How To Follow A Workout Program For Lean Muscle

Step 1

[Personal Trainer] Nik, based upon my evaluation of your workout what you're doing before, your diet and in particularly the photos you sent me of your physique, I went ahead and put together a program for you.

Step 2

Muscle Building Program Day 1: [Personal Trainer] Day one will be legs. Speaking of legs and we are just going to do heavy, basic exercises starting with the leg curl, the stiff leg dead lift, squats, leg extensions, leg presses, and walking lunges. Possibly the most hated, but arguably the most effective exercise in the gym - the lunge. [Nik] Lunge? [Personal Trainer] The Lunge. It's good for track right. [Personal Trainer] Absolutely

Step 3

Muscle Building Program Day 2: [Personal Trainer] On day two, we are to train your back and abs. Once again the theme is heavy basic and you are going to have a little bit of training volume in there.

Step 4

We're going to do chin-ups, barbell rows, rack deadlifts, which are essentially just deadlifts from a power rack with the full range of motion and seated cable rows. Using those four exercises were going to target essentially everything from your spinal erectors to the top of your traps.

Step 5

Then finally on back day, we're going to train your abs. There's lots of different exercises that are really good for the abs and there is a lot that are not so good and train primarily the hip flexors. Two of my favorite are reverse crunches on just a regular bench press, followed by a crunch where you're actually holding the bar up over your head, and just crunching with the bar locked out. Works fantastic. You'll feel like you've been kicked in the stomach every time you do it without fail, to me that's the mark of a good ab workout. We'll show you that. I know in the past, you've been doing a lot of incline board work, which is good but it targets the hips more and the abs less.

Step 6

Muscle Building Program Day 3: [Personal Trainer] Day Three - Will be chest and biceps. Now a word about bicep training. I feel a lot of people spend at least 10 times too long on their biceps. When their energies could be better applied to doing other things. With the reduced volume of bicep training, their arms would actually grow more. Following that trend, where not going to do a low whole lot of training directly for your biceps.

Step 7

Your chest, we're gonna hit very hard, with 3 sets of bench press, followed by a machine bench press whether it's the Smith machine, the Hammerstrength or the Nautilus, take your pick. And then hex dumbbell push-ups.

Step 8

For biceps, we're gonna do bicep curls, with three sets and then simply were going to superset reverse curls and drag curls, for 12-15 reps of each, with about 90-second rest intervals.

Step 9

Muscle Building Program Day 4: Now on day four this is going to be your shoulder and tricep day and this is where the redundancy comes into your program. You just come off of training your chest because you're training your chest, you're doing pushing exercises, because you're pushing, your using your triceps. Well the very next day, or Day four of your workout split, whenever it falls relative to three, you'll be training your triceps again. So, this is where the redundancy comes in.

Step 10

You're gonna do the close grip bench press - Great mass builder for triceps.

Step 11

Dumbbell military presses. Ditto for the side delts there.

Step 12

and then you're going to do something similar to what you are doing earlier. You're going to do superset upright rows and barbell shrugs. Great for the traps and side delts.

Step 13

Followed by that - this is more for isolating your shoulders. You're going to do bent over lat raise, a lat raise, and then a front raise. All threes in series. Three sets of those.

Step 14

You're gonna finish that off with three sets of cable push downs for triceps.