What Constitutes A Good Workout Routine?
A good workout routine should cover all your major muscle groups in the fewest number of exercises, first for reasons of efficiency and second because this will give you more time to recover and grow. Third, most of us have to train around a 9 - 5 job as well as living a normal everyday life, so we don't have the time or inclination to spend all our waking hours in the gym.
For reasons of recovery, your workout routine should have more rest days than training days, because muscle grows at rest and not while being trained. I'd suggest two hard sessions a week, which is less work than the mainstream bodybuilding press advocate.
As a side issue, you should disregard most of the advice you read in the mainstream bodybuilding press, because the workout routines they recommend are usually champions routines, with way too much volume for muscle gains to take place.
The vast majority (96% plus) of us do not have the genetic advantages that the champions have, or the recovery time (it is after all their job.) to make meaningful gains on the routines they use.
A much overlooked aspect of a good workout routine is never to miss lower body training. You legs contain the most muscle mass, and the fastest way to build size is to build your largest muscles as a priority.
This means squats and dead lifts, and to a slightly lesser extent the leg press. Assuming you have access to the equipment needed to train these movements safely, you need to have them in your bodybuilding routine unless you have a compelling medical reason or an injury that prevents you from training them.
For upper body, think in terms of the chin up, the parallel bar dip, the shrug, overhead press and bench press - these exercises are the best mass builders.
Let's take a quick look at how you might divide these movements up. If you train them all you will probably find that your workouts go on too long and become too tiring. Ideally you need to keep sessions under one hour in length.
As a general rule, the larger the movement is, the earlier you should do it in your body workout routine, because you need to be at your best and freshest when you train the most demanding exercises.
One option is to train lower body one day and upper body on day two. Or you could do lower and upper body in each session, but remember not to allow the sessions to go over the hour as mentioned above.
If you dead lift and squat (and you really should), start your sessions with those exercises. Doing them first will give you a tremendous feeling of a job well done, which will carry your through the rest of your bodybuilding routine on the crest of a wave.When not in the gym, keep extra curricular activities to sensible limits, in order to give your muscles the opportunity to recover and grow.
I hope this has been of use to you.
Understanding how to design and plan workout routines that will work for your body is perhaps the most important part of bodybuilding.
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