If you are looking to tone up and burn fat, then you need to do a training program that will hit you relatively lightly and fast, and that won’t let up. This is the kind of training that will help you to tone muscle and that will encourage the body to plunder fat stores for energy.
However if you want to build serious muscle and see yourself grow then you want to use a different approach. Here are two bodybuilding programs for more serious hypertrophy.
Split Routine
A split routine means that you’re splitting your body up into different parts and then hitting each muscle group hard on a separate day. This might mean something like:
Monday: Biceps
Tuesday: Triceps and Shoulders
Wednesday: Lats and Traps
Thursday: Abs and CV
Friday: Pecs
Saturday: Legs
Sunday: Rest
Or it might mean something where you have slightly more rest and combine complimentary muscle groups onto the same day. For instance:
Monday: Biceps and Lats
Tuesday: Traps and Pecs
Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: Legs and Abs + CV
Friday: Triceps and Shoulders
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: Rest
Of course the first program is more intense than the second, and the first can be used to build more muscle, but the latter is more useful if you don’t have as much time or if you aren’t quite up to a workout so intense at your current stage.
The reason this works so well is that it allows you to hit the individual muscles with six or seven different workouts without pausing. This then means that you are able to cause maximum damage to the muscle fibers resulting in lots of microtears and thus lots of muscle growth. At the same time each muscle group then has all week to recover before being targeted specifically again meaning it has plenty of time to come back bigger and stronger (as long as you rest and eat lots of protein). This is basically a case of working hard, hitting the muscle groups in a big way, and then resting hard so they come back and that’s what results in muscle growth, not lots of little sessions that never let up but don’t cause much harm either.
Compound Program
If you are more interested in building functional power though and you admire the physiques of the world’s strongest men more than Frank Zane’s, then you might want to train using just the big compound movements. Compound movements are exercises that hit lots of muscle groups at once and require them to work in unison and this means things like deadlifts and bench press. These trigger the production of a lot of growth hormone and other anabolic hormones, and crucially they force the muscles to work together in unison – which is the way that you use them when you’re really training.
To do this right and to build strength you are looking at doing only a very few reps in each set but having the weights incredibly heavy. This is for building strength so that means you’re constantly challenging yourself to lift as much as you can. For more strength training tips visit my blog Training Products Reviewed.