite topics to discuss with my Twitch chat and to write about and talk about with my clients because resistance training is honestly the secret magic bullet of getting in shape. A lot of people don't realize just how powerful it is to do resistance training and develop your muscles. Now, resistance training isn't going to automatically turn you into Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is a common fear that a lot of people have, especially women. But resistance training is so much more than just trying to get your muscles to be big. Also, side note, if you are a woman, it's actually really, really hard to get your muscles to grow big.
(01:22)
Even if you're a man, it's hard to get big muscles. It takes many, many years of training, training in a specific way, eating a specific way to grow big muscles. So if you have some hesitance about starting to incorporate resistance training into your weekly exercise routine, and you're afraid that you're going to turn into a bodybuilder and look super masculine and look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, it is just not going to happen. Okay, so rest at ease. It's not going to happen. I'm telling you, even if you were to try to get big muscles as a woman or as a beginner, it's just literally not going to happen. And if you want to get big muscles, that's another discussion for another day that takes a lot of work and a lot of specific training. So when we talk about resistance training and its role in a healthy, active lifestyle, we do it because it has so many benefits for our bodies.
(02:28)
Did you know that actually as we age, our bodies get weaker over time and we actually lose muscle as we get older? This is a process called sarcopenia, and it especially is a threat to people who have a sedentary lifestyle. So when it comes to your muscles, it's use it or lose it unfortunately. So if you don't use your muscles, you're going to lose them. Your body will break that tissue down to access the energy that's there. Remember that our bodies are super systems and they will react to whatever stimulus you give it. So if you don't need to be strong in your everyday day-to-day life, then your body is going to be like, but we don't really need much muscle because we're not really using our bodies anyway. Now, the problem with this, with sarcopenia and the loss of muscle is that it has a direct negative impact on our overall health.
(03:23)
As our muscular strength declines, as our lean muscle mass declines in our bodies, we lose coordination. We lose bone density and we lose balance, which are all things that can contribute to injury as people age, there's a common saying that as soon as someone falls down and breaks a hip and has to get a hip replacement and then they're sedentary, it's really not long after that that they end up actually passing away. This is a really common thing, but if we keep our muscles strong, we can improve our coordination, we can improve our bone density and our overall mechanical control and ability to live longer, live healthier for longer. Now, there's a bunch of other benefits of keeping your muscles strong. For example, whenever you build muscle, you actually improve your body's insulin and glucose sensitivity. So if you are at risk of diabetes or if you have diabetes, performing resistance training and building muscle is one of the best things that you can do to help manage that condition.
(04:26)
Resistance training and building muscle can also help to improve your blood lipid profiles. That is your cholesterol as well as your blood pressure. So you'll actually improve your heart health and reduce your risk of developing heart disease or having a heart attack or a stroke. As you make your muscle stronger, you also improve your bone density. And this is especially important for women because as we age, our bone density tends to decline pretty rapidly and we develop a high risk of osteoporosis, which is when our bones become more porous, which means that they're more likely to break and have a harder time healing when they do break. And then of course, when it comes to resistance training, it's one of the best ways that you can keep your metabolism high and increase your daily calorie burn if your goal is to burn fat. And it's also the pathway to developing that toned look that a lot of people are after, right?
(05:20)
A lot of people don't just want to lose weight and be skinny. They want to look strong and healthy and resistance training is the way to do that. So there's lots of reasons to do resistance training, and for that reason resistance training is a huge part of the personal training sessions that I run for my one-on-one clients and in the training programs that I create. So in today's episode, let's take a look at the recommendations for resistance training, incorporating it into your weekly exercise routine, and we'll go over five different ways that you can organize your weekly schedule to make sure that you are hitting the as often as they need to be hit to stay strong and improve your lean muscle tissue. Now, what is resistance training specifically when you think of resistance training, you probably imagine people going into the weight room at the gym and pumping some iron, right?
(06:12)
They might be doing some bicep curls, maybe some deadlifts and some squats. All of these are examples of resistance training exercises, but specifically resistance training is any type of exercise where you are challenging your muscles to perform or do their job against some form of resistance. So if I want to make my bicep muscles stronger, then I'm going to make my bicep do its job, which has bend the elbow using some kind of resistance. A lot of times people use weights like dumbbells or barbells, maybe kettlebells. Sometimes you can use machines which add resistance using a pulley system, usually with some weights that are scaled against some kind of mechanism that you're sitting in. But you can also use resistance bands and even your own body weight to add more resistance to a movement. So in the example with the biceps, I could perform a biceps curl with the dumbbells or with a resistance band, and the goal here is to make the bicep do its job against resistance to the point where the muscle starts to fatigue or get tired.
(07:22)
Now, in practice, what this often looks like for a lot of people is that the muscle starts to burn. That's typically the sensation that people describe it as. It's like a burn. As the muscle starts to get tired, you can feel it getting tired. And for building strength and growing muscle, we want to allow the muscle to approach the point where it would completely tire out, which we call muscular failure. So muscular failure is the point where your muscle just completely gives up and it cannot do even a single rep more. Now for beginners and even intermediate exercisers, you don't necessarily need to train all the way to muscle failure to the point where your muscles give out. In fact, it may not really be safe, especially when you're still learning the technique of different exercises. In general, what we want to do is what we call approach muscle failure, where you do an exercise fatigue the muscle to the point where it's close to the point where it would give out or stop working.
(08:19)
And usually what I tell my clients is you want to stop when you feel like you could do maybe one, two, or three more reps. So at the end of a set, when you have just maybe one, two, or three more reps in the tank, you stop your set, you stop the exercise, and then you rest. You let the muscles recharge for about 30 to 60 seconds, and then you do the exercise again to fatigue the muscle. You do this usually two to three sets. Sometimes you'll do more sets, but in essence, you're doing these sets to try to fatigue your muscle practice doing repetition after repetition until your muscles are burning and you feel like you could only do 1, 2, 3 more reps. So what this does is you are actually causing microscopic damage to your muscles while you're training like this, and that microscopic damage is what your body is going to read as injury.
(09:10)
So after you finish your workout, when you go home, you eat a good meal with protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats, and then you go to sleep and while you're sleeping, your body is going to start the repair process. It's going to flood that area with some healing hormones, protein, white blood cells, and it's just going to send all of that into that muscle area and your body is going to start the repair process. So it's going to repair the damage that's done to the muscle fibers, and it's also going to fortify them. So that next time you go to do that same task, your body is stronger, you're able to perform that same task, that same amount of weight, that same number of reps. You'll be able to do it without getting as tired. So this process of over and over and over again, over the course of weeks, if not months, of doing microscopic damage to the muscles, letting them heal, get fortified, and then doing it again is how your muscles get stronger and stronger over time.
(10:08)
So now let's talk about what the recommendations would be for how often you should do resistance training, how hard you should train. We'll go a little bit more into detail of that, and then I'm going to talk about how you can actually split up your resistance training over the course of a week to make sure that you're hitting all of the muscles and you're going to be improving the strength of your muscles throughout your whole body. So let's talk about how often you should train. So this really depends on a lot of factors. First and foremost, it depends on your level of experience. So if you're a brand new beginner to resistance training, you really don't need more than two or three days a week to improve your muscular strength and build some muscle. So if you've been exercising for less than six months consistently, I would recommend starting with two to three days a week of incorporating resistance training into your routine, and you don't need to set more than 30 to 60 minutes aside for resistance training here.
(11:08)
If you are more intermediate and you have been doing resistance training for more than six months, then you can add on another day and work out for three to four days a week. However, I do have to say there are plenty of advanced exercises who only train resistance training two or three times a week, and it does depend on the block of their training and what they're focusing on, but don't feel like you have to add in more days. But just keep in mind that as you get stronger and as you get more advanced, your muscles are going to need more of something to continue to get stronger and improve their strength. So for some people, that might look like adding in another training day or adding two more training days, but for some people they might not have the availability to do that. In that case, you might just add more exercises or more difficult exercises or more weight so you don't have to add on another day.
(12:01)
But I wouldn't recommend as a beginner starting out with four, five, or six days of training a week, if you have been training for less than six months, stick to that two to three day range. Now, if you are advanced and you have been working out for one to two years and you've been doing resistance training, you can do four to five days a week according to the American College of Sports Medicine. Now, keep in mind that the more frequently you train, the more you're going to have to moderate what we call the intensity, which is how hard you push yourself and what muscles you're pushing during your resistance training workouts. We'll talk about that a little bit more when we get into the different training program, splits or schemes and how you can split out what muscles you're working. If you're doing something that's like a body part split, you can get away with training six to seven days, but in general, you do not need to train for six or seven days a week in order to make gains.
(12:59)
Now today we're going to talk about five common ways that you can organize your resistance training to split out which muscles you're hitting every time you train, when you're a beginner, when you've been training for less than six months, I recommend taking your two to three days a week of resistance training and doing what we call a total body training. So in a total body training session, you are hitting muscles everywhere. You're hitting upper body, lower body, and your core. So upper body would be the muscles in your arms as well as in your back and in your chest. Lower body exercises are going to target the muscles in your legs primarily, and then your core is the muscles in your torso, so your abs obliques your back muscles. So in a beginner level training program, I'm usually going to recommend total body training two to three days a week.
(13:52)
So you're hitting each muscle group one time with one to two exercises for two to three sets per exercise. I like this because when you are a beginner, you don't really need that many exercises on a muscle group to make gains. You might only need to hit the quadriceps for three sets with one exercise in order to get stronger, which is usually the case with beginners. You can do maybe two exercises per muscle group and that's fine, but you really don't need a whole lot of stimulus to build strength and build muscle as a beginner when you're in the first six months of your training, there's plenty of people who are more advanced who train total body as well, but just keep in mind that the more advanced you get, the more you're going to have to put load on your muscles during your total body training sessions.
(14:43)
So as you get more advanced, you're going to have to push a lot harder in those sessions. So a lot of intermediate and advanced exercises say that total body training days are killer and they're really hard to recover from because you have to hit the muscles a lot harder than you did when you were a beginner in order to make gains. But plenty of people do it, especially people who are limited in their availability and the amount of days that they can train. A lot of them will stick to a total body two or three times a week training split even when they're more advanced and they just know going into it that they're going to be really, really tired. Also, for my athletes who are in season, a lot of times I'll have them do two to three days a week of total body, but their intensity will be a little bit lower.
(15:30)
We'll incorporate a lot more mobility, style training, lower intensity, lower volume because when they're in season, their workouts need to be really supplementary to the sport that they're in. So in general, total body splits work for everybody, but a lot of times I'm going to start beginners off with total body. Now a second really common intermediate level, I would say type of splitting out your workouts is to do what's called an upper lower split. So in upper lower splits, we focus each training session either on your upper body or your lower body. So for upper body days, you're going to be doing exercises that are focused on your arms and probably your core as well. Although sometimes people will train core on lower body days as well. You can kind of fit in core training, abdominals, obliques your back, you can fit that in on either day, but the focus of an upper body day is going to be a lot of exercises for the chest, the shoulders, biceps, triceps, et cetera.
(16:29)
Now, the benefit of this, especially for intermediate people is it allows you to hit the same muscle group with a few more exercises. So if you have kind of hit a plateau trading total body two to three times a week, splitting out your workout sessions so that you're hitting the same muscle group with a couple more exercise varieties, a few more sets, performing the exercises to fatigue will help kind of stimulate those muscles to get stronger again or to start growing again For a lower body day, that's going to incorporate a couple of different exercises that all hit the legs, your quadriceps, your hamstrings, your glutes, your calves, all of those. All of those are going to get hit multiple times with multiple different exercises. Though I really like the upper lower body split. You can do this in two days a week. You can do this in four days a week.
(17:22)
Now another way that you can split out your workouts that's similar to the upper lower split is what's called a push pull legs split. Now, this can be practiced between 3, 4, 4 or five, six days a week. Essentially what you do is every workout session, you alternate between push focused exercises, whole focused exercises and exercises that target your legs. This split of your workouts is focused more around types of movements and a type of performance for your body versus just hitting a muscle group. So for athletes, push pull legs is a really great workout split that helps them to develop different movement patterns. So it's really great for training like functional movement. So a push day would include all of the muscles involved in different types of pushing exercises or pushing movements like pushups, bench press, overhead press, tricep dips or tricep push downs. The muscles that we're going to hit on a push day are going to be mainly like the chest, the shoulders, the triceps.
(18:32)
Anything that would be involved in pushing away from the body against some kind of resistance pull day is mainly going to feature muscles like the lats as well as the back of the shoulders and your back as well as your biceps because these muscles are all involved in pulling things closer to your body against resistance. So with the push day, we want to push out away from our body with the pull day. We want to be pulling things toward our body in different movements involving these muscle groups. Usually. Now you might have some exercises that you do on both a push day and a pull day. They fit for both. For example, like face pulls, I sometimes put those on a push day because they target the back of the shoulder, which is an important stabilizer for the shoulders in different push exercises. But I might also put it on a poll day because it's a literal polling exercise, so it doesn't have to be like a super black and white distinction or split, and you can mix it up over the course of your different blocks of training to give yourself some variety.
(19:35)
But in general, this is the theme of the workout. And then your leg day is just all legs. All legs. You can split these out between doing squats and squat based movements, or you can incorporate some deadlifts. Sometimes people will put deadlifts on their pole day because it is a literal polling exercise. Some people will prefer to put that on their leg day though because the deadlift is heavily involving the legs. So again, there's not really clear cut like black and white where everything goes. Just think about it as this is the theme of this training scheme. Push pull legs, and I really like this for my athletes. I really like this for people who are training for functional strength because these are movements that we practice in our everyday life, and especially if you're an athlete, you need to be able to perform these different types of movements.
(20:24)
Now, another way that you can split out your resistance training based on movement patterns is to do something where you are splitting out your days focused on different kinds of more specific style movements. So for example, you might have one day that is a squat emphasis that does exercises that are squat based. So you squats, lunges, different types of movements that involve squatting or that support the strength involved in squatting. And then you may have a hip hinge focus day where you're not really focusing on bending the knees very much. It's all about hinging at the hips. So this kind of a day would involve things like deadlifts and kettlebell swings, leg curls, these types of movements that involve your hips bending and straightening, and then you may have a push day and a pull day just like you would in a push pull leg split.
(21:23)
But also another important movement pattern that's included in the movement pattern emphasis type programs is rotational, which I really love because it's so important to involve rotational exercises because our bodies move in rotation, rotation through the spine rotation in our legs and our hips. So rotation and stabilizing type exercises, which you might put on a separate day would include things like wood chops, like with a cable or with bands, Turkish get ups, Russian twists. All of these are exercises that involve some kind of rotation and then some type of stabilizing exercises where you have to hold a plank or hold a squat while one part of your body is moving and doing something else. All of these are very functional movement patterns that you need for life. This style of training is really what the physical therapists at the office that I do personal training out of, they typically will train their clients using the movement pattern split because for them, they're trying to specifically diagnose and strengthen different movement patterns to help people move more functionally.
(22:36)
So this is a really common style of training. If you work with someone who is a physical therapist and a personal trainer, right, they're a lot of times going to give you a movement pattern split, which is a great way to train. And then finally, you have what is called the body part split or often the bro split. Now the bro split or the body part split is a style of splitting out your workouts so that each day you're focusing on one or just a couple different muscles at a time. Now, the bro split is really good for people who are specifically interested in building muscle size. So bodybuilders will often train according to a body split program or a body part split or a bro split because they're specifically trying to develop their muscles in isolation to develop them and give them more size.
(23:29)
So this is what I'm talking about what it takes to build big muscles. Bodybuilders have to do a lot of different exercises for the same muscle group to get the muscles to grow big, so they'll have an entire day that's just devoted to chest or an entire day that's just devoted to biceps or triceps, right? There's a lot of different ways that you can split this out, but that's essentially the idea is that each day you're really slamming one or just a couple of muscles in that training session to try to get them to grow and try to get as much of those little microscopic tears in the muscles as you can get, training the muscles to fatigue over and over and over again with different types of exercises from different angles, from different equipment so that you can maximize muscle growth. So a common bro split that we see is usually people will start the week off.
(24:20)
Their first date of the week will be training chest or chest and shoulders or chest and triceps. There's a joke that we like to call Monday International push day or international Chest Day because when you go to the gym, a lot of the people who are there are there to grow big muscles, and so they're going to be hitting chest and triceps or chest and shoulders or push on a Monday. So it's going to be really hard to get the bench available on a Monday if you go, because usually with a bro split, a lot of people are starting the week off with chest or chest, shoulders, chest triceps or chest, shoulders and triceps, and a common day for them to follow that up with is back day or back and biceps day. So this is going to be a lot of pulling exercises. So deadlifts might be included, but sometimes people will save their deadlifts for leg day pull-ups, lap pull downs, different types of rows and lots of different bicep curl type exercises.
(25:14)
And then for a third day, they might focus on a muscle group like the shoulders, and then they finish off with legs. There's lots of different ways that you can do a bro split. There are some people who train a bro split across seven days where they hit chest one day, shoulders the next day, back the next day, biceps the next day. They're hitting everything in isolation every single day of the week. Now, a lot of people are able to get away with this without developing symptoms of over-training because each muscle group is only getting hit one day a week, so they're slamming that muscle group, but they have seven whole days before they hit that muscle group again to recover and build. Now, this works for people who have been training for a long time and their body is really efficient and effective at recovering.
(26:00)
However, if you try to go into a six or seven day bro split as a beginner, you're probably going to risk developing the symptoms of over-training, which is when you are doing too much and your body is having a hard time recovering. So if you feel like super overly fatigued, even though you've been training consistently for three or four weeks, your body isn't getting better at recovering and your recovery is just like it feels like garbage. You might experience dips in your appetite or intense appetite, cravings. It could go the other way. You might be feeling tired all the time, but you're having trouble sleeping or you are getting lots of chronic aches and pains or injuries. These are all signs that you're doing too much in the gym. You're doing more than what your body can effectively recover from. And when we do more than what our body can recover from, it doesn't matter what you're doing in the gym, you're just not going to grow as much muscle and you're not going to get as much strength.
(26:52)
You're actually harming your body at that point. So in order to keep your training effective, you want to make sure that you're only doing as much as your body can properly recover from. So if you're interested in doing a bro split and you're a beginner, I would say do no more than four days a week and do day one chest and triceps, day two, back and biceps day three, shoulders day four legs, something like that. But I mean, I still personally, I'm never going to recommend a bro split to someone who's been training for less than six months, right? At that point, you do not need to spend an entire training session on your chest or an entire training session on your shoulders. You don't really need to hit those muscles more than with one exercise for 3, 2, 3 sets. So it just keep that in mind.
(27:36)
You don't need to blast your body to make progress, especially in the beginning. A little bit is going to go a long way, whichever way that you decide to split out your workouts. In general, we want to shoot for 10 to 20 sets for each muscle group total over the course of a week. That's how you want to organize it, and then you can split it out however you like. Again, I recommend that when you're starting out to start with total body training, because if you do a leg day and you're a beginner and you hit your quads for 10 sets in one training day, your legs are going to be cooked, you are going to have a really hard time recovering from that, right? So this is why I recommend starting with total Body. Now, what do I mean by a set? Okay, so a set is a period of time where you're actually doing the exercise.
(28:26)
We usually define a set by a number of repetitions. Now, a repetition is one time doing the exercise. So if you're squatting one time down and back up, that's one rep in general, especially for people who are beginners or even intermediate. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends doing roughly between eight and 12 repetitions for each set of every exercise. That's a good general recommendation personally for me in how I teach my clients. And if you do one of my training programs, one of my body sculpt programs, a lot of times you're going to see that I actually recommend doing between 10 and 15 reps per set, and I like to do this rep range because one, it's memorable, eight to 12 is kind of like weird numbers for people, especially if they've never done any kind of exercise before. So I would say 10 to 15, easy to remember.
(29:28)
Two, it also is a higher rep range, which means that you're going to not need to use as heavy resistance or as heavy of a weight, and you're going to get more reps in to practice the technique. So especially for beginners, 10 to 15 is my favorite rep range to recommend for people. You don't have to stay to that. You don't have to do that yourself. I just find that that is what my clients respond best to. And I've trained both. I've done eight to 12, I've done six to 10, and I've done 10 to 15. And in general, 10 to 15 seems to be the Goldilocks zone for my especially beginner clients because it's memorable. And again, they don't have to use quite as much weight to get the muscles burning when they're going to 15 reps or somewhere between 10 and 15 reps.
(30:19)
Now, over time, as someone gets stronger, I'm going to reduce their reps as they get closer to wanting to develop more strength and power training. However, when you are just starting out, you can stick to one of those larger rep ranges. We call this high volume training. High volume meaning a high number of repetitions, 10 to 15 is a high number of repetitions. Eight to 12 is also a high number of repetitions, especially when you consider advanced lifters who are lifting really heavy weight for up to six reps, right? You'll see heavy lifters or power lifters doing super heavy weight for just one rep or two or three. We call that singles, doubles or triples. I don't recommend trying to do singles, doubles and triples with heavy weight until you have been training at least one or two years. You want to have one to two years of resistance training, exercise and solid technique before you start trying to mess with the heavy stuff.
(31:17)
Now, another note that we should take is you don't really need to set aside more than one hour or an hour and a half at most for resistance training. When you go to the gym and you're going to do a resistance training session, you don't need to be in the gym for hours and hours and an hours. Now, I know that some people do like to train for two or three hours, but keep in mind that when it comes to resistance training and working out in general, that you're going to get a diminishing return on the investment of energy that you put into your workout. So whatever you do at the beginning of your workout is what is going to benefit the most. And if you work out for hours and hours and hours, what you train towards the end, you're not really going to get a whole lot of benefit from it.
(31:57)
Versus if you were to train that within an hour and an hour and a half, our central nervous systems, they fatigue over time and you're just not going to get the muscle activation that you would get if you kept your workouts to a shorter period of time. And so when we're trying to grow the muscles, when we're trying to build strength, we want the central nervous system to be able to activate as much of the muscles as possible. So keep that in mind. You do not need to be working out for hours and hours and hours. Some people do it because they think it's fun. Some people do it because they feel like they need to, but that's just not the case. And in fact, you may actually be hurting your gains if you are in the gym for more than an hour and a half hitting those muscles because again, you may put yourself at risk of over-training.
(32:41)
Your body is only going to yield as so much benefit from those exercises. There's a diminishing return on that investment. Now, with that said, I recommend putting your compound or more technically difficult exercises at the beginning of your workout because that's when your body is fresh. That's when your central nervous system is able to activate everything. And so you want to put your technically complex things like squats and deadlifts at the beginning or towards the beginning of your workout. You don't necessarily need to do it first, but when you are more fresh, that's going to be safer for you because you're going to be able to activate your muscles more. Your central nervous system is going to be more connected to your muscles, so you're less likely to slip on your technique, and then you can kind of finish off as your workout goes along.
(33:29)
You can finish off the little muscle groups in isolation with more isolation exercises like bicep curls, tricep, kickbacks that work just one muscle. Save those towards the end of your workout. So we get the more complex compound exercises first, and then work your way down to the isolation exercises. And then one more note when we're talking about resistance training. If you want to continue to build muscle over time, you want to continue to get stronger over time, you need to make sure that you are always giving your muscles a little bit more challenge than what they're used to. So over time, as your muscles get stronger, you're going to need to add more repetitions or you're going to need to add more weight or more exercises or more frequency, something more to your muscles to give them the challenge that they need to keep getting stronger.
(34:20)
Remember, your body is a smart system. It's going to adapt to whatever stimulus you give it. So if you work out for weeks and weeks and you use the same amount of weight and you do the same number of repetitions for the same exercises, you're going to reach a plateau. And a plateau is a point where your body doesn't change very much or it doesn't change at all, right? You're not getting stronger, you're not burning more fat, you're not burning more calories. Your body is just staying like this. So if you have been doing the same exercise, the same routine, and you haven't changed anything or added more reps, added more weight, you're going to be in that plateau. So if you've hit a plateau, change something, do something different in your workouts, add something more, add more reps, add more weight, add another training day, add another exercise to hit the same muscle group.
(35:06)
We call this the principle of progressive overload. So we always want to be giving the muscles a challenge a little bit more than what they're used to. That said, I highly recommend tracking your workouts. Write them down or use some kind of a workout tracking app. Now, I have actually created some workout tracking worksheets that you can download, print out and put into a little notebook for yourself to write down and track what you do every time you go to the gym. You want to write down what exercises you do, how many reps you do in each set, how much weight you use or whatever resistance you're using, and then how hard it was for you, your scale of one to 10 rate of perceived exertion, or write down how many reps you had in the tank. And you want to use this data to help yourself know when it's time to progress.
(35:55)
For example, if you have been working out and you've done the same routine three or four times, and you look back at your workout tracking logs and you've used the same weight, you've done the same number of reps, you know it's time to advance. So keeping a record of your workouts, writing them down is a great to consistently practice that principle of progressive overload. I've also very recently come out with some new journals that you can buy off Amazon. These are monthly fitness tracking journals that you can use to track your progress, including your workouts, and they come in a variety of different designs. So check out the link in the show notes for those. And the link to the free downloadable tracking sheet is also in the show notes. Now, if everything that I said went way over your head and you're just like, I still am not sure how to organize my workouts, it's okay.
(36:50)
A lot of people really don't like to program for themselves, meaning they don't like to schedule what exercises they're going to do and how they're going to organize their workouts. So in that case, I recommend getting onto a pre-planned program, which is an exercise program where someone tells you this is the schedule, these are the exercises you do on day one. These are the exercises you do on day two. You can look up different workout programs on bodybuilding.com. There's a ton of free programs available on the internet if you specifically want to try one of my programs. There's a couple of different ways that you can do that. I do have some follow along workouts that are available on Vimeo. If you go to the link underneath this video or the link in the show notes, I have a subscription service where I'm adding new follow along workouts to my Vimeo channel every month.
(37:39)
And you can just follow along with those. And you don't have to think about splitting up your workouts because those workouts are already planned out for you. So you can follow along with those. There's also an app version of those workouts that you can access through the Trainer Eyes app and the link for that, the Body Sculpt Program on Trainer Eyes is in the description and in the show notes as well. So if you specifically want to do my programming and access my videos, and I'll break down how to do these exercises, check out those links. Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and if you found this episode helpful, I would love if you could leave a like and a comment on the YouTube or subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I'll see you again soon in the next episode. And in the meantime, make sure that you stay hydrated, drink some water, eat some protein, eat your veggies, and I'll see you soon.

1: Total Body Training

If you’re in the first 6 months of your resistance training, I suggest sticking to a 2-3 day program doing Total Body training in all of your workouts. Total Body workouts train all major muscle groups in each session (upper body, lower body, and core).

This style program is recommended for beginners because you don’t really need to hit each muscle group for more than 1 or 2 exercises per day to get stronger and build muscle. Once you have been training consistently for at least 6 months, then you can split out your workouts to focus on one or a handful of muscle groups (like in the options below).

Note that this style program is also great if you have limited time available to train during the week, even if you are more intermediate or advanced.

2: Upper-Lower Split

Once my clients have been doing resistance training consistently for 2-3 days per week for 6 months, I move them into an Upper-Lower 4-day split program.

This style program focuses each training session on either upper body muscles (arms, chest, back, etc) or lower body (legs & glutes).

Training like this allows you to increase the amount of load each muscle group gets in your training sessions (doing 2-3 exercises for the chest, then the lats, etc). In a beginner-level Total Body program, for example, you might do 1 or 2 exercises for the legs in one training session. However, with an Upper-Lower split, you’ll hit the legs with 3 to 5 different exercises. This increase in load will give the muscles the increased challenge they need to keep making gains.

3: Push, Pull, Legs (PPL)

Another way to split up your exercises throughout the week is to do a Push, Pull, Legs routine. This type of workout split is based on movement patterns and is especially helpful for athletes.

For a Push, Pull, Legs split, each workout focuses on a specific type of movement pattern involving a certain group of muscles.

Push Day exercises usually include movements primarily targeting the muscles of the chest, shoulders, and triceps (like chest press, shoulder presses, and triceps dips).
Pull Day workouts are focused on exercises that emphasize pulling movements, primarily targeting the muscles of the back and biceps. This often includes pullups or pulldowns, rows, biceps curls, and different deadlift variations.
Legs Day workouts include exercises that heavily involve the legs muscles, like squats, lunges, leg press, and certain deadlift variations.

4: Movement Pattern Emphasis

Similar to a Push, Pull, Legs split, a Movement Pattern Emphasis split program focuses on movement patterns such as squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling, and rotating. This can help improve functional strength and athletic performance.

5: Body Part Split (“bro split”):

Body Part Split programs are popular among people who are interested in building muscle and achieving an aesthetic physique. In this style of programming, each gym session targets a specific muscle or muscle group with at least 2 exercises, usually with high volume (many reps). Bodybuilders and “gym bros” often train with a body part split to maximize hypertrophy (muscle size).