New Program to Break Monotony

Bigger Stronger Leaner Competitive Bodybuilding
1

Guys, I’ve been doing some version of a 5x5 program or a simple 4-day split for the past year, alternating the two depending upon progress. I’ve had enough of both of them and want to go more for hypertrophy/size than strength, which is what I’ve been aiming for the past 2 years or so. Stats are 5’9", 202 lbs, ~15% b.f. Currently I have the following on a few lifts:
365x5 - Deadlift
335x5 - Squat
245x5 - Front Squat
B.W.+70x5 - Weighted Dips

I don’t have any bench or press #'s because I’m just getting over a shoulder injury/rehab. It feels about 90% right now so I’m taking it slow working my strength back up, but I’m hoping to focus on both chest and shoulder development because I haven’t been able to do much of anything the past 4 months with either. Here’s the program:

Monday - Chest/Back/Biceps
1A - BB Bench Press: 3x8
1B - BB Reverse grip Bent Rows: 3x8
2A - Weighted Dips: 3x10
2B - Middle grip chinups: 3x10
3A - Cable flyes: 3x15
3B - Seated Rope Pull to neck: 3x15
4 - BB Curl - 3x8

Tuesday - Shoulders/Legs
1 - Seated DB Press: 3x8
2 - BB Back Squats: 3x8
3A - Front Plate raises: 3x15
3B - DB Lunges: 3x15
4A - Cable Lateral raises: 3x10
4B - RDL’s: 3x10
5A - Cuban Press: 3x10
5B - Seated Calf Raises - 3x10

Wednesday - HIIT cardio (20-25 mins)

Thursday - Chest/Back/Biceps
1 - Deadlifts: 3x8
2 - Incline DB Press: 3x8
3A - Wide grip pullups: 3x10
3B - DB Pullovers: 3x8
4A - BB power shrugs: 3x8
4B - Incline cable flyes: 3x10
5 - Pinwheel curls: 3x10

Friday - Shoulders/Legs/Triceps
1 - BB Push Press: 3x8
2 - Front Squats: 3x8
3A - Arnold Press: 3x15
3B - DB One-legged squat: 3x15
4A - Seated rear delt raises: 3x15
4B - Narrow stance hack squat: 3x10
5A - Side lying external rotations: 3x15
5B - Standing DB calf raises: 3x15
5C - Rope pulldowns: 3x8

Ab work will be done toward the end of each workout. I play football on Saturday’s and consider that an extra cardio session. I might eventually add a morning jog for 1-2 days a week, but I’ll start here.

So, any thoughts, criticism, things you’d change? Is it awful, poorly constructed, or does it look like a decent program. I’m not looking for anything fancy, but I do have 2 goals (as mentioned above): hypertrophy and focus on chest/shoulders. Thanks for any and all feedback!

2

3 questions…

  1. Is your diet in check to gain size?

  2. What exercises do you feel hit your chest/shoulders (although this should be considered for all muscle groups) most directly and also carry the most potential for rapid increases in strength?

  3. How do you plan on increasing those lifts you’ve selected?

3

[quote]mr popular wrote:
3 questions…

  1. Is your diet in check to gain size?

  2. What exercises do you feel hit your chest/shoulders (although this should be considered for all muscle groups) most directly and also carry the most potential for rapid increases in strength?

  3. How do you plan on increasing those lifts you’ve selected?[/quote]

Thanks for the reply. To answer your questions:

  1. Yes. My diet’s been pretty spot on for a few years now, I just tweak the kcals from carbs and fats depending upon my goals. Currently I’m upping my carb intake a small amount and I’ll adjust depending upon results.

  2. Incline DB Press for chest, though my gym only has DB’s up to 90’s and I can get that 8 times without a problem (before the injury–at my old gym–I was hitting 120’s for 5 reps). I’m going to have to figure something out in that regard, I might try incline BB if I find I’m not getting enough out of the DB’s.

I’d also include dips as a favorite chest exercise, thankfully that’s something that I was still able to perform despite the shoulder rehab. I find that my shoulders respond best to med/high rep. lateral raises along with push presses. My guess is that I’ll see pretty rapid strength increases on both chest and shoulders due to the time away. While rehabbing I was able to do the following chest/shoulder exercises: dips, pullovers, flyes (toward the end of rehab), front raises, lateral raises, rotator cuff work. Everything else was on hold, so I should, at minimum, see quick gains until I get back to where I was before the injury.

  1. I might be misinterpreting your question here, but all I plan on doing is increasing resistance weekly. I keep pretty detailed logs for everything so I’ll just bump the weight up every week (and I have no problem slapping on the little 2.5’s), if I find I’m not improving then I drop the exercise and replace it (similar to DC training…if you’re not increasing reps/resistance or lowering recovery time then you’re not improving).

Hope this answers your questions, any feedback would be great.

4

I also wanted to post my first days log:

BB BP: 185, 195, 205 (all x8) (I was pleasantly surprised here…I hadn’t done BP in about 4 months, so to get 205x8 rather easily–when my previous best was 5x265–seemed pretty good to me)

Rev. grip bent rows: 185, 205, 205 (all x8)

Dips: BW+35, +45, +45 (all x10)

Chinups: BWx5, x6, x5 (yeah, I suck at these…it’s been a weak point forever but I’m still plugging away)

Flyes: 40, 50, 50 (all x15)

Rope face pulls: 100x7, 80x15, 80x15 (hadn’t done these before, I overshot what I thought I could do and my bi’s were already killing).

BB Curls: 85x8, 65x8, 65x10 (I’m getting rid of these, after all the back work it’s completely unnecessary. I’m going to add some rotator cuff work at the end here instead).

5

That is precisely what I meant by point #3. Haha. Sounds good to me.

Your workout seems a bit scatterbrained, however. Are you supersetting those exercises? If so… why?

Why would you get rid of direct bicep work?

Why are you training SOOO many different exercises?

Do you really think exercises like “rope pulls to the neck” and “one-legged DB squats” have much potential for strength increases?

I just feel like you need to allign your program more closely with your actual goals. In my opinion there is too much “fluff”.

6

[quote]mr popular wrote:
That is precisely what I meant by point #3. Haha. Sounds good to me.

Your workout seems a bit scatterbrained, however. Are you supersetting those exercises? If so… why?

Why would you get rid of direct bicep work?

Why are you training SOOO many different exercises?

Do you really think exercises like “rope pulls to the neck” and “one-legged DB squats” have much potential for strength increases?

I just feel like you need to allign your program more closely with your actual goals. In my opinion there is too much “fluff”.[/quote]

I can deal with that. As I said, I’m going for hypertrophy, not strength. So I’m using lower sets, higher reps than I’m used to, and hitting everything. The rope pulls are very specialized because they’re part of extending my rehab. They target the rear delts and rotator cuff, which is where my injury came from. The one-legged squats are AWESOME, after a heavy squat exercise you won’t feel more burn than with one-legged squats.

I’m supersetting because they’re antagonistic muscles that I’m using, so doing a set of BB bench press supersetted with BB rows does not hinder either exercise. You’re using chest, shoulders and tris on the bench, and back and bi’s on the rows, so I like to superset them.

Direct bi work: trust me, after doing reverse grip BB rows, chinups and rope pulls my bi’s were SCREAMING, they got all the direct work they needed. Thursday I have pinwheel curls, so I’ll hit them then.

Finally, regarding the number of sets: I’m doing 12 sets per body part, nothing crazy there. Because I’m doing a 2-day split it looks like it’s a lot of extra, but today’s program took me 50 minutes…I don’t think I’m burning myself out with this routine, but only time will tell.

Thanks for the reply. I have no problem changing things up, blowing this program up or updating some exercises, I’d just like to hear some feedback. What should I do?

7

[quote]Hambone1818 wrote:

Finally, regarding the number of sets: I’m doing 12 sets per body part, nothing crazy there. Because I’m doing a 2-day split it looks like it’s a lot of extra, but today’s program took me 50 minutes…I don’t think I’m burning myself out with this routine, but only time will tell.
[/quote]

It might not seem like that many. But, are you really going to be able to make significant increases in strength each and every workout with that much volume and assuming you are actually working hard?

In other words, after you’ve blasted your chest with BB bench, weighted dips and flys on Monday, do you really think that you’ll be able to come back 72 hours later and be able to add significant weight to the bar on DB inclines, DB pull overs and incline flys?

If so, then congratulations, you’ve got some kick ass recovery ability. But to be honest, if you’re really “working” on Monday, I think that much volume isn’t going to allow for enough recovery to be able to once again really “work” the same muscles again on Thursday.

If your primary goal is muscle, I’d suggest using only one exercise per body part for each session. Then do 1-3 work sets (similar to an HIT format). You’ve got enough years of experience, so you might even want to try just 1 work set (or one extended work set). That little volume should allow you to still supply an overload, add significant weight each session, and be recovered by the next workout.

And to be honest even then, I’d suggest maybe switching to an upper/lower or push/pull format (working one M,W.F, or T,Th,Sa and alternating between the two). That’ll still mean you’re working each muscle group twice every 5 days (which will allow for quite a few growth cycles).

But, if you can honestly continue to make progress on the above frequency, go for it.

8

So blow it up then, huh? Yeah, after rereading mr popular’s post and searching around for more program information, plus looking at some of the physique clinic workouts for day one, I think I need to reexamine what I’d be doing. I do tend to respond to high volume and have a decent recovery rate but I’m thinking I might have gotten a bit overzealous with this routine.

So, I’m still going to go with Back/Chest/Bi’s and Legs/Shoulder/Tri’s–specifically so I can split up chest and shoulders and perform each at the beginning of my routine. I’m going to go with one exercise per bodypart with 2 extended working sets on each. I’ve split it up with the following exercises:
Chest - Dips, BB Bench, DB Incline
Back (width) - pullups, chinups, straight arm pulldowns
Back (thickness) - deadlifts, BB bent rows, Seated cable rows
Shoulders - Push press, Arnold press, seated lateral raises
Legs (1) - Front squat, back squat, DB lunges
Legs (2) - RDL, Goodmorning, leg curls
Triceps - Rope pulldowns, CGBP, one-arm pulldowns
Biceps - BB curl, pinwheel curl, cable straight bar curl
Calves - seated raises, standing raises, Leg press raises

Chest/Back/Bi’s will be Mon, Fri, Wed, etc, with Shoulders/Legs/Tri’s on Wed, Mon, Fri, etc.

I’ll do sets in the following manner:

8-10 reps, rest 10 sec, reps to failure, rest 10 sec, reps to failure.

The only thing I won’t do this with is rotator cuff work at the end of every routine.

Now, is this still a ridiculous program, does it still need some tweaking, or do you think it looks good? I’ll post the routine itself separately so it’s not cluttered into all this mess I just wrote. Thanks, as always, for the help!

9

Updated Program:

Chest/Back/Bi’s
A
BB Bench Press
Pullups
BB Bent Rows
BB Curl
rotator cuff exercise (will be done at the end of every workout)
(and remember, I’m doing 2 working sets of 8-10, rest 10 sec, reps to failure, rest 10 sec, reps to failure of everything)
B
Dips
Wide Grip seated rows
Chinups
Pinwheel curl
C
DB Incline Press
Deadlifts
Straight arm pulldown
Cable straight bar curls

Shoulders/Legs/Tris
A
Push Press
Front Squat
RDL’s
Seated Calf raises*
Rope pulldown*
B
Arnold Press
Back Squat
Leg curls
Standing calf raises*
Skullcrushers
C
Seated lateral raises
Lunges
Goodmornings
Leg Press calf press*
CGBP*
(* - denotes a superset)

10

I think it looks like it could definitely work. If you’re doing rest-pause you might even want to keep it to one extended set (ala DC).

But, if you feel like you can recover from the volume then go for it. I’d say at least give it a shot your way and see what happens. If you stall quickly, then try dropping to 1 extended set and see how that goes.

11

[quote]Sentoguy wrote:
I think it looks like it could definitely work. If you’re doing rest-pause you might even want to keep it to one extended set (ala DC).

But, if you feel like you can recover from the volume then go for it. I’d say at least give it a shot your way and see what happens. If you stall quickly, then try dropping to 1 extended set and see how that goes.[/quote]

Sounds good, and thanks again for the help. I’ve never done an entire program designed around rest-pause sets so I’m excited to try it and see how it works. As you said, if the extra set is too much then I’ll just drop down to one set per, but I think I’ll be fine.

12

I would echo everything sentoguy had to say above, however I would just like to add that the difference between gaining muscle mass, and ONLY gaining strength, should be a function of your DIET.