Designing an exercise program

Designing your own exercise program puts you in total control of your exercise regime. The benefit of designing your own program is that you yourself are in total control of what, why and when and everything inbetween. A sense of control and knowledge of WHY you are doing things may give your motivation a big boost. Before you start you need to set yourself a goal and design your program accordingly. In this summary I will consider some factors involved in designing your own strength training program, where the general goal would be to build strength and/or muscle.

About Choosing exercises

Generally speaking, a good strength training program should consist of at least one multi-joint exercise for each muscle group. Multi-joint exercise allows you to apply the heaviest loads and the fact that they are multi-joint exercises makes them altogether more efficient, both with regards to time efficiency, movement patterns and neural adaptations. The opposite of multi-joint exercises would be isolation exercises which isolates one particular muscle group. These exercises should only be considered supplemental to the multi-joint exercises and should never form the main part of your program.

Some good multi-joint exercises

Chest: Benchpress, dips, chestpress

Shoulders: arnold Press, overhead dumbell press

Back: Dead-lifts, chins, rowing

Thighs: Squats, dead-lifts with staright legs

Arms: Standing curls with dumbells, benchpress with narrow grip, french press

About sets and reps

Generally speaking, most people would benefit the most from 6-10 sets per muscle group per week. These sets kan be done all in one day or they could be spread out throughout the week. These sets should be scattered across a selection of different exercises for each muscle group to ensure that no muscles in a particular muscle group is overlooked.

Large muscle groups like chest, thighs needs a few more sets than smaller muscle groups like. The number of reps should be kept within 6-12 unless your goal is to train endurance or max strength. However, with some exercises it is better to go a little easier on the load and include a few more reps instead, this is true for overhead shoulder exercises in particualr, because the shoulder joint is very vulnerable to injury due to its anantomical structure. Dead-lifts is another one of these exercises, the reason for this is simple, the fewer reps, the heavier load and with a heavier load you are more prone to apply bad technique that might hurt your back.

About warming up

Before a strength training session you should spend about 10-15 minutes to raise your body temperature. This may be achieved by exercises such as cycling, running and rowing among others. The warm up phase will help prevent injuries and will increase performance. A specific warm up for each muscle group is also a good idea, this is even more important to prevent injuries. A decent warm up makes the tissues more elastic and therefore less prone to injury. The warm up serves to prepare the tissues for the heavier load applied. It's important to remember that the warm up should not fatigue the muscles.