Body Workout Plan

The following is an introductory weight training regimen designed for a person looking to get started with this type of exercise.

It involves three workout days: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with four rest days interspersed. Each workout day trains a different muscle group. Monday you will be training the chest, shoulders and triceps, Wednesday the legs, and Friday you will be training the back and biceps.

Rest days are important for muscle recovery, and also to provide flexibility into the program so that is could be fit into a busy schedule. Typically, each workout will involve a warm up phase using light weights, and a work out phase using heavy weights.

Each phase will typically involve two sets of 6-8 repititions (for a total of four sets and 24-32 repetitions). The Monday workout, as mentioned above, will exercise the chest , shoulders, and triceps. To train the chest you will preferably use the bench press first and then the pectoral butterfly (”pec dec”) machine.

Do four sets of bench presses: 2 warm up sets followed by 2 heavy weight sets, with 6-8 reps in each set. Then do four sets of pectoral butterflys. Next are shoulder exercises, which will use standing or seated barbell shoulder presses (again, four sets), followed by an isolation exercise such as shoulder dumbbell laterals.

The isolation exercise will be the typical four sets, but increase the repititions to 8-10 per set. Finally, triceps will be trained with four sets of tricep pressdowns on a cable station.

This is the only tricep exercise since they were already worked out during the bench presses. This completes Monday’s exercises. The Wednesday workout will exercise the legs. The first exercise depends on if you can safely do squats. If you can, they are preferable. If not, use the leg press machine. Do four sets of either squats or leg presses (again, the typical two warm up sets and two heavy weight working sets).

The next exercise for the legs are leg extensions done on a machine: the four typical sets. The third leg exercise works out the hamstrings at the back of the legs using a machine for reverse leg extensions. Similar to the tricep exercises, we will increase the reps from the typical to 10-12 per set.

The fourth and final leg exercise is for the calf muscles using a calf machine, and again increase the reps for the calfs, this time to 12-20 per set. This completes Wednesday’s exercises.

The Friday workout trains the back and biceps. The first exercise for the back will preferably be barbell rows, but a good hammer machine row can also be used. Do the typical four sets at 6-8 reps per set. The next back exercise is “Lat pulldowns” on the lat pulldown cable machine.

Do the typical four sets, but increase reps to 8-10 per set. The final exercises are for the biceps: start with standing bicep dumbbell curls (typical four sets), followed by two sets (one warmup and one working) of seated concentration curls. This completes Friday’s workout.

This is an introductory weight training workout designed to isolate the major muscle groups, while using low sets to avoid overtraining, and provide effective training to each. After using the program, you may make adjustments as needed, or for your own personal preferences.

A great machine for weight lifters is the PowerTec Workbench.