Different workout plans, which one to choose?
Question:
I am 25 year old woman, otherwise I’m in decent shape, I do cardio exercising 3 – 4 times a week. I have been reading about building muscle. Especially I have interest to get a bit bigger and firmer butt, but how should I workout? One webpage I read suggested that I should exercise one muscle group only once in a week and have different exercise days for different muscle groups, like back and legs on Monday, arms on Tuesday etc. One other workout program suggested, that I would workout my whole body 3 -4 times a week. Then there are exercising till failure, long sets, short sets etc. This make me pretty confused. How should I workout? How would I get more muscles mass to my butt and other desired places? How would I get a bit more toned muscles on other body parts?
Answer:
The answer here could be short, if you are a beginner, just exercise your whole body three to four times a week. First I have to say I’m no pro-bodybuilder so anything written here cannot be taken as an advice to get mega muscles, but as an advice to get bigger muscles or toned muscles.
When you start working out at the gym, usually the first six months to first year are a time of rapid muscle growth and you can notice almost every week that your results are a bit better than they where on the last week. In the beginning, during the first year of heavy weight exercising, the most important thing is to keep your weightlifting moves as correct as possible. This way you learn the correct movements from the beginning.
To answer the question “which workout you should choose, which is the BEST workout plan?”. There is no simple answer, over the years I have observed and noticed myself after trying out different workout plans that the most effective plan seems to be as simple as going to gym regularly 3 to 4 times a week. Exercise hard, and use the sets and repetitions which help you to achieve YOUR aims. That said, as people are different, different people and their bodies respond differently to different kinds of exercising. Other feel that workout plans with special days for muscle groups work the best, other feel, like me, feel that working out the whole body three times a week is the best choice. It is up to you to try out which method suits you the best. But I try to go through few things about the exercising to help you get started.
First important thing to understand about muscles is the concept of adaptation, your muscles require the change of stimulus from time to time. Your muscles will adapt to exercises which are done in the same way with same resistance on consecutive exercising sessions. This makes it important to change the resistance, variate exercise moves and techniques as well as number of repetitions to keep your muscles growing and busy. One simple way is to do 15 repetition weeks and after few weeks change to 8-10 repetition sets for couple of weeks and then back to 15 repetition sets.
As a general rule, the 15 repetition sets are for basic muscle fitness and for “toning” your muscles. It is a good idea to start with 15 repetition sets and learn the exercise movements. It isn’t bad idea to do 15 repetition set weeks later on, to keep up your muscles basic endurance. Obviously, the 15 repetition sets have to be done with quite light weights. In the long run the endurance is a big factor, you will hit a wall if you never do a bit longer 12-15 repetition sets.
6 – 12 repetition sets are the ones you are looking for, they are the best for getting muscle hypertrophy, gaining muscle in English. Important thing here is to push your muscles to their max, nobody benefits from just lifting barbell up and down, it has to be hard. Choose weights that make your muscles work hard and on the last set of the specific exercise will feel hard to complete. There is nothing more important when you exercise and want to gain muscle mass than to do exercises with big enough weights. Remember still to keep the movements clean.
1 – 5 repetition sets are more for getting more power and strength. It doesn’t mean that your muscles will not grow, but 6 – 12 repetitions are better. It is still wise to do 5 repetition weeks now and then just to get your muscles to accustomed to bigger weights.
For the beginning and first three months I would suggest following program:
Exercise your whole body on one exercise session, 3 – 4 times a week, with 3 – 4 sets of each exercise.
Weeks 1 – 4: just learn the exercise movements, take it easy but still keep the exercises hard. Do 12 – 15 repetition sets.
Weeks 5 – 6: Do 10 repetition sets.
Week 7 – 8: Do 15 repetition sets.
Weeks 9 – 10: Do 10 repetition sets.
Week 11: Do 6 – 8 repetition sets. Use as big weights as you can.
Week 12: Do 10 repetition sets.
After this, read again about different workout programs, I try to cover the topic a bit more detailed later on. If you have certain body part, like your butt, you would like to get bigger muscles, you can focus more on it by doing 8 – 12 repetition weeks and 6 – 8 repetition weeks. Remember to use as big weights as you can to keep your muscles getting stimulus to grow. If you desire of getting a bigger butt, go through different butt exercises to decide which ones suit you the best, do 3 – 4 different butt exercises in one exercise to really get your butt a good workout. Still try to keep your overall weight exercise time in about 1 hour.