Dylan Backer | Writer & Photographer
March 3, 2023
A good workout routine starts with analyzing goals. Two common goals are to gain muscle or to lose fat. No matter your goals, a workout split is a fundamental part of your workout regime. A workout split is an organization of what muscle groups you train together. The most common beginner workout split is the push-pull legs split. The pushing muscles are the chest, shoulders, and triceps. The pulling forces consist of the back and biceps. The leg muscles consist of the quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves.
After you have chosen a workout split, you can move on to exercise selection. An excellent way to find exercises is to use TikTok. For example, if you want to find exercises for a push day, look up push day workout, and you will be granted thousands of videos highlighting different exercises. There is no perfect exercise that will work for everyone. Exercise selection truly comes down to preference. Some exercises may feel good, while others may not. Everyone will have specific exercises that their body will respond well to. Once you find one, add it to the routine and improve. The exercise selection process has a large amount of trial and error involved.
Diet and nutrition are additional factors at play when it comes to working out. The most important differentiation between muscle gain and fat loss comes down to your diet. Eating more food is the most important thing you can do for muscle gain. This food should be high in protein and carbs. However, the baseline here is to eat more food. The main driver behind fat loss is eating less, also known as a calorie deficit. The most common advice for a caloric deficit is to eat 500 calories less than your maintenance calories per week. This equates to about a pound of weight loss per week. To find a rough estimate of your maintenance calories, use a calorie calculator on Google. Many like tracking their calories using an app like My Fitness Pal. These apps allow you to plug in your foods and track calories and macro nutrients. This would also benefit people trying to gain weight since they can track their protein intake.
Rest and recovery are the last but most easily overlooked aspects of working out. Having adequate rest periods in between sets within a workout is crucial. This time where you’re resting is essential because it allows for higher levels of force production for the next set. You can train harder if you have time to rest. Additionally, the body takes time to recover after a workout session before it is one hundred percent again. The best practice is to rest after completing one rotation of your workout split. That way, you allow time for your body to rebuild the muscle stronger.
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