5 Simple Steps To Building Your Own Gym Programme

Goal

Initially you must select a goal. When I mention a goal I’m talking about what do you actually want to get out of the programme? Is it just to work on your general health? Build as much muscle as possible? Lower your body fat while maintaining muscle? Or could it be for injury prevention or for a particular sport you play? Whatever your goal, this process will still be relevant for each, just bear in mind that the next 4 components will vary depending on that goal.

Days Per Week

Next step is to figure out how many days per week you have available to train. Before you even think about an exercise you need to be clear on how much time you have available to dedicate to the gym. Again this is dictated by your goal, if it’s to build as much muscle as possible, there’s a chance you may need more days in the gym compared to someone who just wants to improve general health. So get super clear on point one and you can start to put in place the days per week you want to train. Now for the next step, do you potentially need to add a rest day between sessions? For example if you are planning to mainly resistance train and you want to follow a programme in which you are training different muscle groups on different days, you won’t train your legs on a Monday and a Tuesday, ideally you’d want some time to recover between them sessions (again dependant on the goal and intensity). So an example may look like this:

Monday - Back & Biceps

Tuesday - Rest

Wednesday - Legs & Shoulders

Thursday - Rest

Friday - Legs & Core

Saturday - Cardio

Sunday - Rest

Exercise Selection

Only when you’ve decided steps one and two can you start to put into place exercises that are going to build your sessions. Again this is goal dependent but I’m going to work off the example that your main priority is resistance training and you want to lose body fat and maintain muscle. There are a few key areas/movements you want to include in your programme. They are as follows:

A Squat

A Deadlift

A Row

A Press

A Hip Thrust

There are a few reasons I’ve included the above movements/exercises, firstly they are the main compound movements, meaning they involve multiple joints and muscles within each movement. This means that you will be expending more energy when carrying out these exercises compared with smaller isolation exercises such as bicep curls - However that doesn’t mean that isolation exercises can’t play an important role within your programme. Secondly you will notice that these movements

Ideally you want to build your sessions are these movements, now again we have to look at how many days per week you’re training to give us an idea of what exercises to include and where, but using the same example from earlier I’m going to give you a rough overview of how a session may look.

Monday - Back & Biceps

Compound exercises first

Assisted Pull Ups

Deadlift

Bent Over Row

DB Bicep Curls

Seated Row

BB Curls

Lat Pulldown

DB Hammer Curls

So as you can see I’ve started with the main compound lifts; pull ups, deadlifts (some people like to include these within leg training days or back day) and bent over rows. As I mentioned earlier, these use multiple joints and muscle groups which makes them more taxing on the body, so we want to perform these while we are fresh with good technique.

Sets/Reps/Rest

A recurring theme here but your reps, sets and rest again depends on your goal. I’m going to continue with my example above to give you an outline of how it may look for this trainee that wants to lose body fat and maintain muscle. I don’t want to go too deep into what builds muscle in this post but let me give you a brief overview of where you want to focus your attention, first thing is volume. Volume is the total amount of work we are doing, and you may see this written as reps x sets x weight. If any of them three factors increase then the total volume will go up. Next thing to consider is intensity, should you be trying to lift weights until you literally can’t lift anymore? Known as failure. Well the answer is still not fully understood. The main drivers of muscle growth from a purely physical (in the gym) perspective seem to be, mechanical tension, muscle damage and metabolic stress

Mechanical tension - Think of the force and the stretch we create when adding load to any exercise.

Muscle damage - When we lift weights we cause micro tears in the muscle tissue which is thought to then start the process of rebuilding bigger tissue.

Metabolic stress - Think of this as the ‘pump’ you get from weight training. We can manipulate this through reps/sets/rest.

The take home on sets/reps/rest

Studies on muscle hypertrophy (building muscle) are still fairly new and things are always evolving, however based on the most recent studies you want to be looking at around 10-20 sets per muscle group, and working in a rep range of somewhere between 6-12. Rest periods between sets should be somewhere between 60-90 seconds.

Progression

Finally let’s wrap this up and discuss progression and more specially progressive overload. If you are not sure what progressive overload is, it’s the process in which you are making your sessions more difficult over time. Now an obvious way of doing this is simply by increasing the weights you lift, but that isn’t the only option you have available to make your sessions harder, here are some more:

• More reps

• More sets

• Less rest

• More sessions per week = more volume

• Change the tempo of the movement

• Different exercises

• Different training protocol (ie supersets, tri sets etc)

• Longer sessions = more volume

The thought around progressive overload is once the muscle adapts to the training stimulus you are giving it, they will eventually stop progressing/growing. If I asked you to pick up a 10kg kettlebell everyday for 10 reps, your body will adapt to this stimulus, so if we want them to continue growing, we need to change something, eg, If I then ask you to pick up a 30kg kettlebell for 10 reps, your body will struggle and need to potentially rebuild stronger tissue to adapt top that stimulus and so on, until you end up the size of Thor lifting cars ;-)

However before you start adding more weight to the bar or throwing extra exercises into your programme, it’s important that you are performing each movement to the best of your ability and not neglecting your technique. Build a good foundation, then work on progression.

So I hope this post gives you an overview of how to build your own gym programme to get yourself started. If you would like more information on how you can work with me then drop me an email at mark@coachclegg.com. I have some new 6 week starter packages available to get you started in the gym.