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    101 Body-Sculpting Workouts & Nutrition Plans: For Women
    101 Body-Sculpting Workouts & Nutrition Plans: For Women
    101 Body-Sculpting Workouts & Nutrition Plans: For Women
    Ebook409 pages1 hour

    101 Body-Sculpting Workouts & Nutrition Plans: For Women

    By The Editors of Muscle and Fitness Hers

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    About this ebook

    Removing guesswork from workout regimens, the programs in this guidebook are not only clearly explained and easy-to-follow, they are proven to be effective at burning more calories and body fat to achieve a firm, healthy, strong body. Designed specifically for women, this resource introduces to many different styles of working out—from barbells and dumbbells to machines and elastic bands—to maximize the effectiveness of each workout and to ensure there is never any boredom with the routines. Also included are complete meal plans, designed by some of the countries best nutritionists, which feature a collection of recipes that are both healthy and delicious.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTriumph Books
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781623684013
    101 Body-Sculpting Workouts & Nutrition Plans: For Women

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      Book preview

      101 Body-Sculpting Workouts & Nutrition Plans - The Editors of Muscle and Fitness Hers

      Chapter 1

      Split Decision

      Deciding which body parts to train together can be a real puzzle. We solve it for you

      To make noticeable improvements in your physique over weeks and months, you need to know how to change up your training. Whether through variables such as exercise and weight selection, sets and reps, or even your rest periods between sets, continually tweaking your workouts helps stave off plateaus and keeps the beneficial muscular adaptations coming. But before you can even consider altering your training variables, you need to decide on your training split. The split you use determines how frequently you work out each week, how often you exercise each muscle group in a week and what body-parts get trained together.

      Your current split may be something you adopted from a training partner or lifted from a popular fitness competitor’s split presented in M&F HERS. While it might be good, it may not be the best split for you. And even if it’s a great split, you should change it up from time to time as you do other training variables to prompt the gains you’re looking for.

      Why? For one thing, if you keep your training split the same month after month, your muscles will adapt and stagnate, limiting your progress. Two, if you train the same bodyparts in the same order every time, the muscles you hit later in the routine can’t be worked with the same intensity as the ones trained first, again limiting your results.

      While an endless combination of training splits exist, several fit a variety of experience levels and schedules. Here we lay out the four most common splits, and in Trial Separation at the end of this chapter we provide a way to try them all over the course of 12 weeks to help you gauge which ones work better for you.

      DUMBBELL INCLINE CURL

      SPLIT NO. 1

      Whole-Body

      Three Days per week

      Here you simply train the entire body each time you go to the gym. Typically, most whole-body workouts use only 1-2 exercises per muscle group with total sets per bodypart rarely exceeding six. This allows you to train each bodypart more frequently because it receives a limited amount of stress in each workout. The less stress a muscle receives, the faster it can recover and be trained again.

      Although typically considered a beginner split, the whole-body option can also work well for advanced lifters. Training such a large number of muscle groups in each workout boosts growth-hormone levels, which helps to encourage muscle growth as well as fat-burning. Whole-body training also activates a greater amount of enzymes in muscles that turn on fat-burning processes.

      In addition, research from St. Francis Xavier University (Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada) shows that female and male subjects who trained each muscle group three times per week had upper-body strength gains 8% greater and muscle mass gains 300% greater than those who trained twice a week. This was despite the fact that each group completed the same number of sets per bodypart, which means the three-times-per-week trainees did fewer sets per workout. So if you currently train each muscle group once a week for about 12 sets each, training each with four sets three times a week on a whole-body split instead will allow you to do the same number of sets per week but may enhance your results.

      The simplest way to use the whole-body approach is to train on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, thus allowing at least one full day of rest between workouts. Of course, any three days that provide at least one day of rest between workouts will do, such as a Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday schedule. Be sure to do a different exercise for every muscle group in each of the three workouts per week to avoid staleness, and alternate the order of the bodyparts you train, being sure to move weak muscle groups earlier in the workout on some days. Our sample program accomplishes both of these goals to optimize your results.

      LEG EXTENSION

      SPLIT NO. 2

      Upper/Lower-Body

      Four Days Per Week

      In this split you break the body into upper (chest, back, shoulders, biceps and triceps) and lower (quads, hams, calves, glutes and abs) muscle groups. You can train each bodypart twice per week, in two upper-body and two lower-body workouts.

      Because you split the entire body into two sessions, you can do more sets for each muscle group than in the whole-body split. It also allows you to train with a little more intensity, since you have fewer bodyparts to focus on each time you visit the gym. Yet because this type of split allows for more sets and higher intensity, it means your muscles will require more rest. Most people who follow an upper/lower split follow a standard Monday (lower-body workout 1), Tuesday (upper-body workout 1), Thursday (lower-body workout 2) and Friday (upper-body workout 2) training schedule as shown. This allows each muscle group two full days of rest between workouts.

      MACHINE CHEST PRESS

      SPLIT NO. 3

      Push/Pull/Legs

      Three Days Per Week

      The push/pull/legs split is based on the concept that the body’s muscles are mainly divided into pushing and pulling muscles. Pushing muscles include the chest, shoulders and triceps, which tend to push the weight away from the body such as during the bench press, overhead press and triceps extension. Pulling muscles include the back and biceps, which mainly pull the weight toward the body such as during barbell rows and dumbbell curls. Abs are commonly considered pulling muscles because they pull the torso toward the legs and/or the legs toward the torso.

      The problem arises when you consider legs. The squat is a pushing exercise, as is the leg extension, but moves such as leg curls and romanian deadlifts are pulling exercises. But the issue is resolved by giving legs their own training day.

      Because the entire body is trained over three separate workouts, many people who follow this split train on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, hitting each muscle group once a week. Yet some do it six days a week to hit each bodypart twice over the seven-day span. We suggest the former to prevent overtraining.

      LAT PULLDOWN

      Bonus Tip

      Keep your torso erect at all times — don’t lean back excessively — to keep full tension on the upper lats

      MONDAY (PUSH WORKOUT)

      WEDNESDAY (LEG WORKOUT)

      FRIDAY (PULL WORKOUT)

      SPLIT NO. 4

      Four-Day

      Four Days Per Week

      This split simply divides all the major muscle groups of the body into four separate training days. This means you train fewer bodyparts per workout than the three splits we’ve described, allowing you to increase both the intensity of your workouts, and the number of exercises and sets you perform per muscle group.

      Most four-day splits are performed on a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday schedule, with rest days on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Yet you can train any four days of the week you prefer.

      You can divide muscle groups in many ways with a four-day training split, but here we’ve paired body-parts that perform opposite actions. For example, on Monday you’ll train quads, hams, calves and abs; on Tuesday you’ll do back and chest; on Thursday you’ll work shoulders and abs; and on Friday it’s time for biceps and triceps.

      The Tuesday and Friday workouts listed here best exemplify the benefits of this training strategy. Pairing chest with back and biceps with triceps allows you to train two muscle groups that don’t fatigue each other. Each bodypart performs an opposite motion of its pair, a push vs. a pull.

      PUSHDOWN

      MONDAY (LEGS + ABS)

      TUESDAY (BACK + CHEST)

      THURSDAY (SHOULDERS + ABS)

      FRIDAY (BICEPS + TRICEPS)

      LEG PRESS

      Extra Credit

      Moving your feet higher on the platform places more stress on your hamstrings and glutes

      Splitting the Differences

      Follow the program schedule in Trial Separation at right, using each training split for three weeks. This will give you just enough time to get a feel for each one and determine how well your body responds, as well as how well it works with your schedule. These are all important considerations. We also give you questions to help you grade the benefits of the various splits.

      Regardless of which split you find works best for you, you’ll still want to consider swapping it out every once in a while.

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