I’m (43M) just starting my gym routine and was wondering about some guidelines where to get informed about good workout schedules, in example which group of muscles to do on which day for optimal effect?
E: I’m 176 cm (5 foot 9) / 86 kg (190 lb) now. Want to reach 80 kg (175 lb).
I want to lose that belly and work on overall fitness/muscle
For five days a week, I do an upper-lower split. I tend to do lower body Monday, Thursday and Saturday, and upper body Tuesday and Thursday, taking Wednesday and Sunday off (I may do cardio stuff those days).
My priority at the moment is legs, due to a bad knee which I’m focused on keeping stable and strong. You could switch this to having three upper days per week with two lower, if you’re more focused on upper body growth. Or you could even do a push-pull-legs, but then you’d only maybe hit legs once a week, which I think is too little personally - again, all depends on your goals.
With any split, you can easily find a free starter program if you look around. Then you can tweak it based on your own needs. As an example of the content: for my upper days I focus on hitting upper back, lats, some lower back, chest, front, side, rear delts, as well as biceps and triceps. And I add abs at the end. For lower body days I do glutes, quads, hamstrings, calves, adductors and abductors. Sometime o add abs on leg days too.
Which exercises you specifically want to do for each muscle is really down to preference. If you’re very new to it, you could start off with machines, and over time you can tweak your programme to be more varied e.g. with free weight, cables etc. The main thing at first is to learn the form of each exercise, and to track your reps and weights, so you and progressively increase those over time, for growth.
Thank you so much for the ideas and pointer. This is great. You definitely got me thinking and planning. I cannot wait to start implementing my own routine which will be a little bit tweaked version of your. Definitely I’m starting with rhe machines before I’m moving to free weights. I will be tracking my progress and I need to find good quality source of guidelines on how to do the exercises properly. I want to perform them correctly from the beginning for better results and to avoid injuries. Thanks a lot!