How many lifts per workout

This is the amount of time the muscle is under tension or strained during a particular exercise. In essence, you should try to lengthen the time of each phase of the movement.

The phase of the movement we are most concerned with is the stretching phase where you should try for slow eccentric movement. Think of when you do a bicep curl, you can curl the weight up fast but you should slowly lower the weight.

As mentioned above, the goal is hypertrophy so you will want have a good mixture of both compound movements and isolation exercises with a rep range of reps per set. Those new to fitness should start with full body workouts until their bodies get accustomed to exercising. In each full body workout, each muscle group should be targeted, completing 2 sets of reps.

Make sure to give yourself adequate rest and recovery between workout days. Choose one exercise from each of the 12 muscle groups listed below then complete two sets of reps.

Once again, the number of exercises per muscle group should be influenced by individual circumstances including the goals of the person. You should be aiming for sets per muscle group per week split into two sessions. This will keep you fresh, avoiding potential over-training and should give you better gains. Aim for each workout to consist of sets total but with less than 10 sets for a specific muscle group on one day.

To go a step further, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends multi-joint exercises per week. Multiple studies show that the optimal results occur when people train each muscle group twice a week. By training each muscle group twice a week you can work hard with a high intensity without over-training in one particular workout session. This training schedule is also good because it can reduce your time commitment to working out but also give you some amazing results.

There are over muscles in the human body! We will briefly touch on some of the best exercises for certain muscle groups. The following 12 major muscle groups that should be targeted in your exercise regimen. Often overlooked as part of the back muscles the traps can be targeted with particular exercises such as shrugs.

Deadlifts also work the traps because of the strain it causes, the traps are forcefully engaged. The traps help with rotating and moving the shoulder blades while keeping them stable. Your head movements are sustained by your traps. The muscle fibers of the trapezius are split into three areas, the upper, middle and lower. The upper fibers are responsible for extending your neck while also elevating and upwardly rotating the scapula.

The middle fibers retract the scapula and the lower fibers support the upper fibers in upwardly rotating the scapula. The trapezius is considered a superficial muscle, as we can see and feel it. The best exercise to build your trap are different shrug variations. The shoulders are comprised of the front deltoid , side deltoid and rear deltoid. There are exercises that target a specific deltoid or multiple deltoids.

The military press is one major exercise that works all three deltoids aka delts. The delts stretch from the clavicle to the scapula and down to the humerus. Protecting the glenohumeral joint, these muscles help with everyday tasks such as raising your arms to pick something up. They also help support pectoral function, as you will feel when you do a chest workout. The king of shoulder exercises is the military press or overhead press.

Although the military press might be the best shoulder exercise, there are plenty of others that will also help make your shoulders stronger. The shoulder muscles are also engaged in other exercises such as incline bench press and deadlifts. Located on both sides of your sternum is the pectoralis major and pectoralis minor.

If you move your arms up, down or across your body then your pecs are being put to work. You often hear people talking about how much they can bench as a sign of strength but when was the last time you heard someone saying how many weighted dips they could do? The best exercises to build a strong chest are bench press and dips but there are a number of exercises that assist in developing the chest muscles, including:. There are 40 muscles in the back 20 pairs , one the largest muscle groups in your body.

We will only focus on the bigger back muscles such as the erector spinae, rhomboid, teres major and last but not least the latissimus dorsi. While higher volume training does stimulate muscle growth, the amount of weight you use is very important. Here are some general guidelines for the optimal number of exercises per workout that have worked in my programs:. Remember, maximize the contraction for every repetition, utilize good form through a full range of motion or utilize a range of motion that allows YOU to maintain good form , and push yourself hard in every workout.

Meet the Lift Doctor. Jim Smith is a highly respected strength and conditioning coach and Fitness Advisory Board member for Schwarzenegger. It's an exercise lifters love to hate, but split squats are a must for leg gains. Alo Moves instructor Josh Kramer shows a quick and proper warmup that can add gains to your lifts. This means that it's sometimes smarter to focus on training more frequently rather than training longer per session.

Adding sets can be a surefire way to discover your recovery limits. Once you hit this point, you'll struggle to complete the desired number of reps per set. After sets of a heavy compound exercise, you should be exhausted enough that you cannot really continue to get in high quality work with more exercises for the same muscle groups.

You could waste time doing a lot of lower quality, lower intensity work, but this would provide little extra benefit. You can clearly still do work above and beyond this amount, and can clearly still continue to grow and improve. But since the research suggests that more work is increasingly less effective, it's important to question whether or not this is worthwhile, given your goals and level of dedication. Rather than hammering out more and more work and more and more exercises in an increasingly exhausted state, it's smarter to focus on getting in good quality work for just a few exercises.

This also often means that I take longer rests than many people expect. I push hard enough on each set that I need that longer recovery time. Luckily, research also suggests that longer rests are better for both strength and size, contrary to common expectations. There is no hard and fast rule about how many exercises you should use within a workout. But in my experience, focusing on the major movements squat, bench, deadlift, overhead, row and going hard for a few sets followed by one or two accessory exercises for 3 sets each, is more than enough.

When working for strength, you typically want to focus on progression within the rep range, and when working for size you typically want to focus on progression within the rep range. When working for size, I often convert the overhead day into a back day to focus on the relatively larger back musculature instead - a better return on investment for size alone. In this case, the day should look something more like this:. Naturally, these plans need to be modified depending on your needs.

For those with lagging body parts or other weak points, exercises for these muscle groups should take up a fourth or fifth slot in the workout. Adding cardio into this plan also changes the structure a bit. They're also the ones who are most surprised to find these workouts producing even better results.

For progression, overall volume matters more than the exact number of exercises used. At the same time, adding additional exercises results in an added layer of unnecessary complexity.

Recently, I also covered how bodybuilders work out less than most people think - meaning, chances are that you're working out too long if you're training for more than about an hour to an hour and a half at a time.