Basic Bodybuilding 101: Four Day Workout Routine
2009 February 15
This is a basic meat-and-potatoes routine, aimed at bodybuilders. It’s a four-day arrangement, alternating upper body and lower body.
The rationale is simple. Muscle responds favorably to heavy weights, and over time those weights have to get heavier in order to continue growing. The easiest and probably best way to expose all of your muscles to heavy weights is to rely on the basic compound barbell lifts: squats, deadlifts, presses, and rows. These will work virtually every muscle in your body, and they allow you to use heavy weights.
The basics are what get you strong, and getting stronger in the basics is what gets you bigger.
There’s a time and a place for isolation exercises, too, and for the same reason: they develop strength in individual muscle groups. Although isolation exercises aren’t as good at this, they can still create high tension and overload in the specific muscle group.
Because of that, this program is built around the big lifts and heavy weights, with isolation work for muscle groups added in as assistance work in higher rep ranges. The idea is that the heavy work will stimulate most of your muscle; higher rep isolation training will simply round out the corners.
The order isn’t terribly important. I put upper body before lower body in the sequence because the upper body session won’t tend to impact the lower body session as much as the opposite. You may or may not find this true.
Day 1 – Upper Body – Chest and Upper Back
Bench Press variation (regular, 2-board, floor press)
Seated cable row (strict form)
DB flyes
Face pulls
Shoulder Ys and Ts
Day 2 – Lower Body – Legs
Squat variation (Olympic squat, power squat, front squat)
Glute-ham raise (use 45* hip extension if you don’t have one)
Single-leg exercise
Leg extension
Day 3 – Rest
Day 4 – Upper Body – Shoulders and Triceps
Overhead Press variation (strict military press, push press, push jerk)
Top-end Bench variation (3-board, 4-board, rack lockout)
Side delt raises
Triceps exercise (pushdowns, DB extensions, etc.)
Day 5 – Lower Body – Heavy Back and Biceps
Deadlift variation (from the floor, from a deficit, rack pull, with chains, with bands, etc.)
1. Barbell Row (strict form)
2. Weighted Chinups (can use a pulldown if not strong enough)
Barbell Curl (strict form)
* This is not a superset; this means you can swap the order of 1 & 2 from time to time if you want to train one harder than the other.
Day 6 & 7 – Rest
Pay no attention to the names of each day; they’re tags to indicate what each day is leaning towards, but don’t be fooled – this is just an upper body/lower body split routine. If you want to tell all your buddies down at the gym that you’re doing “legs” or “chest” or whatever, knock yourself out.
Suggested set/rep schemes for the big lifts:
* 5×5, the old standby (also 4×6 and 6×4 count)
* 3×8
* 5-6×2-3
* Lots of singles (5-10×1)
When I say “squat” or “bench press”, I really mean “any lift that is close”. You can do 2-board press in place of bench, rack deadlift in place of deadlift, etc. You don’t have to do the actual full lift each time. I’d rather you be consistent with whatever you do pick, but the actual lift doesn’t matter that much.
Once your lift is out of the way, just use the other exercises to pump up the muscle. Preferred rep range here is 8-12, and spend anywhere from 1-5 sets, depending on the muscle. Biceps could get away with one really hard set, a bigger muscle might need more.
I’d consider throwing in corrective work for the upper back/scapula and the hips either as part of a warmup or after the fact.
Obviously there’s plenty of variations on and permutations of this theme; I’m not claiming this is terribly original or innovative. What it is is a solid ‘default’ program to use if you have no other goals in mind and just want to build a little muscle and strength.
A Quick Summary
An introductory four-day bodybuilding workout routine.
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