Weight Lifting Workouts
Here you’ll find a collection of weight lifting workouts to suit all needs. Before you get started, read on to find out about the different types of workout available. Otherwise, you can jump straight in to the workouts at the bottom of the page.
Split Bodypart Workouts
The “split” weight lifting workouts are designed to be pieced together to form a weight lifting routine. For example, if you have an “arms” day in your split, you’ll probably want to combine bicep, tricep and forearm workouts in to one session.
Workouts that target one or two muscles groups (as part of a split) usually go something like this. You do the heavy compounds first, because they are the hardest and the most effective. Then you throw in one or two isolation exercises to really exhaust the muscle you’re targeting, and stimulate maximum growth (either muscle or strength).
For larger muscles, your weight lifting workout might include couple of exercises that hit the muscle from different angles, to make sure all the fibres get a good workout. For example, your leg workout might include back squats, front squats and hack squats, all of which target different parts of the quadriceps.
More exotic mass-building workouts are based on drop-sets, super-sets, and sets with forced reps or negatives. All of these techniques can be effective for shocking the body once in a while and stimulating new growth.
A word of warning though, regular use of these super-intensive weight lifting workouts can quickly lead to neural burnout, and set your training backwards.
As a general rule, you want to make use of these techniques infrequently, and lean towards using them as an occasional change from the basics, rather than as part of your regular program.
Full Body Workouts
Some people may prefer a full body workout. If time is an issue, and you can only afford to train two or three times a week, full-body workouts are a good solution.
Instead of training 2 or 3 muscles with 3-4 exercises, the aim of the full body workout is to train most or all of the body in a session, using 1-2 exercises per muscle group.
Compound movements like the squat and bench press are especially useful as they often target multiple muscle groups, and allow you to work your whole body in a shorter period of time.
A full-body workout shouldn’t leave any one muscle group feeling exhausted, but your whole body should feel moderately taxed.
Full body workouts are an excellent choice for anyone new to weight lifting, or anyone who can only afford to work out twice or even once a week.
Weight Lifting Workouts for Strength, Power or Sports
In order to develop a particular component of fitness, your workouts must be tailored accordingly. In this case a classic bodybuilding split probably isn’t for you.
Powerlifters for example, often utilise a “strength” workout and a “power” workout on different days, where they work the same muscles, but with different weights, reps, lifting speed and possibly with different exercises.
If you’re training for strength, power or sporting performance, your best bet is to check out the routine section, where you’ll find complete weight lifting routines tailored to your goals.