If you want to start working out and are serious about building muscle, then it’s necessary to first have a workout plan. While you could just follow another person’s program or develop one with a personal trainer, a lot of people also just prefer to come up with their own. If you decide to create your own workout plan, this post will hopefully be very helpful in teaching you how to do that.
How do you actually go about choosing the right exercises to help you achieve your goals? Luckily, nowadays we have the help of the Internet. The thing is, although the Internet is a fantastic resource where you can easily find workouts to incorporate into your own routine, there are downsides to this approach. Most of the time you’ll find yourself inundated with an infinite number of workouts for every muscle group in the body. Trying all of them out would take forever, and frankly, not everything you come across would actually be worth your time to try in the first place.
So how do you filter out the noise and figure out what exercises would actually be worth including in your own training? While there isn’t an exact science, here are a few questions you should be asking yourself in order to narrow down your choices.
What Should I Work Out?
The first thing you’ll want to consider is what muscle groups you want to target. Are there any specific parts of your body that you want to focus on developing for functional or aesthetic purposes?
Your answer to this question will become more tailored as you progress with your training and fine-tune your routine. If you’re just starting out, chances are you’re probably looking to develop all the major areas of the body. Even then, however, it’s important that you identify all the different muscle groups you want to train, as well as the different parts of these muscles.
For example, the chest has upper, middle, and lower areas that you should ideally all target if you want to fully build up your chest. The shoulders are composed of front, side, and rear delts, each of which comes with their own types of exercises. The back and legs, while each commonly referred to as one big muscle group, actually consist of many smaller muscles, all of which need to be trained in different ways.
When putting together your workout plan, make sure that for every muscle group you want to work on, you’re finding exercises that can address all the different parts it consists of. Instead of simply searching for “chest workouts”, look for workouts that focus on the upper, middle, and lower chest.
Not only does this help you be more specific and narrow down your results each time, but having a comprehensive training routine will help you achieve better overall muscle growth and avoid problems like muscle imbalances later on.
Is It Possible to Do this Exercise?
Once you’ve determined the muscle groups you want to train and begin researching potential exercises to include in your routine, an easy way to continue whittling down your options is whether or not an exercise is feasible to do. In other words, do you have the necessary equipment at home or at the gym to perform a certain exercise?
There are some exercises that require specific machines, such as the prone leg curl. If your gym doesn’t have the machine for this, then this might not be a viable workout for you, and you’re better off looking for other ways to train your hamstrings.
Fortunately, in many cases, exercises that require machines can be recreated with free weights and benches. In some instances, you might not be able to replicate the movement exactly, but there are ways to imitate the motion and target the same muscles. Either way, this means that while you should take practicality into account, it shouldn’t end up being too limiting of a factor when you’re selecting your workouts.
How Difficult Is this Exercise?
Another factor to consider when building your workout plan is how difficult an exercise is. As a beginner, it’s better if you start with simple and fundamental movements. They’re easier to learn and allow you to progress more quickly.
In addition, doing simpler exercises gives you an opportunity to learn proper technique and let your body acclimate to different movements so that eventually, you’re comfortable performing more complex movements.
The issue with more challenging exercises is that while they possess unique benefits for advanced lifters, beginners would have a hard time learning how to perform them correctly and thus wouldn’t be able to fully reap those benefits. As a result, these movements would have little advantage over easier exercises, and people would just be putting themselves at a much greater risk of getting injured.
Does this Exercise Work for Me?
When you’re looking to buy a car, no matter how much online research you do, it’s still important to test drive the car to determine if you actually like it. The same applies to exercising. At this point you have enough criteria to help you compile an initial list of exercises you want to add to your routine. However, this is when you’ll need to try them out to see if they’re actually suitable for you.
First, are you able to perform the movement comfortably? Are you able to achieve a full range of motion without feeling any pain or awkwardness? If it’s just due to a lack of flexibility, that’s something that can be improved over time, but if the motion causes physical discomfort, you should probably avoid that particular exercise.
Second, are you able to target the intended muscle? For many exercises, especially isolation movements, actively focusing on feeling stimulation in the muscle you’re training is a crucial part of working out effectively. This is a concept known as the mind-muscle connection.
If you’re doing an exercise and don’t feel it in the muscle no matter how you tweak your form, it would be preferable to opt for another exercise that trains the same muscle but which lets you feel the muscle activation to a much higher degree.
As Your Muscles Change, So Does Your Workout
With these suggestions, hopefully you’re able to put together an effective workout plan that’s customized for your needs. It might take some trial and error to get it right, but that’s expected; you don’t need to have the perfect routine from the start, and any exercise you incorporate isn’t permanently stuck with you.
In fact, your routine should evolve as you advance with your training. As I alluded to at the beginning of this post, you’ll continue to modify your training over time based on, for example, whether or not an exercise proves to be effective in the long run, if you want to focus more on strengthening specific muscles, or if any muscle imbalances develop.
Although you shouldn’t be switching up your workouts too frequently, the reality is that perfecting your workout routine is a never-ending process. There’ll always be a need to find new and better exercises, so it could be useful to keep this guide handy.
