Intermediate gym guide

By now you should have gotten the hang of the basic exercises and gym routines. Hopefully you’ve experienced some growth and increased strength as well. Now is the time to start developing a more thought-out bodybuilding strategy. The first step is reviewing your training split.

Training

As you get better at targeting muscles and hammer them with heavy sets, you inflict more “damage” to the muscles at each workout. Your mind-muscle connection has improved, and you need to let them rest more to recover. As a result, it’s time to revisit your training split.

Some may get away with continuing a twice-per-week schedule, but many natural bodybuilders find that to be too much – overtraining is common and must be avoided. More on overtraining in the Advanced chapter.

Here are two sample training splits, one with three workouts and one with four workouts per week. For simplicity, I’ve assumed a 7-day cycle where you do the same workouts on set days of the week, but you can of course adjust this as you see fit.

If you feel fully rested and energized after 6 days, by all means, go on a 6-day cycle and ignore what day of the week it is, or vice versa, with an 8-day cycle if you feel that you need more time to recover. Ultimately, it is your body that decides how frequently you can train.

As you get more experienced and grow increasingly stronger, you should be able to start phasing out the assist-part of chins, dips and other movements that uses your own bodyweight. If you’re naturally light and can easily do 10-12 reps with your own body weight; consider using a weight-belt to strap on an extra plate or two.

Some exercises, like lateral dumbbell raises and cable crossover flies still require a lot of “feel” to come to its full right. You’re wise to increase the weights in small increments to make sure you’re not losing sight of proper form.

Another change you will notice is a couple new exercises. Deadlifts and barbell squats are classic mass-builders, which help you build core strength. While it may be nice to use the latest and greatest machines, it’s hard to get the kind of mass the classics provides.

Many distinguished professional bodybuilders got their massive foundation by sticking to the basics for the first few years. Then, once you’ve reached a solid base you can experiment more with machines and cables.