Creating your own muscular strength workout to build bullet-proof muscles

Here’s how to create your own muscular strength workout.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Remember, the following are just general guidelines.

Be sure to adjust your weight training variables to levels commensurate with your own physical abilities, training experience, and exercise goals.

Your program should be appropriate for you.

Decide on the mode of exercise (free weights, weight machines, resistance bands, body weight, etc.) that is most practical and convenient for you.

The greater the ease, convenience and practicality, the better your chances of adhering to exercise over the long haul.

Ultimately, your success and the results you seek are not only dependent upon the quality of effort you provide, but also upon your ability to persist over time.

Need more help building muscle?

See Blake's Building-Muscle101.com website for beginner to advanced weight lifting routines to help you build size, strength, and power.

Beginners should aim for at least 2 training sessions per week as a minimum.

Generally, 2 to 3 non-consecutive workouts weekly is recommended making sure you allow 24 to 48 hours of rest and recovery between workouts for the same muscle group.

Intermediate level exercisers will often train 3 to 4 times, while advanced exercisers may train more than 4 times weekly.

These folks tend to devote an entire workout to a few specific muscle groups. This is how they can train more than 4 times a week and still respect the 24 to 48 hour rest and recovery protocol per muscle group. This method of training is called a “split routine”.

The most basic of all split routines involves splitting your training into upper and lower body workouts.

For example, you might train your upper body on Mondays and Thursdays and lower body on Tuesdays and Fridays. This allows you to workout 4 days per week but only train your muscles twice.

However, beginners should stick to a full body workout, training the entire body once per workout for a total of 2 to 3 workouts each week.

Create your muscular strength workout - Exercise Selection

Begin by choosing a minimum of 7 to 10 exercises to target the major muscles of your chest, back, shoulders, arms, hips, thighs, legs, and abdomen. Perform each exercise through the full pain free range of motion.

See the Exercise Library - Physical Fitness Exercises for examples of exercises you can use to create your own workouts.

A multi-joint exercise is one that involves movement at two or more joints in your body and recruits one or more large muscle groups.

For example, both a Chest Press and Dumbbell Fly work the pectoral muscles. However, the Fly involves motion at the shoulder joint exclusively while the Chest Press involves motion at the shoulder and elbow joints.

Similarly, both the Squat and Leg Extension work the quadriceps muscle. However, the Leg Extension only involves motion at the knee joint while the Squat involves motion at the ankle, knee, and hip joints.

Additionally, the Squat exercise also recruits muscle fibres of the gluteus maximus and hamstrings as well as the quadriceps- so you’re training more muscles with the same exercise. It's almost like doing 3 exercises in one...

And performing your muscular strength workout in a time-efficient manner is important.

Statistics consistently show that drop out rates increase with sessions lasting longer than 1 hour.

Therefore, choosing multi-joint exercises over single-joint exercises for the majority of your workout is not only more time-efficient but you better your chances of sticking to your program over the long haul.

Create your muscular strength workout - Volume: Sets and Reps

A repetition or “rep” as it is more often referred to, is one complete movement of an exercise through a full range of motion.

A “set” is a group of repetitions performed consecutively.

The American College of Sports Medicine recommends performing 1 set of 8 to 12 reps for each of your exercises.

There is some controversy in the industry regarding the appropriate number of sets required to solicit physiological adaptations in muscle fibres.

The large amount of research conducted in recent years is helping to bridge that gap.

An overload beyond a minimal threshold results in strength development. The amount of muscular tension needed is about 60 to 80% of a muscle's maximum force.

Some scientists have provided valid research demonstrating that 1 set of an exercise performed to volitional fatigue is sufficient to elicit improvements in both muscular strength and endurance.

Other researchers have reported superior results from multiple-set training.

No study to date however, has successfully demonstrated that single-set training produces better results than multiple-set training.

Hence, single-set training can be particularly advantageous for beginners who often cannot complete multiple sets of the same exercise.

Or, for those who are in a 'maintenance' phase of training (those who have reached their goals and now seek long-term maintenance of gains made).

As a beginner starting out, you should note that once you achieve an initial level of fitness, you may wish to add more sets to each exercise you perform to continue making further gains.

Bear in mind that single-set training is much more efficient in terms of time considerations. That is its great advantage. Shorter workouts tend to improve exercise compliance.

Note also that the number of sets you perform does not have to be identical for all of your exercises.

Continue on to Part 3 to keep building your muscular strength workout...

Go directly to your next topic: Part 3- Strength Training Routines



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