Overview
In order to construct a program we need a way to slice and dice all hypertrophy and strength exercises.
Here we suggest two primary ways to conceptualise this, by movement patterns and by muscle group.
It is certainly true that when you’re a beginner, it’s best to mainly focus on the movement patterns. While this does mean thinking by muscle groups is more ‘advanced’, it never invalidates the movement pattern approach even for advanced trainees.
Rather they are just complementary lens of breaking down training, both should be used conceptually as a diagnostic tool to assess a program.
The key point here is muscle group – these are many muscles that we are classifying together for fitness training purposes. Obviously there are hundreds of muscles in the human body and we can’t train each one in isolation. If you go one step further into concepts such as bioflow then there might not even be a clear distinction between each muscle. This level of detail isn’t helpful for the purposes of actually training so we’ll leave it at that for now.
12 muscle groups
It may actually be easier to visualise this as 10 major muscle groups, plus forearms and calves.
Training differences
Broadly speaking muscles need to be trained in the same way. It all requires sufficient mechanical tension. We want to select appropriate exercises and focus on execution and effort. Most of the time it’ll likely be between 5-15 reps for 1-3 sets with 2-3 minutes.
Having said that remember the old adage ‘you need to learn the rules before you break the rules’.
Sometimes, we need to bend the rules for best progress.
Higher reps
- Shoulders and quads in particular will benefit from rep ranges upwards of 20, 30, and potentially up to 50
Different tempos
- Traps may benefit from higher velocity work which means we don’t get a slow and controlled eccentric.
- Calves are a particularly resilient muscle group. It may benefit from 3-5 second pauses at the lengthened position for each rep.
More sets
- Traps and lats are resilient muscle groups that may potentially warrant starting at 1 extra set more than other muscles groups.
Exercise selection and rotation
- Shoulders are relatively unique in that it may require more exercises rotated more frequently than pretty much every other muscle group.
More details will be in each individual section.