Are you putting together your own exercise routine and do not know what is the optimal way to accommodate them? You have done well to investigate, since there are certain guidelines that we must follow when designing a training plan. Do we analyze them together?
If you don’t already know, let me tell you that the order in which the exercises are programmed, in a training routine, can strongly affect the overall quality of the results.
Once you define which exercises you are going to do in your daily routine and in each of your training blocks, the next decision you need to make is to organize them according to your training goals.
And although there are certain exceptions to some rules, we can establish certain general guidelines that will help you determine the best way to order the exercises when putting together your own basic or even intermediate level training routine.
How to organize the exercises in a training routine?
series of guidelines that we must take into account to accommodate the order of the exercises that we are going to do in our future routine.
Compound and muscle isolation exercises
In general, it is recommended to perform compound exercises before isolation exercises, at least when we perform different exercises for the same muscle group.
Generally speaking, at the beginning you should perform exercises that allow you to lift as much weight as possible and that include as many muscles as possible (compound exercises).
For example, if you are going to do two exercises; a chest press and a dumbbell fly, do the latter after the press.
Then move on to isolation exercises where a single muscle or small muscle group comes into play. And in which case we must take into account to lower the load of the exercise.
Perform free weight exercises before going to the machines
This goes hand in hand with the previous point, when designing your own routine, focus on ordering free weight exercises first before machine exercises.
But… what if machine exercise is a compound exercise and weight training is a muscle isolation exercise?
Well, in this case follow the previous guideline and do the compound exercise first, regardless of whether you use equipment or not, we return to the rule of large groups, before individual muscles, so to speak.
The exercises with the bar and the exercises with dumbles
Barbell exercises should be done before dumbbell exercises.
An example would be, programming the incline barbell press before the flat dumbbell bench press.
You will probably be able to lift more weight on the barbell exercise; then, and to maximize the gains in size and strength, do the barbell exercise when the muscles are without any signs of fatigue; that way you will be able to use more weight.
Schedule the exercises according to your weaknesses
You should organize the exercises in your routine, based on your own weaknesses.
For the example above, when deciding whether to do the flat bench press or incline bench press first, you need to take into account where your weaknesses are.
If your upper pecs are underdeveloped relative to the middle and lower pecs, place the incline first, to emphasize the upper pecs with the full potential of your fresh muscles.
How to arrange the exercises according to the area to train?
Most experts believe that exercising the large muscle groups provides a superior training stimulus on all the muscles involved.
This is believed to be true because the more muscle groups a given exercise stimulates, the greater the metabolic, endocrine, and circulatory response effect; causing over time to potentially increase the development of the other muscles.
To be clear, think that the legs, chest and back require much more energy than stimulating the biceps, triceps or shoulders.
How to design a weekly routine by muscle group?
In this sense, if we are going to put together a weekly routine, where we train 2 muscle groups per day (not counting abs), we can accommodate our routine starting the day with a large group and ending with a small group.
For instance:
- Monday: We could accommodate, chest, biceps and abs.
- Wednesday: legs and shoulders.
- Friday: back, triceps and abs again.
Why this diagram? There is a practical reason to save your forearms, biceps, shoulders, or triceps for last.
These smaller muscles are also used in training the larger muscles.
The biceps help the muscles in upper back exercises. Similarly, the triceps come into play in most chest exercises.
Training small muscles that assist larger ones would seriously hamper the progress of those larger muscle groups, and make the routine more injury-prone.
How to design a full body routine?
In addition to what we saw before, and taking into account that the general principles continue to apply.
Here are some guidelines for creating a full-body training program:
Do full body workouts if you plan to train up to 3 times a week. If you are going to train 4 days a week, it may be a better option to go for the split training that we saw earlier.
Start with an explosive or plyometric exercise followed by one of the great compound exercises, Bench Press, Squats, or Pull-ups.
Then move on to one exercise for the upper body and another for the lower body. The workout may end with a core-focused exercise and optional arm or leg work.
This is an example of how you could put together a full body or full body workout, however the variations that you can include here are much larger compared to the exercise divided by muscle zone.
Finally, remember to put together this routine on consecutive days. An ideal scheme would be Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Conclusion on how to organize the exercises in your routine
We hope that these general guidelines for planning the order of exercises in your own training routine have helped you.
Remember to include the other pillars that we do not talk about here, which are: having an optimal diet, having adequate rest and warming up prior to activity.