The workout plan is a 3-6 day split you can follow for the next 6 weeks to build muscle. Its focus is to help increase muscle gain and strength development. The muscle building program is suitable for beginners and intermediates.

Your rep tempo should be slow and controlled. Focus on the eccentric contraction of the muscle. For example when you are lowering the barbell during a curl, a bench press, or when you’re lowering yourself on a chest dip.

Aim for a resting tempo of 60 seconds. Give your body enough time to rest and regain its lost minerals to ensure you have enough energy during sets.

Remember, the reps indicated is what you should be aiming to do with weights that allow you to do just 8 repetitions  correct form. If you don’t really know your limit yet, that’s fine too. If you notice that you can do 8 reps with 20lbs, but the last 2 sets are cheated, then lower the weight. The last thing that you want to happen is for you to injure yourself during a workout.

The workout program is designed so you can exercise 3 or 6 times a week. With that being said, if you want to maximize muscle gain, then you should aim for the 6 day split. If you are a beginner, you will find it hard going to the gym 6 times. This is simply because your muscles will not have fully rested. Start of with 3 days a week and progress towards the full 6 days to maximize your results.

Also, it does not have to be either 3 or 6. You can go 4-5 times. Use the extra 1 or 2 visits to focus on lagging muscle groups. For example, if you notice that your chest is not as developed as you want it to, then just do one extra push day after you finish the 3 day split.

While on the topic of beginners, another benefit of this workout program is that it will provide you with a lot of tools and information that will benefit your long-term development with your fitness journey.

After the workout program you will find quick nutrition and supplementation notes. As well as a list of exercises that you can substitute existing ones in the workout so you can add variability (promote more muscle growth).

Adding “drop sets” and “negative sets” help boost strength and muscle gain. And quite often can completely transform a workout for the better. If you are not aware what those terms mean, here is a quick explanation:

• Negative sets:  They require either a spotter or assisted equipment. It involves doing 4-5 repetitions of eccentric movement with weights that are beyond your capacity. If you don’t have a spotter who can help you, that’s fine. Negative sets can often be swapped for drop sets.
  • For example, let’s say that you’re doing biceps barbell curls. Your average weight with which you are capable of doing 8 repetitions is 45lbs. Let’s say you raise that weight to 65-70lbs. Your gym buddy (spotter) would help you raise the weight and what you are responsible for is lowering the weight in a controlled fashion to its starting position.
  • For the exercises in this muscle building workout that I have recommended doing negative sets you will see a “Negative set” tag underneath the name of the exercise. Negative sets are usually done as a last set.
• Drop Sets: It’s where you strip the excess weight (taking away roughly 20-25%) so that you can do 1-3 more repetitions of a certain exercise. As you would probably notice, I have recommended doing drop sets for exercises where most commonly the lowest rep range is 5 or 6.

• • For example, using the same exercise example as for the negative sets, imagine you are doing biceps barbell curls with 50lbs. This weight is ideal for you to properly carry out 5 or 6 repetitions. You bring the weight down to 35-40lbs and do another 1-3 correct repetitions.
  • For the exercises in this workout program that I have recommended doing drop sets, you will see a “Drop Set” tag. Remember that the Drop set should be performed for the last set of the exercise where you will have the lowest rep range following weight progression.

Finally, all the exercises have a link to a video where the exercise is performed. This is until I build a library of my own with visual demos of exercises. For now, though, this will do.