Workout Plans

Learn about powerlifting. I would suggest searching Yelp for a “strength gym” in your city. The senior trainers there can push you further than I ever could.

I've also heard good things about Stronglifts 5x5.

For those wanting to get bigger, becoming a powerlifter requires extreme dedication, and it’s outside the scope of this handbook.

It's also worth pointing out, however, that Plan B doesn’t have to end. It’s the workout plan you can use for as long as you see results. Despite what you've heard, the science suggests there is no need to switch up exercises to continue growing. We talk more about that in this FAQ.

At some point, you will notice your rate of muscle gains slowing. (In the next section, we learn how to measure our muscle gains so you can identify when this happens.) Some people will want to stop at this point because they'll consider themselves sufficiently muscular. But they will need to keep going to the gym to maintain it.

Whichever path you take, there’s also a genetic reason why your gains will eventually slow: your muscles can only get so big. Research has shown that the total size you can naturally reach is relative to how large your skeleton is (study).

Are you a broad-shouldered man with thick wrists and ankles? Perhaps expect to get way past the 3” (7.5cm) arm gain if you keep up your workouts. Are you a smaller 5’4” (1.65m) person with narrow hips? Even if you naturally worked out for a decade, you're unlikely to get as muscular as a much larger person could.

There are two types of warmups: stretching and lightweight sets.

Research suggests neither is necessary: there is no need for stretching before weightlifting (study). Pre-workout stretching can actually decrease weightlifting performance (article—see bottom for sources) and the evidence for its help with injury prevention is mixed (study, study). Don’t get angry at me! I’m just the messenger! Another warmup that provides no performance benefit is a light starting set before lifting your normal weights (study). 

There are a few exceptions, however: 

• You’re new to an exercise and you need to discover your safe range of motion when performing it—like in the first couple weeks of this program.
• You have injuries. (Addressing them is beyond the scope of this handbook, and I cannot say how much of the advice in this handbook applies to you.)
• You are a powerlifter (an advanced weightlifter who focuses on increasing strength) handling dangerously heavy weights.

The fitness expression “no pain no gain” is misleading. The only “pain” you should encounter is from lifting weights that are a bit too heavy for your comfort. Beyond that, overworking your muscles through high volume or low rest is counter-constructive.

As you’ll see from your weekly measurements, when a muscle is stressed by a workout, it appears to only grow by a fixed amount for the next ~12 hours. So if you do more reps or sets than this program calls for, you should experience no further gains per workout, and you’ll endure unnecessarily longer recovery times that will keep you out of the gym.

Want to prove this to yourself? Using the technique outlined earlier on this page, measure yourself the morning after a workout containing 50% more sets than this program calls for. So long as you’re doing everything else right, you’ll see no increase in gains over the previous workout. 

It’s not only very high volume that needlessly overworks muscles, but also very short rest times between sets. Research suggests at least 2 minutes of rest between sets (study), and it appears you can go much longer than that without it affecting your gains. I repeat: Contrary to popular belief, your gains shouldn't be reduced by taking, say, a long-ish 5 minute break between sets instead of the more common 2 minutes (study, study, study). 

Even though it’s more painful to do a second set within a short amount of time (such as 1.5 minutes), the increased pain does not mean you’re exhausting the muscle better for the purposes of growing bigger. It might just mean you’re rushing yourself and you're mistaking discomfort for progress.

In Plan B, we exploit the fact that long rest times are acceptable by doing 2 sets of bicep curls at the start of the workout and the remaining 2 sets at the end of the workout. I call these split sets. They help us retain the bicep strength needed to complete every rep with proper form. If we don't complete all reps, we don't grow.

Note that ample rest time also applies to unilateral (one-handed or one-legged) exercises where one side of the body is worked at a time. The bicep curl is a good example: It’s commonly performed with one arm completing all 8–10 reps before switching arms and repeating. But consider taking a short break between arm changes so your heartbeat can return to normal.

Personally, heartbeat is how I determine rest times: I wait for my heartbeat to return to normal and for my muscles to feel “energetic” enough that I'm confident I can do another full set with proper form. 

Resting also applies to the time between workout sessions. Don’t do all three of your weekly sessions back-to-back. Your muscles need ~48-72 hours to recover (study, study). So even if you "feel" you could repeat Day 1 of your workout plan within 48 hours, you’re being mislead by your body. They might not feel sore while sitting at your computer, but if you go the gym and do a set, you'll feel a strange discomfort.

When working out for muscle size (as opposed to strength), use a weight that’s light enough to do a set of at least 8 reps with and heavy enough that you can't easily do more than 10 reps (study, study). 

This range of 8 to 10 reps means it should be fine if you stop at 8, 9, or 10 in any set. In short, go as high as you can while stopping one rep short of the maximum you feel you could do. 

Stopping one rep short of exhaustion is the best kept secret in weightlifting: It shouldn't decrease your rate of gains and it increases your recovery time between sets so that you can complete all your reps (study, study).

It will take a couple weeks of working out to begin recognizing when you have the capacity to do just one more rep in a set. Until then, focus on staying within the 8–10 rep range: do 10 when you have high stamina and 8 when you don't. 

According to some studies, women will build muscle faster by choosing a heaviness that lets them get closer to 10 reps rather than 8. So, if you’re a woman lifting a weight that’s too heavy to complete 10 reps with, perhaps go lighter. According to studies, this is because women have muscle fiber distribution that responds better when stimulated with higher reps (study, study, article).

For size gains, research suggests the optimal number of sets is between 3 and 6 (study, study). This is how many sets you should do for each muscle targeted by a workout.

Plan A of this program consists of 3 sets per exercise. In Plan A, no muscle group is directly hit by more than one exercise per workout. This means if you do the bench press in a given workout, you won't also do another chest exercise in that workout. Three sets of one exercise should be enough to trigger a muscle's per-workout growth limit for the first 8 weeks. More sets would likely increase recovery time without increasing growth rate. 

At the 8 week mark, you switch to Plan B, which builds on top of Plan A in part by advancing to 4 sets per exercise. This becomes necessary to continue stimulating your more developed muscles. 4 sets is in accordance with both the bodybuilding research (study) and decades of best practice. I have also anecdotally found no evidence that doing more than 4 sets is advantageous when employing the 8 to 10 rep range, which is the range that maximizes muscle size gains (study, study).

The potential implication of 4 sets being optimal is that doing, say, two chest exercises in one workout where the combined number of sets across both exercises exceeds 4 is overkill. Yet most workout plans found on the web instruct you to do 3–4 sets of 8–10 reps for the bench press (which directly works your chest) followed by 3 sets of the butterfly (which also directly works your chest)! This of course sums to 6+ sets that all target the same muscle, which is above the 3 or 4 sets recommended above.

These potentially misguided workouts are likely the result of either:

• The people designing them have unscientifically copy-pasted them together. Their suggestions are neither based on research nor experimentation that have been compared to alternative workout plans.
• The people designing them are on performance enhancers and their recommendations are indeed maximally effective for their artificially enhanced states, but they don't realize that it would be overkill for non-steroid users. I'm not even kidding.

I repeat: Contrary to popular belief, 4 sets of 10 reps at the heaviest weight you can lift should be all you need to maximally trigger muscle size growth in a workout. (As always, you can verify this for yourself by measuring your arm growth after a workout.)

If you avoid overworking your muscles, your recovery times are shorter, and you avoid the risk of re-training muscles before they’ve recovered.

Out of all the myth busting I’ve done in this handbook, I know that "no more than 4 direct exercises per muscle" is the most difficult to digest for experienced weightlifters who’ve been doing otherwise. So I've written a detailed reasoning in the FAQ further down this page.

However, there are two important distinctions that should clear up your disbelief:

• Indirect targeting: It’s acceptable if a muscle is both indirectly targeted and directly targeted in a workout for more than 4 sets total. For example, if you work your triceps through a bench press then later do a tricep extension exercise, that's fine because the bench press only in part works your tricep—to nowhere near the extent that the isolated extension does.
  
  So as long as you’re not directly exercising the same muscle for more than 4 combined sets, post-workout recovery times won’t be too compromised.
• Muscle group sub-isolation: When it comes to chest exercises, for example, it’s acceptable to do 4 sets of one exercise that exclusively works lower chest and 4 sets of a second exercise that exclusively works upper chest. (The upper and lower portions of your chest are different muscles.)
  
  However, keep in mind that most chest exercises work both the upper and lower chest and therefore it can be difficult to achieve total isolation.
  
  Here’s a counter-example: Because of the way triceps are built, any exercise that puts an emphasis on one of the two smaller tricep heads should still place the majority of the emphasis on the longest tricep head. So if in the same workout you do two different tricep exercises that each emphasizes a different secondary head with 3–4 sets, the longest head will get overworked. 

You don’t have to wrap your head around all the implications above if you're following this program’s exercises. To the extent reasonable, they take all this into consideration.

Note: To see how each exercise is performed, click its name in the exercise lists.

If you're committing to spending 2.5 hours in the gym every week, be smart and use your time efficiently: use proper form for every single rep. Failing to do so can result in injury, under-training intended muscles, and/or not getting bigger after your workouts.

The goal of weightlifting is not to move a weight from point A to point B. The goal is to maximally stress the muscle that is most responsible for moving a weight from point A to point B. The way you do that is by contracting that muscle throughout an exercise's motion to remind yourself that it should be doing most of the lifting.

Don't let unintended muscles do so much of the lifting that your intended muscles don’t feel the majority of the load. That might defeat the purpose of the exercise. (It should be obvious what the intended muscle is for each exercise. If not, ask a professional trainer to guide you.)

Another mistake beginners make is not completing their full range of motion. For example, on a bicep curl, they won't bring a dumbbell up to where their forearm touches their bicep. But if you don’t start at the lowest point in a motion and push all the way through to the end, you’re not making best use of the exercise to exhaust your muscle. Sooner or later you’ll likely stop getting stronger on that exercise.

So, to recap, two pointers: (1) lift using an exercise's intended muscle and (2) lift fully.

Now let’s cover the best practices of form:

• Grip: Firmly squeeze the handle or the bar you're gripping onto when lifting. Many people find that this helps complete their final reps by increasing their concentration and focusing their strength.
• One-sided exercises: Start any one-handed or one-legged exercise with your non-dominant side, which is the side you don’t write with. Every muscle on this side of your body is at risk of being weaker than the other, so it’s smart to have your weakest side dictate the maximum reps you can perform. (Needless to say, don't do more reps on one side of your body than the other.) 
• Two-handed exercises: When an exercise requires that you push or pull with both hands or legs, distribute the force evenly across both sides of your body. Otherwise, over time, one side will get stronger than the other.
• Lowering a weight: When you lower a weight back into its starting position, do not let gravity do the work; don't let the weight drop without your muscles resisting the force. Slowly fight the resistance by keeping your muscle contracted. Not only has extensive research shown that going slowly through in this direction leads to faster muscle gains (study), but you can hurt your joints if you suddenly drop heavy weight. 
• Timing: Don’t lift weights really fast (e.g. 0.5 seconds in each direction, study) or really slowly (e.g. 10 seconds in each direction, study). However, whether you lift closer to 2 seconds or 6 seconds shouldn't make a critical difference to your gains (study).
  ‍
  My rule of thumb is to complete an exercise as fast I can while (1) maintaining good form and (2) not feeling like I’m going to yank a muscle. For me, this averages out to lower-body exercises or compound exercises like the bench/military press being 2.5s lifting and 2.5s lowering. For smaller isolated exercises, like the bicep curl and tricep extension, I spend 1.5s lifting and 1.5s lowering.
• Locking joints: You never want to extend your joints (e.g. elbow, knee, shoulder) so far that you stress them. Whenever something feels wrong—such as a pressure that stings—stop and consult a trainer. I don't recommend only using this guide and skipping professional consultation.
• Breathing: Breathe out when you’re contracting/lifting and breathe in when you’re un-contracting/releasing. Exercises begin with a contracting motion, so take a breath before starting any set. 
  

Consider this: The biggest bodybuilders and the strongest powerlifters work their chest and legs using the same exercises (bench press and squats) every week. They don’t often switch off the bench press for several months. There’s no need to because it's great at exhausting the chest thanks to consistent tension and wide range of motion. 

The other muscles in your body aren't different. Muscles appear to have no intelligent awareness of how they’re being worked. So a change in "angle" is misleading. What a new angle actually does is introduce variation in these three exercise factors:

• Consistent tension: Do you feel heaviness throughout the entire motion, or is the beginning or ending of the movement much easier to complete? The more consistent the tension, the better the exercise will exhaust and grow your muscle.
• Full range of motion: Does the exercise allow you to fully contract your muscle, or are you constrained to a portion of the contraction due to the way your limbs are positioned? The fuller the range of motion, the better the exercise (study).
• Safety and comfort: Is this exercise putting a disproportionate amount of stress on your joints due to your body position when lifting? Joint pain is not acceptable when weightlifting.

If you're already using a safe exercise with the widest range of motion and most consistent tension, I don't see a need to switch off it. There are a couple reasons why you could, though:

• If the exercise is failing to work complementary muscle groups you care about. For example, your upper back and triceps each consist of multiple muscles. These smaller muscles benefit more from specific exercises.
• If you're an advanced weightlifter who is looking to vary the distribution of stress on your muscle fibers. This is a needless complication for beginners.

If you're hitting a plateau and want to "switch things up," take a look at the plateau advice at the bottom of the cheat sheet.

Plan A’s exercises are chosen to:

• Be possible with home gym equipment (if you choose to go that route).
• Not be complex or intimidating for beginners.
• Not be uncomfortable or unreasonably unsafe to perform.

If you've lifted weights before, you might think Plan A’s exercises (e.g. chest flies and goblet squats) are “non-hardcore” and ineffective, but that would be bodybuilding folklore clouding your judgment. The plans' chosen exercises should work for everyone when heavy enough weights are lifted. 

You don’t “need to hit the rack squats and bench press” to “trigger growth hormone” that’ll “jumpstart your gains” (study).

This isn’t to say we won’t be doing the bench press and bar squat exercises (“compound exercises”). We do them in Plan B, and they're very important. They involve supporting muscles, which builds whole-body stability when lifting heavy weights (study). Stability is important for injury prevention when doing intensive labor or playing sports. 

Additionally, compound exercises work complementary muscles that you might not be targeting directly through isolation exercises. 

But compound exercises aren’t the only exercises worth doing. For one, they don’t necessarily hit muscles proportionately: Just doing bench presses, which works your shoulders and triceps in addition to your chest, will not maximally develop your three tricep or three shoulder heads. These heads could be directly targeted with isolation exercises. 

If you regularly do cardio, you need to schedule it around your weightlifting sessions.

I couldn't find much research on how intensive cardio (aerobic exercise) impedes weightlifting. (We’re defining "intensive cardio" as over 30 minutes of high-speed running, biking, swimming, etc.) Based on the research available, I suggest abstaining from intensive cardio on workout days. It can conflict with your muscle gains (study) by competing with your body’s repair mechanisms, and it complicates calorie requirements because you’ll be burning extra calories you must account for.

(If you insist on intensive cardio on workout days, I suggest doing it before weightlifting and track the calories you’re burning to get that much more from your meals that day.)

If you want to be lightly active on workout days, that’s fine. Going for an hour-long walk won't conflict with weightlifting, and it's a smart thing to do. In fact, research says taking two brisk 20 minute walks per day will extend your lifespan if you're currently living a sedentary lifestyle. A well-publicized study concluded that activity equal to a brisk 20 minute walk per day reduces your chances of dying from unnatural causes by up to 30% (study).

So here’s the conclusion: Don’t worry about light cardio being conflicting, but do worry about intensive cardio. Schedule the latter on non-workout days and follow these two rules:

• Avoid intensive lower-body cardio (e.g. running, biking) after a workout day that worked legs. Legs should need a couple days to recover before their next workout session.
• Similarly, avoid upper-body cardio (e.g. swimming) after a workout day that worked your bicep, back, or shoulders.

Yes, unless otherwise noted. Specifically, the research suggests (1) women can avoid creatine and (2) women should do their best to aim for 10 reps instead of 8 or 9 reps given their different muscle fiber distribution. You can read more about this in the Reps section.

If you’ve only lost one or two weeks worth of gains, I suggest you continue as normal: keep trying to lift heavier than you did in your last workout. If you can’t lift heavier, go back to the weight level from your last workout. You'll need to retrace your weight levels until you begin newly gaining size again; you shouldn't regain the size you lost by re-traversing.

This is because, over the course of just a couple weeks, we likely lose size quicker than we lose strength given the way muscle growth is a function of two different means: neurological and cellular. The terms I'm using here makes it sound like a redundancy, but it's a simplification (study).

Alternatively, if you’ve fallen off the wagon and lost a significant amount of strength and size by running a calorie deficit for an extended period of time or not going to the gym for a few months, re-traversing previous weight levels should regain your muscle size in lock step with the weight levels you originally used to grow them. Hopefully.

In either case, I haven't found evidence that a muscle regrows faster than it originally grew. This means if you run an extreme calorie deficit for two days, which could potentially result in the loss of two workouts' worth of size gains, it could take you two workouts plus the rest days between to regain the size. That's a span of 5 days to make up for 2!

Geek note: My testing suggests that our muscles respond more negatively to calorie deficits than a lack of exercise: you might lose muscle in a single day just by failing to eat 50% of your daily calorie target. On the other hand, I've found you can skip workouts for ~2.5 weeks without noticeably losing size.

If any of these claims seem questionable to you, you can easily prove all this to yourself by taking your regular muscle measurements after running a deficit.

Here are the likely reasons why much of the popular workout advice is wrong:

• Scientific studies are often misinterpreted. For example, it is common for studies to suggest that “protein synthesis” is elevated from specific protein timing and dosing regimens. But here’s the thing: After a fairly low ceiling is hit, higher protein synthesis rates don’t actually lead to increased muscle gains (study). Bloggers and magazine writers often fail to realize the distinction, and they conflate “protein synthesis” with “muscle gains” to give you wrong advice. 
• Not that many weightlifting studies have been conducted. Weightlifting seemingly isn’t of huge interest to academia. With a shortage of research, bodybuilders may resort to unscientific hunches to conclude what's best.
• If you eat a lot and workout for years, you may slowly get bigger as you gradually lift heavier weights—even if you’re not following a proven, well-structured program. But taking 5 years to get where you should have in 1 is not a good place to be sharing advice from. Yet this describes the majority of people giving advice.

Some protein myths are rooted in research misinterpretation. “Protein synthesis” hasn’t actually been shown to lead to greater muscle mass gains once your body’s low synthesis threshold is reached (study). Conflating synthesis with size gain is what leads to all the protein myths on the web.

Three research suggestions that can be misleading: 

• There’s suggestive research that eating more protein later in the day leads to greater muscle mass gains than bulking up on protein in the morning (article).
• Taking 30g of protein before your workout (study) can maximize protein synthesis because your blood flow is elevated after a workout and this is when it can make best use of the ingested protein (study).
• Protein synthesis is maximized when it’s taken in smaller 30g servings (study, study).

Consider the following:

• Workouts only last so long, so we can’t fit every exercise into the plans.
• Contrary to popular belief, research suggests that using multiple exercises to repeatedly hit the same muscle in a single workout is unnecessary. This is discussed here. So we only need to choose one bicep or tricep exercise per workout.
• The exercises that made the cut for Plan A are those that can be performed with a dumbbell (which limits our exercise possibilities but not at the expense of size gains) and have good range of motion. The exercises chosen for Plan B are those that allow us to scale to heavy weights without our grip being a limiting factor.
• Contrary to popular belief, I can't find any conclusive research showing that Smith machine and barbell exercises builds muscle faster than dumbbells. If you can link directly to a legitimate study that says otherwise, contact me. Consequently, we leave out these compound exercises from Plan A so that we don’t needlessly intimidate beginner weightlifters with workout equipment that’s very sensitive to correct form. (Plan B does introduce these compound exercises, at which point they are needed to safely and uniformly increase the weight we can lift.)

The energy—or calories—in your meals and drinks come from three nutrients: fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Each plays a critical role in your body. You probably should not avoid one unless a doctor told you to.

Thankfully, there isn't a strict ratio of nutrients we must adhere to for maximizing muscle gains (study). So follow the global dietary guidelines. Those numbers are:

• For protein, we’ve actually already covered how much you should get when weightlifting. As a reminder, multiply 0.60 times your pre-breakfast bodyweight in lbs (or 1.32 times your bodyweight in kg) to get the total grams of either whey or rice protein (your choice) you need to supplement. The label on your protein container will tell you how many grams are in one of its scoops. Each gram of protein is 4 calories. So 80g of protein per day is 320 calories you get from protein.
• Around 50% of your calories should come from carbohydrates.
• Around 30% of your calories should come from fat.

To learn how many calories you’re getting from each nutrient in a given food, read its nutritional label or search MyFitnessPal.

Again, these nutrient ratios shouldn't affect workout gains, so don’t worry about applying this rubric to your meal selection. I’m just listing this for the curious.

This answer is a continuation of a discussion from the Sets section.

Most workout plans found on the web instruct people to lift more than 4 sets per targeted muscle group, so the breakdown I'm about to share will be hard for some to swallow. Accepting it means admitting that they've wasted a lot of time in the gym. But they can prove everything I'm saying to themselves by taking—you guessed it—their regular muscle measurements!

First, consider how it's rarely possible to do more than 5 sets of 8-10 reps on an exercise if you're lifting as heavy as you can (which you're supposed to in order to grow). You can test this for yourself the next time you go to the gym. 

Second, consider my earlier note on how hitting muscles from "new angles" is a misleading statement: meaning, you don't have to use multiple exercises to target a muscle in the same workout if the first exercise already had a wide range of motion and provided consistent tension. For example, a barbell bench press followed by a dumbbell bench press is probably like doing the barbell bench press twice.

Now, because it’s not possible for us to do more than 5 sets yet we're considering two same-muscle exercises in a single workout, we must lower how much weight we lift on the second exercise to accommodate. The implication here is that you're actually lifting sub-optimal heaviness on your second exercise; you're lifting below what is required for your muscles to experience a new level of stimulus, which is required for growth.

To repeat, doing two exercises that hit the exact same muscle is effectively the same thing as doing 4 sets on an exercise then dropping its weight by 10-20lbs (4.5-9kg) and doing another 4 sets on the same exercise. But the research suggests that more than 4 sets is not productive for maximizing muscle size.

For Plan B, which requires a pulley machine, you want to choose a gym that has a pulley machine that reaches around 200 lbs (90 kg). If you can't find one, a 100 lbs (45 kg) machine is workable if, when an exercise calls for a two-handed pulley movement, you consider turning it into a one-handed exercise with each side of your body worked independently. This will double the effective pulley weight available to you. 

(By the way, if you have a lot of money to spare, you can get away with skipping the gym and buy one of these for your home. You'll have to switch up exercises a bit.)

If you eventually max out a pulley movement, time to switch fully over to barbells. When you start getting very high up in weight, I recommend having someone spot you. A lack of supervision can be dangerous. If you're at the point where you're lifting very heavy weights, see a professional trainer who can assist you in pushing yourself further.

Supersetting is when you alternate between sets of two different exercises so that you finish both around the same time. For example, you could do one set of bicep curls followed by one set of tricep extensions then repeat this 3–4 times in total depending on how many sets your workout plan calls for.

Supersets should provide no benefit other than reducing your gym time. If you do them, make sure you're still taking your normal rest time between sets. Otherwise, an elevated heart rate or unrecovered muscles prevent you from completing your reps.

You can get away with supersetting on Plan A, but Plan B’s exercises are deliberately ordered so that muscles used in multiple exercises have enough time to recover. So do not superset on Plan B. I would rather you play it safe—even if there are a couple opportunities for you to do it.

It's hard for me to offer support. It takes up a lot of time, and I want to focus on writing my next handbook so I can teach you more stuff. I suggest chatting with an expert trainer at a local strength training gym.