A QUICK LOOK AT THE FIRST WORKOUT
- Week 1: Full-body split
- Week 2: Two-day split: Upper body/Lower body
- Week 3: Three-day split: Push/Pull/Legs
- Week 4: Four-day split: Full body
Weekly Catch Up
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This programme isn’t just for people who have never lifted a weight before; it’s also good for people who haven’t worked out in a long time. When was the last time you went to the gym often? How long? A year? How long? No worries: The following habits will help you get back on track in, you guessed it, only four weeks. Let’s get to work.
WEEK 1: WHOLE IN ONE
Muscular Size & Strength
You will start the programme with a full-body training split. This means that you will work out all of your major body parts during each workout, instead of “splitting up” your training. This first week, you should work out three times, but only do one exercise per body part at each session. It’s important to give your body a day off between workouts so it can recover. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are good days to work out because Saturday and Sunday are rest days.
Full-Body Training
You will start the programme with a full-body training split. This means that you will work out all of your major body parts during each workout, instead of “splitting up” your training. This first week, you should work out three times, but only do one exercise per body part at each session. It’s important to give your body a day off between workouts so it can recover. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are good days to work out because Saturday and Sunday are rest days.
Hypertrophy
In Week 1, you’ll do three sets of each exercise during each workout. This adds up to nine sets for each body part over the course of the week, which is a good starting volume for your goals. Except for crunches for your abs, you’ll do between 8 and 12 reps per set. This rep scheme is used by both amateur and professional bodybuilders because it is thought to be the best way to get bigger muscles (this is called “hypertrophy” in the scientific world).
Body Builder
In the workouts below, you’ll see that the first set calls for eight reps, the second set calls for ten reps, and the third set calls for twelve reps. In the world of bodybuilding, this is called a “reverse pyramid,” since a normal pyramid goes from more reps to fewer reps. For each set, you decrease the weight so that you can do the higher number of reps. For example, if you did eight lat pulldowns with 140 pounds in your first set, try 120 or 130 pounds in your second set and 100 to 120 pounds in your third set.
WEEK 2: SPLIT DECISION
You’ve only been doing the programme for a week, but you’ll already start training different parts of your body on different days with a two-day training split (meaning the entire body is trained over the course of two days, rather than one as in the first week). This week, you’ll train for a total of four days. Monday and Thursday are upper-body days, and Tuesday and Friday are lower-body days. Each body part will be trained twice. Your days to rest will be Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Several of the exercises from Week 1 carry over to Week 2, but one move is added to each body part routine (except for the abs) so that you can work all muscle groups from more angles. For example, there are two exercises for the chest: One is a compound movement (dumbbell bench press) that uses multiple joints (shoulder and elbow) to work as many muscles as possible, and the other is an isolation exercise (dumbbell flye) that uses only one joint (shoulder) and works the pecs more. Presses for the chest involve the deltoids and triceps to some degree, so they don’t focus on the pecs as much as flyes do.
You’ll use the reverse pyramid rep scheme again, but on your third set of each exercise in Week 2, you’ll do 15 reps instead of 12. Even though 15 reps is just outside of the best range for building muscle, these sets will help you increase your muscle endurance. This will give you a solid base on which to build size and strength in the future.
WEEK 3: THREE ON THREE
In the third week of the programme, we split the training over three days: Train your “pushing” body parts (chest, shoulders, and triceps) on Day 1, your “pulling” body parts (back and biceps) and your abs on Day 2, and your lower body (quads, glutes, hamstrings, and calves) on Day 3. As in Week 2, you work out each body part twice a week, so this week you’ll go to the gym six times.
One new exercise is added to each body part’s routine to give you more ways to work your muscles and help them grow in all directions. You’ll do two exercises for 3–4 sets for each muscle group. Large body parts like the chest, back, shoulders, quads, and hamstrings will get four sets, while smaller body parts will get three (biceps, triceps, abs, calves). Again, working in the 8–15-rep range, this adds up to 16 sets for large body parts and 12 sets for smaller ones, which is a big increase in volume from Week 1.
WEEK 4: TURNING UP THE VOLUME
In the fourth and final week of the programme, you’ll train each body part only once over four days (except for calves and abs, which are each trained twice). Experienced lifters often use four-day splits because they train fewer body parts (usually two or three) per workout. This gives each muscle group enough attention and lets you train with a higher volume. As you’ll see, the chest and triceps are paired together, as are the back and biceps, and the quads and hamstrings. Each of these is a very common way for beginner and advanced bodybuilders to pair muscles. Shoulders are worked on more or less on their own, and every other workout, you’ll switch between calves and abs, which respond well to being worked on more than once a week. In Week 4, there are no new exercises, so you can focus on how hard you work out instead of learning new moves.
This week, the number of reps stays in the hypertrophy range, but the overall volume goes up because more sets are added to each exercise: up to five sets per move for larger body parts, and even 10 sets of calf raises on Thursday. This increase in weight will make sure that your muscles are overworked enough to keep growing like they have been for the past three weeks. After you finish this four-week programme, you can move on to the next step.
