Your week will look like this: Day One: Lift Day Two: Rest, grow Day Three: Lift Day Four: Rest, grow Day Five: Lift Day Six: Rest, grow Day Seven: Rest Rest plenty between sets. This isn't a cardio workout, so it doesn't matter how out of breath you get. Rest a good minute between sets—more if needed. (You can perform the lifts in a circuit/superset or not—both approaches will build muscle similarly well. ) Use this as a foundation, add lifts that help you accomplish your goals. Want bigger glutes? Add in a couple sets of one-legged hip thrusts. Want bigger biceps? Add in a couple sets of bicep curls at the end of your workout. Once you have completed a few sets of these main exercises you can do more exercise if you choose to. Pair it with muscle-building nutrition. In order to gain weight you'll need to work on your nutrition as well. Combining this workout with enough calories and enough protein is key in order to gain weight and build muscle. We're going to cover some basic nutrition principles in our next article!
Now, using the above logic, for a set to be beneficial to your growth, it needs to be 100% effort. So, a 100% effort set of an exercise, will make you grow. Then, what is the point to do a second set of that exercise? You cannot go more than 100%. The muscle already has been taxed by 100% from the first set, so why should you do a second one? You will just eat into your recovery ability. So, you should only do one set to failure per exercise. Later on, I will describe the training program and how exercises and warm-ups are involved. A muscle will not grow until it's recovered. The muscle will not begin to recover until the nervous system is recovered. It takes roughly 24hours for the nervous system to recover from a workout. Only then will the muscle begin to recover and grow. So, you should never train 2 days in a row. Even if you train different bodyparts, you still use the same nervous system. You train 2 days in a row, your nervous system recovers, but by the time the muscles begin to, you train again, so the body has to concentrate again on recovering the nervous system.
You do one warm-up for the first exercise of each bodypart, only to optimise the firing of te neuropathways. Let's use chest as an example - if for example your max (work set) in the incline press is 3 plates, then you do 2 warm-ups with the bar, 2 warm-ups with one plate, 1 warm-up with 2 plates and then your work set with 3 plates. The work set is a set where you fail at about 6 reps. Every workout, you have to do more reps or increase the weight in that work set (remember, the muscle has to do something that it has not done before). So if one work out you fail with 6 reps, the following nothing less than 7. When you reach 8 reps, the following workout you should do (increase) a weight where you can do minimum 4 reps. Then increase your reps again every workout until you reach 8 again, and so on. Each rep has a tempo of 2-1-1. That is 2 seconds in the negative, one second in the contraction and 1 second in the positive. Then, after you fail in the incline press, you move straight to flat flyes.