As stated in yesterday’s blog, I’ve just set up my new goals and fitness plans for the next 8 weeks. My personal trainer certification instructor and mentor Mike Rickett passed along some great advice to me for both my new routine and routines I develop for my clients: “keep it simple, stupid!”
My new routine is deceptively simple and requires only about 2.5-3 hours TOTAL per week in the gym. Instead of concentrating on each and every little tiny muscle and hitting it from 8 different angles, I’m doing full body workouts that use as many muscles as possible at once. Why spend more time in there if you don’t have to? Efficiency people, efficiency!
I target four muscle groups every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday…the same four muscle groups that you need to work out whether you’re trying to bulk up or cut off the fat. If you want to gain weight, you want exercises that use as many muscles as possible so when you rebuild you’ll rebuild more muscles and get bigger! If you’re trying to lose weight, you want to do exercises that will affect your entire body and stimulate as many of the muscles underneath as you can.
Chest – Most exercises that work your entire chest will also your shoulders and your triceps. This is a good thing. Exercises done with dumbbells will recruit even more muscles to help stabilize your arms as you raise them up and down. I start out my routine with a chest exercise; it can be regular bench press, dumbbell flys, incline dumbbell press, decline bench press, cable crossover, etc. Later on in the week I’ll go into more detail on these exercises, but I make sure to work my chest while also working my shoulders and triceps. Currently rocking some killer man boobs? Get rid of that fat by doing exercises that work your entire chest to burn the most fat on top of them.
Back – Your back is a big collection of a bunch of muscles. I love doing back exercises because a lot of other people hate them. My favorite exercise is probably wide grip pull ups for a number of reasons:
- Pull ups make you feel like a bad ass.
- Rocky does them in a training montage in Rocky IV, maybe the greatest cinematic masterpiece in the history of the world.
- A majority of the activities on Ninja Warrior require INCREDIBLE back and bicep strength, so I figure might as well train in case they call and say they need me.
- They’re freaking tough, and work every damn muscle in your back, biceps, and forearms.
Now, when you do pull ups (and any variation on them – wide grip, narrow grip, underhand, overhand, assisted, etc.) you’ll be using practically every muscle in your back along with your biceps. Two for one!
Quads – Squats. Do them. I avoided squats for years because I thought they were messing up my back. Wrong. The reason the Squats hurt were because I was both doing them wrong and I had very poor lower back strength. Squats work almost every freaking muscle in your body, which is why you need to be doing them. I love watching people in the gym doing “squats” and they go down about two inches and then stand back up. If you’re doing legitimate squats, your thighs should be parallel to the floor at the bottom, which won’t mess up your knees if you keep your butt way back, your back strong, and don’t extend your knees out over the front of your feet. Some other great quad exercises include lunges (boy I hate lunges) and one legged squats.
Hamstrings – Dead lifts – Another exercise I avoided because of my back when I finally realized that I needed to be doing them to build up my lower strength and really see some gains in size. If you do this exercise properly, you’ll see great gains in strength and size in your back and legs, because it works both of them. Also, by the time you’re lifting heavy weights, you’ll be recruiting your shoulders and arms to just hold onto the weight as you raise it and lower it! Now there are all kinds of variations on this that will work those hammies: Romanian dead lifts, straight leg dead lifts, one legged dead lifts, leg curls, etc.
That’s it. Simple enough, right? Instead of spending two hours a day doing eight exercises per muscle group, why not shock the hell out of each of them every time you get in the gym…and get it done in far less time. You might think it’s crazy to hit each of these muscle groups three times a week. Check back tomorrow for my current routine to show you how I use these principles to develop a routine that will promote muscle growth and get some cardio in there as well without over-exhausting my muscles.
-Steve
