When you are thinking of starting a new training program, there are essentially 5 things that you need to decide upon before starting. These are the volume, intensity and frequency of the program as well as how well you can recover from each session and the end goal you want it to achieve.
If you aren’t familiar with some of the terms above, I have explained each one below.
Volume – The amount of work done in a given time. For example, if you lifted 100kg for 3 sets of 10, the volume in that session so far would be 3000kg.
Intensity – The difficulty of each rep you are performing. For example, lifting 85% of your 1 rep max would be more intense than lifting 50% of it.
Frequency – How often you train each body part or group.
Recovery - Your ability to recover in between each session. You want to feel fresh and energised each session.
Goal – What goal do you want to achieve from the training program?
So how do you go about finding a workout that addresses all these?
Well, first you need to avoid the number one thing done by all-natural lifters at some point (myself included) which is doing too much volume. I used to think that more is better, more reps more muscle, right? Wrong. I quickly developed fatigue and struggled to recover from session to session. The result you want from your training is to trigger protein synthesis in the muscle and that’s it. Once triggered, you have done your job.
Frequency will be a major key to how well you progress. Now listen closely, the magic number you are going to want to remember is 3. This is the optimal amount of times you want to train a muscle per week. How can I train legs 3 times a week I hear you say? By making sure your frequency and intensity is optimal of course! The amount of time you train a muscle is the stimulus that will trigger protein synthesis, meaning the more you train (within reason and other factors are controlled) the more you are in an anabolic state.
Growing comes down to protein synthesis and protein breakdown. If you can get the balance between those right, you will be able to build muscle faster and recover from sessions at a faster rate.
With this information then, what is the best workout for natural lifters? Well, considering the information above, you want to be hitting a muscle group 3 times a week, with low volume. Therefore, the best workout is a push/pull split. The week may look like this;
|
Monday |
Push |
|
Tuesday |
Pull |
|
Wednesday |
Push |
|
Thursday |
Rest |
|
Friday |
Pull |
|
Saturday |
Push |
|
Sunday |
Pull |
As you can see, this is 3 push and 3 pull workouts a week. For each workout, you want to be using a different exercise than you did last time. We now know that as frequency is high, we want the volume to be low to avoid any fatigue and to keep training quality high. With this in mind, we only want to have 4 exercises per training session and only 2 working sets per exercise. I recommend using a rep range of 6-10 for the first set and 11-15 in the second set.
An example of a push session would be as follows.
Push
-
Quad exercise – 2 sets
-
Shoulder exercise – 2 sets
-
Triceps exercise – 2 sets
-
Pectoral exercise – 2 sets
I recommend doing a warm up set before each working set to ensure maximal blood flow and mind to muscle connection.
There we have it! The ultimate workout for natty lifters. Now I know it's hard to peel away from high volume workouts where you don’t leave a single rep in the tank, but ask yourself, are you getting g stronger? Do you feel fresh going into each workout? Are you building muscle? If the answer isn’t yes to all of these, it may be time for a change.
