Practical Workout Design Manual

Table of Content

• Introduction
• Disclaimer
• Step 0: Reviewing our Variables
• Step 1: Setting Goals and Constraints
• Step 2: Defining Muscle Groups
• Step 3: Building Exercise Library
• Step 4: One Rule to Rule them All
• Step 5: Doing some Maths
• Step 6: Laying the Foundation
• Step 7: Filling it in
• Step 8: Final Notes
• Step 9: Evaluating your program
• Bonus Step: Advanced Programming
• Final Words

Programming for muscle building — a thing every serious gym-goer should learn.

Introduction

Many of us start our gym journey with random training. A machine here, a curl there — we go through the motions with little thought. But soon (some later than others) we realize or are told: there has to be structure and order to our training if we want to see any real results. Of course not knowing anything about that, we jump right into someone’s workout plan which usually is some sort split (one muscle group a day — all too common) and be done with that.

But as we progress in our training career, there comes a point where we want to create workout programs ourselves instead of using someone else’s. Unfortunately, the jump from “using a program” to “creating a program” is very large. What exercises, how often, what set/rep configurations, what kind of spread between workouts, so on, and so on are the questions that immediately pop into our heads. If we try to look up for answers online or find a book, we are usually greeted by abstract articles or too much science and math. But all we want is to create our program that doesn’t suck! Is that too much to ask?

This is where the Practical Workout Design Manual comes in. It’s that bridge between using a pre-made workout plan and a requirement for you to have a Ph.D. in exercise science. What this means is, that you will be required to think, but you won’t be required to THINK. The idea is not to hand over you some sample templates and let you fill in the blanks. Neither it is to give you a blank piece of paper and ask to write a program from scratch with no guidelines. It’s something in between — to give you a direction defined enough so you can follow it without too much effort and when the time comes — break it!

Disclaimer

I do not intend this article series for people who just started training, nor is it intended for people who are already very well versed in creating training plans. Although, for the latter ones, it wouldn’t hurt to skim through to see if there are ways they can improve their competence in programming.

I aim it towards people who already have some amount of training experience, can execute most of the exercises in good form, have used various programs before, but still lack in understanding what goes into building a decent program.

This guide is also in no way meant to cover all the aspects of good programming. That would require a book. I will leave a lot of stuff out, but if I’ve done my job, by the end, you should be able to create a basic workout and improve from there on your own.

Step 0: Reviewing our Variables

Before we make our custom workout plan, let’s summarize what things can we change to accomplish our goals.

Workouts

There are two major workout types: full body and splits. Full body means you train your whole body in a single training session and a split means you train only a part of your body. Some splits become so popular they get their own definitions. For example, upper/lower and push/pull/legs — training only upper or lower body and doing only pushing, pulling or leg exercises per session.

Exercises

There are many ways to group them. The muscle group method is the most common one. For example, exercises for the chest, for biceps, for shoulders, etc. This is the first thing every gym-goer learns. Then we can look at them as compound or isolation, where the former are exercises that require a multi-joint action, and the latter ones — only single. Examples respectively can be Squat — bending the knees and hips, and Biceps Curls — bending only elbows. We can also separate them as free weights or machines. We can further divide free weights into barbells, dumbbells, and kettlebells. While machines can be fixed plane of motion or cables.

A workout can comprise as low as 3 exercises and as high as 12 (that’s still reasonable). But more commonly, you will find workouts between 5 to 8 exercises.

Sets

A set is a continuous effort in an exercise usually comprising multiple repetitions with a rest period in between. There are also many types of sets. Standard sets, supersets, cluster sets, giant sets, drop sets, just to name a few. Most of them are out of the scope of this guide, but I will briefly discuss a few later on.

3 to 5 sets per exercise are the most common, 2 to 6 already pushing to specialized programming. That said, 10 sets or more are not unheard of, but they are more exceptions to the rule.

Rest periods

Rest periods in between sets or exercises can range from 0 to 30 minutes. Most common ones being 2–5 minutes. Going lower or higher is usually because of specialized programming: metabolic training with short rest periods and skill training with long.

Repetitions

A movement executed multiple times with no breaks in between counts as 1 repetition (rep). We can split it into concentric (the up portion) and the eccentric (the down portion). Usually, a movement has both, but specialized programming can emphasize or completely remove either of them. Repetition can also be full or partial. These are advanced concepts and beyond the scope of this manual, so I will not expand on it.

Rep ranges are one of the more debated topics in the muscle building community, but it is agreed upon that lower rep ranges will train strength more, moderate ones — size, while high ones — endurance.

Rep ranges and how they affect different training qualities. Source: strongerbyscience.com

Intensity

Intensity can be absolute, measured in KG/LBS or relative, measured in percentages relative to the maximum weight you can lift for 1 repetition (1 Repetition Maximum). Intensity determines your repetitions — the higher it is, the fewer repetitions you can do. For example, 80% of 1RM is usually around 8 repetitions.

Volume

Volume is a way to calculate how much work you have done per training session/week. There are many ways of doing that, but the easiest and most accurate one is counting Hard Sets. A Hard Set is a set where you finish the set with 0 (reach a point where you can’t do more)* to 5 reps in reserve. Meaning, if you can do over 5 extra reps in the set, it was not a Hard Set.

While this is another hot topic on how many Hard Sets you need for effective training (post novice stage). Taking extreme ends, we could speculate it’s somewhere between 5 and 15 sets per muscle group per training session, and 15–45 sets per week.

* It is important to note that 5 Hard Sets with a 2–3 reps in reserve is not equal to 5 Hard Sets to failure (0 reps in reserve). We will discuss this later.

Progressions

We all know that to progress we need to increase the load we are using. There are multiple ways of doing that. Adding more weight, increasing reps, or sets — are the main ones. Combinations are also popular. Double or Triple progressions are especially helpful if you are stuck. More on that — later.

Step 1: Setting Goals and Constraints

Every program design should begin with a question: What is the goal? Fortunately for you and me, the answer is simple: to build more muscle. We can, of course, emphasize different parts of the body, so in that case, the goal can become: build the upper body, build more legs, build more biceps and so on. We can also completely ignore certain body parts.

Once the goal has been set, the second most important thing is our schedule. How often can we train? How long can we train? These are constraints that our program must work with. Ideally, we should have the freedom to train every day of the week for as long as we need, but the reality is that most of us can’t dedicate so much time.

So, how do goals and schedule constraints affect our programming? Well, to put it simply, the broader the goals, the more training frequency, and duration are required. If we narrow down our goals, then we can either choose the higher frequency or longer workout duration as we don’t need both. This is, of course, when we think about the optimal workout plan. Because one can train once a week, full-body, short duration and still get “some” results.

Different trade-offs of goals, training frequency, and duration. For optimal results, you have to sacrifice at least one of the parameters.

Certainly, there are more constraints than this: sex, age, experience, injury history, just to name a few. We will address them separately in later chapters.

So, before you start creating a training plan, you need to define 3 things:

1. What is your goal exactly?

2. How frequently are you able to train?

3. How long can your workouts last?

Step 2: Defining Muscle Groups

Visual representation of the main muscle groups.

Depending on your goals, you will want to determine exactly which muscles you will want to train, but before that, you need to know what those groups are! The easiest and most common way is as follows:

• Abs — usually separated to Upper/Lower and Obliques.
• Chest — Upper/Lower focus is extremely common.
• Shoulders — Front/Side/Rear is something most of the gym-goers are familiar with.
• Biceps — a complicated muscle group, in reality, sporting 4 muscles that can be emphasized with different exercises. We will not go into that.
• Forearms — often not trained directly, but flexion and extension are how it is usually divided.
• Triceps — a 3 muscle group of Long, Medial and Lateral “heads”.
• Traps — split into Upper/Mid/Lower, focusing separately on Upper.
• Lats — a single large flat muscle that can be split into Upper and Lower, but not by many.
• Erectors — rarely targeted directly.
• Quads — another complicated muscle group but with a relatively easy way of targeting Medial or Lateral parts.
• Glutes — the muscle all girls want to train the most. Minimus, Medius, and Maximus are the 3 gluteal muscles.
• Hamstrings — selective targeting is done via foot placement.
• Calves — you either have them or don’t, as they say. But usually targeted by either standing or seated exercises.

Now if the right side of the list feels intimidating, don’t worry, you can ignore it and just focus on the lefts side only. It’s more than enough to build your program.

Before choosing, though, you need to understand that it is very hard to eliminate a muscle group in its entirety because many human muscles do not operate in isolation. A single action almost always requires multiple muscles, and a single muscle can perform multiple actions. You can, however, favor specific muscle groups while somewhat limiting others.

Now, that’s all set. I would like you to answer these:

1. What muscle groups do you want to train?

2. What muscle groups do you want to emphasize?

3. What muscle groups do you want to target the least?

Step 3: Building Exercise Library

So far so good. We already have some sense of your schedule and your goals, but now we need an exercise list from which to select from. Since this is your first time building a program, you probably don’t have such a list. So, here’s what I want you to do.

Open your favorite spreadsheet editor or just pick a pen and paper. Write the muscle groups you want to train and then write all the exercises (and their variations) you know that target those muscle groups. If you are not sure about which muscle groups they work, just google “[exercise name] muscles worked”. When you run out of exercises you know, google “best exercises for [muscle group]”. Continue writing. Don’t worry too much about details and whether it’s 100% correct. That’s not what matters. Right now you are building your exercise library, which later on you will expand as you get more experienced and gain more knowledge.

Sample spreadsheet of your exercise library using basic muscle groups. For more experienced people this could be much wider, splitting muscle groups into smaller parts.

This will probably feel like a huge hurdle to overcome, but all I’m asking you is to write what you already know! You know that Squats hit your Quads hard and you also feel sore in your Glutes the day after. You know that Benchpress works Chest, Triceps, and Shoulders. You know all of that.

While not shown in the image sample above, I also recommend identifying exercise type: free weight compound, machine compound, and isolation. This will help with the selection later.

You should be able to add 50–100 in no time. But if you struggle to come up or find 50 exercises, then creating your programs might be too early. The cause for this is most likely a lack of experience. Anyone trained long enough can name 5–10 exercises for most muscle groups barely pausing to think.

Step 4: One Rule to Rule them All

Before you arrange everything into a plan, you need to understand one very important rule.

Training Frequency, Effort, and Volume

It is not possible to train every day extremely hard and for a very long time. You will break. Everyone who ever attempted doing that — did. There will always have to be a trade-off. If you want to train Frequently, you will either have to sacrifice Volume or Effort. If you want to train very hard (Effort) it will either have to lower the Volume or Frequency. And if you want to have a high Volume, Frequency or Effort has to go down. The reason for this is very simple: your body needs time to recover. The harder you punish it, the longer recovery times become. So, if you’re not recovered for the next workout, you will not only train sub-optimally, you will accumulate fatigue and eventually over-train or injure yourself.

The Holy Triad every good workout plan has to adhere to.

Training Duration (Volume)

(To accumulate Volume you need time, therefore a good proxy for it is training duration.)

A 1 hour minimum is expected (as shown later). There is simply no way around it if you’re not a beginner anymore. Also, a hard cap of 3 hours is a must. The longer you train, the lower the quality of your training becomes. 1h30–2h durations are the most common ones for gym-goers who are past the novice stage.

Training Frequency

Once a week training for an intermediate will violate the 3-hour session duration rule (also shown later). And training without allowing your body to recover, 7 days a week, for example, is not the best idea either. 2–6 is an acceptable range, but 3–5 weekly sessions are more common.

Training Effort

• High Effort can be considered as: you lift weights until you can’t or nearly can’t on every set of each exercise. We call this training to failure or 0–1 rep in reserve. It is brutal and cannot be done in high Volume or High Frequency.
• Moderate Effort can be seen as where you reach failure on occasions while the rest of the sets are somewhere in-between 2 to 3 reps in reserve.
• Low Effort is where you train 4–5 reps in reserve. If you go beyond that, it’s considered no effort at all, even though technically it probably still affects you.

Step 5: Doing some Maths

Let’s shift gears a bit and do some maths. Don’t worry. Nothing too complicated. First of all, how many sets can we do in an hour? Well, if we assume that a set + rest time takes around 3–4 minutes, we can expect roughly 15–20 sets. But we also need to account for warm-up times, set up and so on. 10–15 sets are a somewhat reasonable number. Given this, can we establish the bare minimum time required to develop a balanced physique (train nearly all muscle groups)?

If we ignore Forearms, Erectors, and Calves which get trained to an extent on their own, we have 10 major muscle groups. We need a minimum of 15 Hard Sets for each muscle group per week. That’s 150 sets or 10 hours and would require us to train 2–2.5h for 4–5 times a week. But we base the math here on wrong assumptions. It assumes only isolation exercises when in reality many exercises hit 2 or 3 muscle groups in one go. So, instead of needing 45 Hard Sets (15 each) for Chest, Triceps, and Shoulders, we could have only 15 with correct exercise selection. Same for Back and Legs. And finally, some Abs exercises. 15 + 15 + 15 +15 = 60 Hard Sets or 4 hours of training. That’s quite a saving. 1-hour workouts 4 times a week or even 2-hour workouts twice a week and the minimum requirements are met! As for 4 hours in one session… let’s just say — it’s stupid.

Of course, if you remove certain muscle groups, the time needed shrinks significantly. For example, complete removal of Leg training will save you an extra hour. Remove Abs — another hour!

So, we established the minimum. What’s the maximum then? Well, 3 hours (high Volume) per session 6 times a week (high Frequency) gives us 18 hours. But to satisfy The One Rule to Rule them All, this would mean we would need to train with very Low Effort. Possible, but I doubt anyone would enjoy that and whether it will be optimal for results. Somewhere in-between 4 and 18 hours there’s a sweet spot. A good landmark to aim for overall muscle development would be 8–12 hours per week with a training Frequency of 3–5 times. Which gives us 120 to 180 sets per week. More than enough for nearly any goal. As a side note, I will mention that later on in the guide I will talk about time-saving techniques, so don’t worry if the number of hours here feels high, you can reduce them easily and still have a near-optimal workout plan.

Now I want you to do some maths:

1. How many hours a week do you have?

2. How many sets can you get?

Step 6: Laying the Foundation

If you made it this far, congratulations, you are ready — it’s time to create your workout! First, we need to establish your general weekly layout. What muscle groups and where. Here’s a list of helpful guidelines to make things easier.

Guidelines

1. Grouping muscles via action makes things a lot easier. If you Push, your primary muscles are Chest, Shoulders, and Chest. If you Pull — Lats, Traps, and Biceps. And if you do Legs, it’s Glutes, Quads, and Hams. This is the reason Push/Pull/Legs is so popular.
2. Depending on your schedule, you can have a Full Body day, a Push, Pull or Legs day, or an Upper, Lower day. You can mix and match and fit this into your schedule any way you want.
3. Your Upper days can comprise Push and Pull exercises and your Lower days can consist Front (Quads) and Back (Glutes, Hams) Leg exercises.
4. Lower days usually have Abs muscle group attached to them and can be a part of Front Legs.
5. Full Body can also be subdivided by using Push, Pull, and Legs exercise grouping.
6. You can arrange Push/Pull in any way you want. You can do all Push exercises first, Pull second. You can contrast one Push exercise with one Pull. You can reverse all. The same principles can be applied for Legs.
7. Ideally, you would want to have the same muscle groups spread out in a week evenly and have more rest after harder workouts.
8. If you have a muscle group, you want to train less, train it less Frequently and with lower Volume. And if you want to emphasize something — more Frequency and more Volume.
9. If you train on consecutive days, different muscle groups are a better choice, since it allows you to maintain higher Effort. But Full Body can work too, just make sure you’re not overdoing it (lower the Effort).
10. If you have a big gap (3 days or more) between your training sessions, the last day before it would be ideal for a High Effort workout. Depending on your goals, it can be a Full Body or a part of it which is the most important to you (e.g. Upper body).

Sample of different ways to arrange your training. Try not to copy but adopt to your schedule!

Before you begin, remember, there is no right or wrong way of arranging or splitting your training. There is no Perfect Workout. Only Optimal and Suboptimal. You also don’t have to follow the latest trends (training Full Body 5 times a week), neither do you need to go the “bro road” (training a muscle group once per week). You need not use any of the popular groupings either, just list muscle groups and then fit the exercises. It will be more complicated and it will require you to think whether one workout is interfering with another, but it’s doable. An example, if you train Shoulders and Triceps hard and then try to hit Chest the next day, it will probably affect your workout quality since many of the Chest exercises also require Shoulders and Triceps strength. On another note, the weekly schedule is also arbitrary. It is not so rare to see 4 to 8-day “weeks”.

Step 7: Filling it in

Halfway there! Now that you have arranged all the muscle groups you want to train, you need to select appropriate exercises (from your Exercise Library). It might sound daunting, but trust me, it’s not that hard. Same as with muscle groups, here are some advice to get you started.

Guidelines

1. First, don’t worry about emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain muscles groups, you will do that later.
2. Understand: re-use of the same exercise in a week can and sometimes even should be done if you feel that it targets that muscle group very well.
3. The amount of exercises per muscle group is defined by the minimum session and weekly Volume, which is 5 and 15 Hard Sets, respectively. So you need at least 1 exercise of 5 sets per session or 3 to 5 exercises with 5 and 3 sets respectively per week.
4. A general rule of thumb, start by spreading big free weight compound exercises through the week first (since they are the hardest). Then complement them with machine compounds and isolation if you still haven’t met the minimum requirements.
5. Set count per exercise is determined by dividing minimum session/weekly volume by the number of exercises you selected.
6. Don’t worry if suddenly on some muscle groups you have 20 Hard Sets in a single session. You will do the fine-tuning later.
7. Once you met your minimum Hard Set targets, you can start adding more exercises to emphasize the muscle groups you want to train more. Isolation ones are a good choice.
8. If you have muscle groups you want to avoid training and it seems that you are hitting it quite a lot, try substituting exercises into ones that do not target (or target less) that muscle group but still target the others.
9. Checkpoint. Go through each muscle group, count how many exercises, Hard Sets did you add. Calculate approximate workout duration. Check against every rule, guideline, and recommendation in this manual. If something doesn’t add up, try more exercise swapping or increasing/decreasing the set count.
10. Last, select appropriate rep ranges. Generally, free-weight compound exercises have lower reps, while machines and pure isolation are higher. Overall, while it’s a matter of preference (or beliefs), staying within the 6–16 range is a good start.

This will take you some time, but by now it’s not an impossible task. Not if you read the whole manual carefully. Twice. Or as many times as needed, because every piece of information needed for you to build a simple workout plan has been given.

Step 8: Final Notes

Once you are happy with the plan you created, you will need to try it and adjust if necessary. But before you hit the gym, here’s a few more things you need to understand and apply.

Effort

We talked about it in Step 4: One Rule to Rule them All, where I explained that Effort is affected by Volume and Frequency — if they both are high, Effort must go down. But that’s not all. The effort is also affected by exercise and rep ranges.

Think, 10 Hard Sets of Squats or 10 Hard Sets of Leg Extensions? Which are more brutal? I’d bet you picked the former one. And you are right. The more muscle groups are involved, the more control over your whole body is needed, the harder the exercise will be. So, as a general rule of thumb, you will want to stay away further from failure on free weight barbell compound exercises and closer to it on pure isolation ones. Example: Low Effort (4–5 reps in reserve) on Squats, but High Effort (0–1 rep in reserve) on Leg Extensions.

But, what about rep ranges? Well, if you followed the advice in Step 7 Guidelines#10, you have selected low reps for compounds and high reps for isolation exercises. This means — lower Effort for low reps and higher Effort for high reps.

One more thing: Are 15 Hard Sets to Failure equal 15 Hard Sets with 2–3 reps in reserve? They are not if we are trying to compare the same exercise, but if you take into account the rules in the previous paragraph, it sort of balances out — difficult exercise with 2–3 reps in reserve can be considered equal to easy exercises to failure.

Progressions

I briefly mentioned the names of a few in Step 0. Now it’s time to flesh it out. Here’s a list of progressions you can employ:

1. Load progression — add more weight once you feel it became too easy. This is the first thing every gym-goer learns, and it’s the foundation of any muscle training workout.
2. Rep progression — add more reps while keeping load the same. Some people like increasing reps instead of load.
3. Set progression — add more sets while keeping load and reps the same. A progression scheme that helps when you are stuck with load and reps.
4. Double progression — add weight while you can and when you can’t, start adding reps. Then decrease reps back to normal and increase the weight.
5. Triple progression — add weight, then reps and then sets. Return to baseline, increase weight, rinse and repeat.
6. Rest Period progression — decrease rest periods between sets while maintaining everything else.
7. Time Under Tension progression — slow down the repetitions while maintaining everything else.

Pick the ones you like, stick to them until you can’t anymore, then pick new ones.

Hard Sets

Saying “stay 2–3 reps shy of failure” is a lot harder than it sounds. You will need to practice a lot and test yourself with occasional AMRAPs (As Many Reps As Possible) which just involves you picking an exercise you want to check yourself, doing the reps you are planning, then saying aloud you can only do X reps more and trying to reach that number or beyond until you literary cannot lift anymore in good form. If you did a lot more than you predicted, it is possible that your Hard Sets are not so hard after all.

There is a hack I like to use for people who are bad at estimating how hard they train. If you keep your reps or load the same on every set and reach near (or actual) failure on the last set, you are guaranteed that both your first set and your last set was a Hard Set. Which, coincidentally, is what Moderate Effort means as per my definition in Step 4.

Step 9: Evaluating your program

So, now, you ready to hit the gym. You start. How do you know if your plan is correct? Well, here’s a list of things to look for:

1. Do you feel beat up and not recovered for the next workout? You are probably overdoing it. Check your exercises, maybe there are too many free weight compounds? Maybe you’re putting too much Effort in them?
2. Are your muscles extremely sore all the time? Some soreness is ok. A lot, all the time — is not. Try to identify whether it’s a specific exercise or the whole workout that’s causing this. Make sure you are using the correct Effort level. Last, check if the gap between sessions for those muscle groups is not too big — lower frequency usually means higher soreness levels.
3. Have your joints started to hurt? You can be doing too much High Effort Volume. You can also be overusing certain joints (Shoulders, Hips — prime examples). Adding more isolation movements can help reduce that. For example, you can work Triceps without involving any Shoulder movements. You can also be using an incorrect form — film yourself, check online, and ask for people’s opinions. Or maybe some exercises you are just not built for, and they never feel right. Replace them!
4. Are you feeling worse every week? Not only you can’t progress, but you are also regressing? That’s a tell-tale sign of doing too much! Identify whether it’s an overall program or certain muscle groups. Reduce the Volume.
5. Are you noticing results? 4 weeks of training should give you some indication that things are moving forward no matter how tiny. The weight lifted, scale, body part circumferences are objective numbers to look at. While mirror checks and selfies are subjective.

These are just a few things to keep an eye for. But remember, any program is as good as your nutrition and recovery. If you don’t eat correctly and sleep enough, not even a perfect workout plan will give you results.

Bonus Step: Advanced Programming

Here are a few other things worth learning if you want to create even better programs.

Different Angles

When selecting exercises, you should also try analyzing whether they are targeting the muscle groups at different angles. For example, different grips for Seated Row or Lat Pulldown can change how you train your Lats. You can do multiple angles per workout, per week or even per month. Just make sure you stick to them, it’s not the wisest to try a new angle every time you train.

Specific muscles in muscle groups

Once you become experienced enough, you will want to focus not only on muscle groups but on specific parts of it. One of the primary examples of this are Shoulders, which we usually split into Front, Side, and Rear Deltoids. Practically every muscle group has some sort of division and you will need to expand your Exercise Library to accommodate this knowledge.

Direct vs indirect targeting

When you select exercises that target multiple muscle groups, you are probably aware that not all of them will be hit equally. Benchpress is a great Chest exercise that also hits Triceps quite well and even part of the Shoulders. But if you do a Narrow Grip Benchpress, suddenly you are focusing more on Triceps and Shoulders while de-emphasizing Chest. You can go and say that the former is a primarily Chest exercise, while the latter is primarily Triceps exercise.

If you try to evaluate how much of what’s being targeted, well, it complicates program design by a lot. Add isolation exercises and it gets even worse. Thus, my suggestion is not to worry about what’s direct and what’s not. Sure, maybe 15 direct Hard Sets are better than 30 indirect, but why do you care? Your goal is not to evaluate that a selection of one type of exercise should be equal to another type, your goal is to make sure that in a given program design you reach your goals.

This is where personal experience and subjective feel matters more. Say, same Triceps example. If you designed a program where you have 30 indirect Triceps Hard Sets, then design a program of 15 direct, and a program of 10 direct and 10 indirect, and in all cases subjectively you feel that your Triceps is being worked equally hard, does it matter that the numbers are so different? The answer is, no it does not.

Time-saving techniques

Sometimes you just don’t have the time or want to train long. Fortunately, there are a few techniques that can help you with that:

1. Supersets — doing different exercises without a break in between them. There are many ways to arrange this, but the most popular ones are agonist and antagonist supersets. The first one is to train the same muscle group, the second one is to train opposite muscle groups with two exercises. Simple examples: Dips + Triceps Pushdown (same muscle), Biceps Curls + Triceps Extensions (opposite muscles).
2. Drop Sets — do a set until failure. Drop the weight, do it again without rest. Drop the weight again. Rinse and Repeat.
3. Cluster Sets — instead of having long rest periods between sets, you have short ones of 10–30 seconds and only do a few reps. Keep doing that until you reach your target rep count.

There are many more that are beyond the scope of this manual. This is something you should experiment on yourself. If you like feeling crazy pumps with high reps, different Set methods might be not only a time saving but a very enjoyable workout for you. Just be careful not to overdo. The effectiveness of a workout can drop significantly because you are not allowing sufficient recovery times and thus reducing the total Volume for your muscles.

Breaking Plateaus

While the goal is to build muscle and not to lift as much weight as possible, weights that are stuck can be an indication of no muscle growth. Before you jump to a different program, here are a few things to try:

1. Change reps. If you were doing low reps, increase them. If you were doing high reps — decrease.
2. Change the exercise. A close variation that still targets the same muscle groups but uses different weights and feels different.
3. Reduce weight for a few training sessions, the slowing ramp up again. Bodies can get accustomed to load and refuse to adapt further. Changing the load in a structured way can help in this way.

If none of this helps, it’s probably time for a new program. Fortunately for you, you already know how to do that!

Age, Sex, Experience, Physical and other constrains

When designing a program, it is important to understand that there is more to it than meeting goals while satisfying time constraints. I will go through this briefly, though:

1. Age matters. Older people need longer recovery times between sessions. They also can’t handle as much volume as younger ones.
2. Women can handle more Volume and have speedier recovery times both in set to set and workout to workout.
3. Inexperienced gym-goers will benefit more from compound exercises and less Volume and Frequency, but higher Effort. While experienced ones will need to target muscles more directly and will require more Volume, Frequency or Effort.
4. Physical conditions will determine exercise selection. Severely obese people can’t do box jumps. That’s insane. Extremely weak people can’t just start Squatting with a barbell, they need to learn to squat without weights first. People with chronic conditions, different bone structures might be able to do one type of exercise, but not others.
5. People with physically demanding jobs will require their Volume to be adjusted accordingly.
6. Last, people on Performance Enhancing Drugs will need to consider a multitude of factors relating to the exercise selection, training volume, effort, and frequency. Even such things as the range of motion will become of great importance.

Final Words

6000 thousand words later, here you are. I hope you managed to create your workout. I hope you had all the answers to the questions you had raised. And I hope it kick-started your journey in muscle building program design. It’s just the beginning, programming can be very complicated, but this is something you will have to learn on your own, I’ve only bridged the gap between “using a program” and starting to “create your own”.

Last, I would like to invite you to try creating programs based on this guide and send them to me — I will check them, see if they are correct and give you some helpful tips. This will also help me improve the guide itself because maybe I missed something, maybe some things are not as clear as I thought they are. You can send the programs to coach.andrius@gmail.com and I will try to make sure I reply as soon as possible.