My Program - Feedback Needed!

Bigger Stronger Leaner Beginners
1

Having read through how to design a program and various other articles, I put this together and just wanted to know what you guys thought and any improvements I could make.
My goal is size, I am following a structure of
Day 1 -upper
Day 2-lower
Day 3-off
Day 4-upper
Day 5-off
Day 6-lower
Day 7-off

My upper body workout is as follows:

Incline press
Seated cable row
Shoulder press
Lat pull down
Curls
Tricep machine

Each exercise will have 3 sets, the first set will be 10 reps, I will increase the weight for the next set and try and complete 8 reps, increase the weight again for the final set and try and finish 6 reps.

Lower body workout will be:

Leg press
Lying leg curl
Good Mornings
Abdominal training (plank for 30s, followed immediately by reverse crunches for 30s, followed immediately by swiss ball crunches for 30s, rest, repeat whole set twice more)
HIIT 12-16 minutes on treadmill

Same idea as the upper workout in terms of reps/sets.

Looking forward to your feedback, thanks guys!

2

[quote]freedom21 wrote:
Having read through how to design a program and various other articles, I put this together and just wanted to know what you guys thought and any improvements I could make.
My goal is size, I am following a structure of
Day 1 -upper
Day 2-lower
Day 3-off
Day 4-upper
Day 5-off
Day 6-lower
Day 7-off

My upper body workout is as follows:

Incline press
Seated cable row
Shoulder press
Lat pull down
Curls
Tricep machine

Each exercise will have 3 sets, the first set will be 10 reps, I will increase the weight for the next set and try and complete 8 reps, increase the weight again for the final set and try and finish 6 reps.

Lower body workout will be:

Leg press
Lying leg curl
Good Mornings
Abdominal training (plank for 30s, followed immediately by reverse crunches for 30s, followed immediately by swiss ball crunches for 30s, rest, repeat whole set twice more)
HIIT 12-16 minutes on treadmill

Same idea as the upper workout in terms of reps/sets.

Looking forward to your feedback, thanks guys!
[/quote]

You should try to incorporate more compound movements, as they yield the best mass gain results per time. And you absolutely need some hip dominant exercise and also some sort of leg flexion.

I suggest switching Incline press with flat Barbell Bench, doing close grip chins for Lat pull down and Curls (maybe keep curls if you are a back-dominant puller and your Lat do most of the work) and adding some sort of overhead pressing, e.g. clean+press, military press or push press. Imho, your can ditch the triceps isolation. If you really think your tris are lacking or slowing your bench progress, do some close grip benching, rack benches or board presses.

Lower day needs some more work, i suggest some sort of DL + squat combo. (e.g. conventional DL and front squats) You don’t really need much more, if your feel the volume is not enough you could increase the number of sets while decreasing the reps per set and adjust the weight accordingly (e.g. 5x5, 10x3). I never had much success with Abs after doing squats/DLs, maybe try to do abs on off day…

3

If you ask me, the workout is pretty good for the beginner’s forums. You might want to check on the volume of the upper body workout - nothing fancy, just try to get it done around 1 hour.

Upper body:
To replace the lat pulldown with chin-up or pull-up would be great, as Petrichor said, but if you can’t do that, this is a viable alternative until you become stronger. The additional bicep/tricep training is okay, but imho wouldn’t be necessary if you do chins (my rule of thumb: If those make you train longer than 1 hour, cancel them).

Lower body:
If you want to do leg presses, the plank has its merrits. I’d do some front squats or Hackenschmidt squats instead of those two exercises, because squats train the same area. This reduces the volume a lot, but I personally would add some reps anyway, because I am a believer in high reps for legs. Damn, I am currently sprinting up a hill as HIIT and believe there is nothing better for the calves. If you don’t want to do that, add some calf exercises…

I’d just completely cancel the HIIT training after normal training. Do that on the free days. If you’re able to do an endurance training after the weight lifting, you’re not doing it right. You should reduce the breaks. Personal note: After I bought a watch for my home-gym, I am training much harder. Give it a try.

I am also not sure if you’re doing the plank long enough if you can do crunches afterwards :wink:

But besides the HIIT issue, I think it is a viable training program that will work for six weeks.

@petrichor

He has shoulder presses, which imho are great overhead pressing moves.

He has the good morning in there.