The Program!

The program splits all of your weight training up into 3 seperate days: Push day, Pull day, and Leg Day. On each of the 3 days you will work 3 different body parts. Before we get into the system, we need to understand a few concepts.

Sets and Reps: A rep is one full motion of an exercise from top to bottom. For example, if you are doing the Bench Press, one rep would mean taking the bar off the rack, lowering it to your chest, then pushing it back up to the rack. You have completed one full bench press motion, and in fitness lingo that means you have done one rep. A set is a collection of reps done back to back. If you did 5 reps of that bench press then stopped to rest, you just did a set of bench press.

If the program askes you to do 3 sets of 10 reps each, that means you would do 10 reps of the exercise, then rest for a moment, then do 10 more, then rest for a moment, then do 10 more. Then you are done!

Recovery Time: Contrary to popular belief, your muscles do not grow while you are in the gym. Your muscles grow at rest, particularly during sleep. If you try to train a muscle without allowing it to fully recover from a previous workout, it will not grow because you did not give it sufficient rest time. A natural weightlifter needs a great deal of recovery time between muscles. I reccomend one full week. Therefore, if we train the chest on Monday we will not train the chest again untill next monday.

Isolation Movement: An isolation movment is an exercise that uses only one muscle. A bicep curl is an example of an isolation movement, because ite only involves the biceps.

Compound Movement: A compound weightlifting movement is one that uses more than one muscle group to execute the lift. A bench press is a good example of a compound movement, because you use the chest, shoulders, and triceps to execute the lift. It has been shown that compound movements cause greater increases in muscular size than isolation movements because the additional stress that a compound movement puts on the body causes a release of natural human growth hormone.

This system is known as a Push/Pull/Legs system. This means that we seperate our training into 3 days: Push day, Pull day, and Leg day. We will rest one day between each of the three days. This system is used by Powerlifters because each of the 3 days corresponds to one of the 3 traditional powerlifts. Push day focuses on the bench press, Pull day focuses on the deadlift, and Leg day focuses on squats. Monday is Push Day, Wednesday is Pull Day, and Friday is Leg Day.

The specific exercises to do on a particular day can be found by clicking that day at the top of the screen. The amount of weight you can handle for each exercise varies widely from person to person. Expiriment and find a weight for each exercise that leaves you exhausted by the end of your workout.

Here is a printable version of the training split that you can use to remind yourself when you have to train!