How To Create Your Own Strength Training Workout
Every week, I'm asked for examples of full-body, push, or upper-body workouts. At the same time, I do provide those; they're not always the most useful. If you train four times a week and only have one full-body workout example, what are you doing the rest of the time? Have you developed a balanced approach to your overall training?
There's a real simplicity to building your own programme.
Exercise Categorisation
Before we delve into splits and exercise selection, it's essential to understand exercise categorisations. Think of all the thousands of exercises you see on social media – more often than not, they can be broken down into categories. This is a great way to create what we classify as "structural balance" in your workout, ensuring you're training your entire body and not missing any key areas.
Some categories you've probably heard before:
Lower Body:
Knee-dominant squat patterns: Think back squats, split squats. The name often gives them away.
Hip-dominant hinge patterns: These are a bit harder to spot as "hinge" is rarely in the name. Examples include Romanian deadlifts and deadlifts, which are more hip-dominant than knee-dominant.
Lunge patterns involve locomotion, such as moving into the lunge, and can be either hip- or knee-dominant.
There's a massive crossover here; you can make a squat more hip-dominant and a hinge more knee-dominant. It's not a perfect model, but generally speaking, we look at squat patterns, hinge patterns, and lunge patterns.
Upper Body: Nice and straightforward, movements are either:
Pushing: Where you're pushing weight away from the body (the load moves away).
Pulling: Where the load is being pulled towards the body.
These can be done in either a horizontal plane (pushing horizontally with the chest) or a vertical plane (pushing overhead). So, we have horizontal push and pull, as well as vertical push and pull. People get confused with things like an angled incline chest press, and I appreciate we can expand this further, but for simplicity: squat, hinge, lunge, upper body push, and pull in the horizontal and vertical plane. I think that's a great way to simplify it right down.
I have arguments online with trainers about whether an exercise is a push or a pull. It's not a perfect model and is open to some interpretation. That's not the most important thing. The most important thing is having a fairly rough idea of exercise categorisation. You don't need to get lost in the details; just know it's not a perfect system, and it doesn't need to be.
How Many Exercises?
Before you start picking your exercises – which is the natural thing to do at this stage – the best thing to do is work out how many exercises you can have to choose from. If you're training three times a week versus five times a week, that will obviously change how many exercises you can do per week. Also, consider how long your workouts will be and how many big, complex exercises you like doing in a workout.
Generally, you can probably fit between five to eight exercises per workout. If you're doing more than eight exercises per workout, I don't think that's very smart, and I'll explain why in a moment. But generally speaking, five to eight exercises in a 45 to 60-minute workout is about right.
So, let's say you're going to train three times a week with six exercises per session. That means you have 18 exercises to choose from. You could logically say, "Hey, I'm going to do nine upper body exercises and nine lower body exercises." That's absolutely fine. However, you may also want to incorporate some core exercises or rehabilitation work. So you could split that differently: seven upper, seven lower, and maybe four additional exercises.
I think it's worthwhile setting that intention from the start. If you're more focused on building strength and muscle in your lower body and less concerned about your upper body (perhaps you just want to maintain lean muscle mass there), you might concentrate most of your work on your lower body. For example, 10 lower-body exercises, five upper-body exercises, and three core exercises. Again, it's smart to set that expectation from the outset.
Training Splits
Now, let's talk about training splits – how you organise your workouts. I mentioned that people ask about full-body workouts, and they are indeed an option. A pushing day and a pulling day can also be an option. This could be just upper-body pushes and pulls, or you could do pulls and hinges as a session by itself, and upper-body pushes and squat patterns as a session by itself. You could choose an upper-body day and a lower-body day.
Of course, there's the classic chest day, back day, arm day. I'm not a big fan of this; I don't think it's overly versatile for a recreational strength person. It's big in the bodybuilding world, and I think it can stay in the bodybuilding world. Bodybuilders use steroids, so they have a greater ability to recover. Looking at what the pros in bodybuilding do and thinking that filters down to you is just not smart.
Doing all your leg exercises in one workout or all your chest exercises in one workout will certainly make you very sore, but it could also potentially drop your performance in subsequent lifts. If you do chest presses, then push-ups, then dumbbell incline chest presses, then cable flies, you'll become increasingly fatigued. By the time you're doing the last two exercises, you've trained that muscle group so many times. I just don't think it's a very smart way to organise your workout.
If you've chosen 10 lower-body exercises and five upper-body exercises, you could then write another three workouts per week: two lower-body workouts and one upper-body workout. It may become quite obvious how you plan to split your workouts. If you've never tried full-body, give that a try. If you've never tried upper/lower, maybe give that a go. Honestly, the split doesn't make a significant difference.
The totality of work you do per week is more important than how you organise it into a split. The fact that you have 10 lower-body exercises is more important to know about how someone is going to progress. With 10 lower-body exercises and five upper-body exercises, you're going to see more muscle growth in your lower body than your upper body. How you organise that into full body, push, or pull doesn't actually matter sometimes. As I said, it might be logical that you have to programme a certain way because you have so many more lower body exercises to deal with.
Exercise Selection and Recovery
When it comes to exercise selection, it's essential to recognise that some exercises are inherently more taxing than others. If you've ever done a back squat or a deadlift, they are tough exercises to do, much harder than, say, a leg curl or a leg extension machine. So, suppose you're choosing your exercises and you're going to skew them all towards big compound exercises – deadlifts, squats, bench press, chin-ups, military press, leg press – where you're using a lot of external load. In that case, you're not going to get that many exercises in your workout.
It's also smart to consider incorporating some isolation, less skill-based, and less taxing exercises into your workout. This is especially true if you are doing four or more workouts per week, because you won't have as much time to recover. Suppose someone's doing six strength training workouts per week. In that case, you probably want to speak to a professional to ensure they can help you with your programming, as there are more things to consider when managing recovery.
As I mentioned, 10 lower-body exercises versus five would allow for more growth in the lower body, but that doesn't continue indefinitely. If you progress from 10 exercises to 15, then to 20, there is a point of diminishing returns because at some point, you can no longer recover. Then you'll find the sheer amount of workload you're putting through a particular muscle group is causing an inability to perform better workout to workout, and that's a good way to hit a plateau across your exercises or workouts. There is, however, a sweet spot with this kind of thing.
By now, you should have a good idea of how many exercises you can do per week, as you should know how many times you're going to train per week and how long your sessions will be. I think you should have written down the number of lower-body exercises and the number of upper-body exercises.
Now it's time to bring back into the conversation the concepts of squat, hinge, lunge, upper body push, and pull (both vertical and horizontal). If you're doing a full-body workout, it's straightforward: you can incorporate a squat, a hinge, an upper-body push, and an upper-body pull into each workout. If you're doing upper/lower, you'll obviously have squats and hinge exercises in the lower body workouts, and then a push and pull in the upper body workout. So, it should start to make better sense where these exercises are going to go.
Put your "big rock" exercises in place first so you're not having too much competing fatigue from one workout. Don't put your squat, deadlift, and leg press all in the same workout and make that workout just very, very hard. Look at the exercises you have and spread the most taxing exercises equally across the workouts, so you have maybe two or three taxing exercises per workout. It's not about dumping everything into one workout.
A note about lunges: you'd probably only choose one or two lunges total, whereas for your squat patterns, you might have a back squat, a leg press, and a split squat as options across all your workouts, three days a week. But you don't need to have a lunge in every single workout.
As I mentioned, if you're training more than four times a week, the position of the exercise becomes more important, as you want to ensure you're giving yourself enough time to recover between workouts. If you know that your grip isn't overly strong, and you have a deadlift one day, a Romanian deadlift the next day, and a pull-up the day after, you might find that your grip is going to be fatigued, especially if those days aren't spaced out. There is some subtle complexity here. Usually, you get into a lifting session and then realise, "Oh, actually, this is getting quite hard on my grip strength," and you might need to tweak things as you go through, so you're not having too much carry-over fatigue on things like grip and also things like the lower back. If you have too many exercises where the load goes directly through the spine (e.g., lots of barbell-loaded reverse lunges, barbell-loaded back squats, front squats, lots of bar on the upper body), that is very tough. So, you probably want to ensure you're sensible about how much workload the spine has to handle.
You also need to think a little bit about your own injury history. If you know you have a history of knee pain, I'm not saying you shouldn't train the knee; I'm just saying you might need to choose exercises wisely around the knees. You might not want to do a big squat because it could potentially be too taxing on the knee joint. It's also worth noting that you don't have to include a back squat and a deadlift. Back squatting is just a variation of the squat; it's not the only one you have to do. Deadlifting is the same; it's just a hinge variation. I have plenty of clients, and myself, who don't currently have a big deadlift variation in their workout, and it's okay to do that.
Programme Duration and Consistency
Let's discuss how long you plan to participate in this programme. Once you've set up your workouts and have all your exercises in order, I would suggest at least eight weeks as the absolute minimum to stick to the same routine. If you're an intermediate or advanced lifter and you've reached your max on quite a few exercises early on in your workout, you're going to need longer blocks. If you've ever worked with a squat or deadlift, you know that across eight weeks, nothing really happens too much. So, you would want to have 12 to 16-week blocks. Eight is the absolute minimum; 16 weeks is probably a good place to be, but somewhere between 12 and 16 weeks. Yes, you heard right – three to four months doing the same thing.
So, make peace with the fact that progression takes time, and it's essential to stick to it. But, of course, I don't want you to get bored. So, every four weeks, you make one or two changes to each day. But don't just change things for the sake of it; change things for a good reason. For example, you're at your limit, or you just find an exercise a bit niggly. But don't make full changes to all five or six exercises. I recommend against this. Make a few subtle changes so the majority of the exercises stay in there, certainly for eight weeks, maybe 12 weeks. You can rotate some of the bigger lifts out if you want to, but I think it's nice and smart approach.
What I think is a really great thing about 16 weeks is making very small changes at the four-week stage. I might make larger changes at the eight-week stage, and those changes I make at eight weeks, I leave all the way through the next eight weeks. And every four weeks, I make minor tweaks again. You actually get quite a lot of exercise variety coming through there, but you still get a lot of consistency at the same time.
Going back to what I said earlier, if you're doing more than eight exercises per workout, I'm questioning your exercise selection and how hard your load selection is, or how close to your max your load selection is. If you are choosing good exercises and pushing them hard, you should not be able to do more than eight exercises in a workout, unless the workout is taking that much longer. And your workout is taking that much longer. In that case, there's a question about whether you're fueling yourself well for those workouts, whether you're tracking your progress, and really ensuring that those last few exercises of the workout are of high quality.
An expression I frequently use on social media is "junk volume," which refers to people doing excessive amounts of extra exercises without actually engaging with them. It's better to do fewer exercises, pushed harder with an appropriate load, close to or to the point of technical failure, than it is to mess around with tons of junk.
And I'm going to pick very specifically on glute training. I see terrible programmes promoted online with mini-band kickbacks and donkey kickbacks, as well as all these small glute exercises. Absolutely fine to do isolation for glutes – brilliant. But if you have 12 exercises in your workout and six of them are mini-band glute exercises, that is a complete waste of your time. It's better to choose one or two exercises you can load properly and push hard, and use that time much more efficiently.
So, that's it! By now, I hope you have a rough idea of exercise categorisation. Splits aren't that important, but they might be dictated by the exercises you have chosen, as well as an idea of how to spread these exercises out throughout your workout and the overall duration that your training programme should last.
If I'm going to be critical of the way people train in the gym on a day-to-day basis, I don't see enough sticking to programmes, logging their weights, progressing, and seeing things through to the end. There is too much either not using a programme or "programme bouncing," where every four weeks, they're just going into a new workout, trying a new app, trying the next best thing. Stick to what you're doing. It's better to choose a basic programme, perhaps with a few errors, but pushed hard, progressed, and stayed consistent, than it is to second-guess yourself and change things every five minutes.
If you want help with your own programming and would like some advice on aligning your nutrition with that programme, then I am available for one-on-one online training.
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