Hypertrophy-Specific Training: Writing the programme

10th June 2012

I have slowly been adapting myself to the gym after an absence of a couple of years. It is important not to rush these things at the beginning. If you have been away from the gym for a while or if this is the first time for you to start on a real weightlifting programme, then you need to allow the body to slowly adjust to its new environment. The last thing you want is an injury at the outset of a new regime.

It is best to start out doing a full body workout three times a week to acclimatise yourself to the gym. If this is the first time you have done weight training, you could stick with this programme for the first 12 weeks. You will see a lot of progress during this time. A good full body workout can be found on exrx here.

Over the last few weeks I have been concentrating on increasing the weights I can lift so that I can find out my weight limits up to 10 repetitions.

I have been following a three day split so I have been in the gym five days a week exercising all body parts twice each apart from the legs which I did only once a week - they are bigger and require more strenuous exercise and longer recovery. I did the split by doing push exercises on Monday and Thursday and pull exercises on Tuesday and Friday and legs on Wednesday.

I am now able to lift slightly heavier weights which has made it possible to calculate all my one rep max's. This means that I can now write my hypertrophy-specific training schedule. This shall follow the principles of low volume and progressive intensity training, an interesting article on which can be seen here.

In my next post, you will be able to see my new training schedule showing all the exercises in the correct order with the weights and numbers of times I shall be lifting them for the next two weeks. The programme is now all planned out to the last detail for the next eight weeks. I shall be posting the schedule in two weekly blocks just in case I need to do any adjustments. I can foresee one problem; because I am not lifting heavy weights yet, some of the incremental increases are very small and these kind of weights are not readily available in the gym. I might have to do some adapting until I can lift heavier weights.

For people lifting heavier weights, and for most of the exercises myself as well, the beauty of this system is that there is no guess work, no "let's just see how many times I can lift this." The intensity increases over the entire course, first on a two week cycle with the number of reps staying the same but the weight increasing from one session to the next. The intensity also increases every fortnight as the weight is considerably increased as you move onto the next repetition max group. You perform your 15 repetition max group of exercises for two weeks, then two weeks of 10 and finally two weeks of 5.

A general warm up for the whole body should be performed prior to lifting any weights. This might involve a few minutes on the treadmill or some Ab crunches just to raise the pulse a bit. The warm up for some of the exercises should consist of lifting half the target weight about 12 to 15 times. This allows you to get used to performing the exercise. It is not necessary to stretch as this just puts the muscle under stress and will result in not being able to lift the weight to the best of your ability and strength.