Creating your own exercise program
Following last week’s post on creating an exercise program, I wanted to breakdown “The rules” for your Basic hypertrophy (building muscle) program, and then tie in how to make sure you can continue to see results which I’ll share in a later post.
Workout Structure: Hypertrophy (gaining muscle mass)
Choose an exercise of your own preference that focuses on the following and repeat each exercise 3-4 times (each set should include 8-12 reps) and focus on the “eccentric” phase of the muscle contraction. Eccentric phase is defined as active contraction of a muscle occurring simultaneously with lengthening of the muscle. For example “lowering” the weight on a bench press or controlling the weight as it goes up on a lat pull down machine.
Upper body push/pull hypertrophy structure for building muscle
Bench press
Bent over barbell row
Core exercise
Lat pull down machine
Barbell overhead press
Core exercise
Dumbell flat bench
Straight arm lat pull down
Core exercise
8-12 reps is just enough time under tension stimulate muscle breakdown with heavy weights. Remember, if you are not “failing” out of every set, than you are missing out on valuable break down! Make sure you can not complete your set, and that the notion of one more rep seems “impossible”.
Kyle is a nationally certified personal trainer, certified nutritionist, and lifestyle motivator out of Los Angeles, CA. He has been training for 5 years and has experience working with top-tier celebrity and executive clientele. When he’s not in the gym, Kyle is reading philosophy or writing poetry.
BosGuy 