My New Workout Routine – Building Lean Muscle, Getting Stronger
Word Count: 450 NF Difficulty: Advanced Goal: Build Muscle
If you guys have been following the blog for a few months, you know that back at the beginning of April I started a new workout routine, emphasizing full body routines three times a week. I worked in some Olympic style workouts, and even some circuits to get my heart pumping and work some cardio into my weight training. If you’re just getting started with fitness, I think full body workouts are absolutely the best way to jump in.
Now, it’s always important to mix up your workout routine too from time to time so your muscles don’t adapt too much and you start to see diminishing returns. If you read yesterday’s blog, you know about my decision to switch to a more natural/primal diet (as much as possible), I decided it’s time for a switch up on my workout too.
Here’s the new plan: I’m going to do a upper/lower split rather than a full body workouts for the next twelve weeks, allowing me to really concentrate on building strength in each half of my body on alternate days. At the moment, when I do certain taxing exercises (squats, deadlifts, dumbbell presses, etc.), I pretty much expend all my mental and physical energy and the rest of my workout suffers. At the moment I’m trying to build muscle mass, so I’ll concentrating on my upper body one day, and then my lower body two days later, really going all out and get the most out of my 40 minutes in the gym. I’m going to keep the workouts ultra-intense and heavy and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
- Monday – Upper Body
- Wednesday – Lower Body
- Friday – Upper Body
- Monday – Lower Body
- Wednesday – Upper Body
- Friday – Lower Body
For my upper body, these are the exercises I’m going to concentrate on:
- Incline dumbbell chest press
- Bench press
- Body weight dips
- Shoulder presses
- Pull Ups
- Chin Ups
For my lower body, I’m going to concentrate on these exercises:
- Squats
- Lunges
- Deadlifts
- Romanian Deadlifts
Notice anything? It looks deceptively simple. “But what about bicep curls, tricep extensions, calf raises, shrugs, forearm curls, etc?” By concentrating on lifting heavy amounts of weight
As with my previous workouts, I’ll be concentrating on keeping my rep range in the 6-12 range, and minimizing time between sets (a minute or less) to really build muscle size and bulk me up a little bit. I’m still going to work in a day of Olympic Lifting here and there, and I’m also going to continue interval training (wooooo sprints) on off-days to burn as much of the fat on my body as possible. Due to various reasons, my weight has dropped down to 180 lbs. I’m going to hopefully get my weight back up to 187-190 over these twelve weeks, and then really concentrate on burning any fat left on my frame, leaving me looking like King Leonidas.
I’ll also be making some changes to my diet, influenced by cavemen. Yes cavemen. Check back tomorrow for what that.
-Steve
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