Designing a Workout for Your Dream Body

One of the most common things I hear is, “I need a weights routine but I don’t know how to meet my goals.” Fortunately, it’s not as overwhelming as you might think to tweak the variables in a weight-lifting workout.  And the reward is an outcome that you wanted instead of one you didn’t expect or didn’t get. It’s like ordering from a gourmet menu - and you get to control what the food tastes like!

While you can use other people’s workouts, including the ones in this blog, you really should be able to develop your own so that you can stay ahead of your body’s quick and efficient methods of adapting. Remember, the only way to improve your body is to place stressors on it.

Envision Your Dream Body

How do you see yourself benefiting from your beautiful, fit body? Do you want get into shape for a vacation? Knock out physically challenging tasks without injuring yourself? Be comfortable playing sports with your kids? Play beach volleyball in a bikini? (Wow, that is ambitious! But doable!)

Your goals (and motivators) will dictate how you train, so you must be very clear about what they are. Once you know your overall goals, drill down to these more specific goals and train accordingly (see how below).

And You Want the End Result to be…

I will describe how to get results below, but first you must identify the exact changes you’d like to see in your body.

Increase strength endurance. Being able to maintain force for prolonged periods of time requires endurance. I’m not going to cover muscle endurance here, because that is simply being able to perform the same task over and over for prolonged periods. For strength endurance, you need to combine methods for hypertrophy and strength (next).

Build muscle (hypertrophy). Even women want bigger muscles. If you do, you need to train (and eat) for big muscles. That means about 500 calories over what you normally eat – men and women and lifting big and heavy.

Develop muscle definition. The only difference between building muscle (above) and developing a lean, sculpted look is having lower body fat. This means eating lean and regular incorporating cardio as well as weight lifting. You’ll need to lift hard and heavy just as you would with building muscles, but to get cut you’ll need to really lean out your diet while still eating enough to grow.

Boost strength. You may’ve heard it before: You need to be strong to lift heavy, and you can’t get big (or defined) muscles unless you lift heavy. Or maybe you simply want to be stronger. Regardless, you need to train for this adaptation.

There are other levels of weight training, such as power, but I don’t have the band width here to cover that topic. I’m also not covering improving health here because you already know that weight training will give you health benefits!

You may notice I didn’t include losing weight on this list, although I know it’s a goal for many. Since this is a weight lifting blog, I simply can’t cover that subject in depth here. There are many resources on this subject. Just remember that weights should supplement your weight loss program – muscle burns more calories than fat and raises your metabolism. Doing circuits and supersets will also intensify the calorie burn during and after weights sessions.

With any of these goals, you need to commit to loving the iron. Are you ready? Will you give yourself what you deserve?

Train for Your Goals

Now that you’ve pinpointed your goals, you need to train based on your goals. Keep in mind that the more specific your goals are (such as, “I want a bubble butt”), the more specifically you can train.

Variables You Control

Use the following variables as a guide, and as you become more experienced, you should become concerned with a few additional components (covered in future posts), such as cycling your workouts (periodization). Also please keep in mind that how you train will depend on your fitness level.

• Repetition: A complete movement of an exercise.
• Set: A group of consecutive repetitions.
• Rest intervals: The amount of recovery time between each set.
• Frequency: How many times per week you train. How to divide up your muscle groups is another common question. If you’re a beginning to intermediate weight lifter, three full-body sessions per week will give you great results. If you’re an advanced lifter and want to focus on individual muscle groups at length, you can use a split routine, working different muscles each session.

…And More Exciting Choices

• Exercises. Which weight lifting movements you choose. How many exercises you do per muscle group will depend on how many times per week you work out. A rule of thumb is 12 sets per week per muscle group (fewer for small muscles). So if you do 4 exercises for legs at 4 sets each, that’s 16 sets. That’s more than plenty for the entire week. Some effective exercises include:
• Glutes: Squats, back extension, lunges, hip extension, glute bridge (more here)
• Quads: Squats, leg press, leg extension, lunges
• Hamstrings: Lying leg extension, hip extension, stiff-legged deadlift
• Calves: Seated calf raise, standing calf raise, calf press
• Back: Back extension, deadlift, lat pull down, cable row
• Chest: Incline chest press, flat bench press, dumbbells flyes, push ups, dips
• Shoulders: Arnold press, iron cross, military press, rear delt flyes
• Triceps: Triceps push downs, lying tricep extension, overhead tricep extension, dips
• Biceps: Concentration curl (or preacher curl), Barbell or dumbbell bicep curl, cross-body curl, hammer curl

Also check out the many online guides for learning to perform exercises, such as Bodybuilding.com and MuscleandStrength.com.

• Intensity. How much effort you expend, i.e., how much weight you lift. One way of figuring this out is to use a percentage of intensity (such as your one-rep max), but many beginning to intermediate lifters simply use this rule: Lift as much as you can lift for the target number of reps, ensuring that your muscles are fatigued by the last rep. That doesn’t mean you cannot do another rep (called lifting to failure); that simply means your muscles are very tired by the last rep. If you can do more reps than your target range, increase the weight. Similarly, if you cannot complete the target number of reps, decrease the weight. The body’s job is to adapt, and your job is to stay ahead of your body’s adaptations.
• Duration. How long you spend exercising during one session. This will depend on your fitness level and time constraints, but just know that anything beyond 60-90 minutes results in rapidly decreasing energy levels. Keeping your workout to under one hour will allow you to maintain strength and energy.
• Other variables. I’ll talk about periodization, or how many weeks to do a particular workout, in another post. For now, focus on performing your newly created workout for four weeks. After that time period, back off the intensity and let your body recover for a few weeks, or change up the variables. The main principal is to constantly change things up.

Enjoy your workout and don’t hesitate to hit me up with questions.

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Tagged as: Exercises, Goals, Weight-Training Basics, Workouts