Workout Plans

Header image featuring woman eating, sleeping, and working out

This is page three of a How to Build Muscle guide. Start with page one to understand how realistic it is to build more muscle.

Contents

Workout program

My research process: I cite research when possible, but I don't blindly follow a study’s conclusions. Not all studies are well designed, so I try to find multiple studies to support claims. I then experiment with findings and compare them against each other.

This page covers what the research says about building muscle. In particular, it covers:

The catch is there's a lot you must know. Muscle building is finicky, which is one reason why many people fail to see consistent gains.

The reward is sweet: When you're done, you'll feel confident about bodybuilding—perhaps for the first time. You'll better understand the science and be free of the pseudo-science that may have you doing the wrong things.

This guide contradicts some popular building muscle workout advice. But it backs up its claims. At the bottom, there's an optional Science and FAQ section that explores the rationale behind the recommendations made. Skim these if you have unanswered questions or want proof of this guide's claims.

At the bottom of this page, there's also a cheatsheet recapping everything in this guide—including workout and meal plans—so there's no need to take notes.

Workout plans

If you don't plan on working out yet, skip ahead to Measuring your gains.

Why follow this workout program?

The workout plans below are designed to help reduce the rate of hitting early plateaus (where your muscles stop growing).

These plans do this by employing exercises, set volumes and cadence, and exercise order in such a way that you can maximize recovery.

Exercise Plan A: Your first 8 weeks

If your arms are already as muscular as these, you can skip exercise Plan A to start with the intermediate Plan B detailed momentarily.

Otherwise, even if you’ve lifted before, I suggest starting with exercise Plan A.

Plan A entails hitting each muscle group once per workout. It's a starter plan without barbell squats and deadlifts, because these exercises can intimidate beginners from completing their workouts. They're also harder to do at home with just dumbbells. (Barbell squats and deadlifts, however, do become critical in the intermediate plan that you quickly transition to.)

And the point of this ramp-up period is to get you acclimated to working out with as few excuses as possible. I want you to build the habit of working out—so that it sticks.

For your first two months of working out, your inexperienced muscles will grow efficiently even with the lesser stimulus of starter Plan A. In other words, Plan A will start by producing the same results as the more intensive Plan B while requiring less effort and less time.

Eventually Plan A will stop producing size gains for you. When you fail to measure size gains on your arms after a month of working out on Plan A, switch to Plan B. We'll talk about measurement in a bit.

Specifically, gains on Plan A should stall around 8 weeks in if you're properly following all the advice in this handbook. If the stall occurs sooner than 6 weeks, and you're new to building muscle, you may be prematurely plateauing and should refer to the overcoming plateaus section at the bottom of the cheatsheet.

Here's Plan A:

Clicking on an exercise will load a demonstration video.
º  8–10 reps   º  Stop 1 rep before limit   º  3 sets per exercise   º  60 min total  º  Rest 2.5-5 min
† Cannot be done with home equipment. These exercises aren't critical, so you can skip them.
Do hand gripper exercises on your off days.

The exercises have been chosen according to the criteria laid out here and here.

Notes on Plan A:

Exercise Plan B: 8 weeks and beyond

By the way, if you're starting to feel like you're being overloaded with information, remember that this page is purposely in-depth because it's a reference guide. Plus I summarize everything for you in the comprehensive cheat sheet at the bottom of this page.

At the 8 week mark, your muscles will likely need greater stress to continue growing. So we change a few things:

You can do all three workout types on back-to-back days if desired. But you must take 4 days of rest before repeating a day type. For example, you can do Day 1 on Monday, Day 2 on Tuesday, and Day 3 on Wednesday, but you have to wait until Friday to repeat Day 1, Saturday to repeat Day 2, and Sunday to repeat day 3.

There are no exceptions—even if your muscles “feel fine.” If you wind up overworking your muscles, you can lose an entire workout’s worth of size gains. (You can try proving this to yourself if you’re feeling bold and measure closely.) 

Here's Plan B. As with Plan A, B exercises are chosen according to the criteria here and here.

Click on an exercise to load a video of how it's performed.

Biceps, triceps, back

Seated pulley row
Lat pulldown
Julian tricep extension (2 sets)
º Or tricep pulldown (2 sets)
Bicep curl (2 sets)
Repeat tricep exercise  (2 sets)
Forearm curl up (15 reps)
Bicep curl (2 sets)
Forearm curl back (15 reps)
º  8–10 reps   º  Stop 1 rep before your limit  º  4 sets per exercise   º  60 min total  º  Rest 2.5-5 min  
Note: Exercises with an or option should be alternated between workout days.

The order of exercises and workout days in Plan B is critical. Don't rearrange them or you'll risk not having the strength to complete all your sets.

The exercises are ordered to allow your muscles adequate recovery time so that exhaustion from one exercise doesn’t make it difficult to perform another that reuses a muscle group. (For example, you use your biceps when performing back exercises. So, avoid doing a back exercise right after a bicep exercise.)

One of the unique aspects of this program is how Plan B splits some exercises into two sessions per workout. Meaning, 2 sets of one exercise are performed at the beginning of a workout and the remaining 2 sets are performed at the end. (Read more here.)

Notes for exercise Plan B:

What comes after Workout Plan B?+

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How to get abs

If you enter your email to receive this guide's summary cheatsheet, there's a "Science of ab workouts" bonus section in it. The cheatsheet is here.

Maintenance workout plan

You can stop Plan A or Plan B whenever you’re happy with your size.

Then, if you simply want to maintain the muscle you’ve already built, this should do the trick:

•  8–10 reps  •  Stop 1 rep before failure   •  2 sets per exercise   •  Rest 2.5-5min  •  40min workouts

How heavy to lift every workout

Soon, you'll learn to measure weekly muscle growth. You can use these results to prove to yourself everything I'm claiming is working for you. But before we cover that, let's cover the topic of weight heaviness.

You need a reference point for how heavy you can lift when you first start. To do this, refer to the find your starting weights section from Prep Week.

After that, each time you return to the gym, lift 2.5lbs (1.15 kg) heavier per arm or leg for each exercise. With exercises that are repeated twice weekly, increase by that amount just once per week.

This means if you're doing a single-handed exercise, such as a bicep curl or a trap raise, increase the weight by 2.5lbs on each hand when you return to the gym.

(If you're performing a two-handed or two-legged exercise, such as a benchpress or squat, increase the weight by 5lbs (2.25kg) so that it averages to 2.5lbs per hand/leg.)

If your gym's equipment does not increase in 2.5lbs increments, use magnet weights, which you slap onto dumbbells, barbells, and racks to make them a bit heavier. You want to get the 1.25lbs magnet weight variant in addition to the 2.5lbs weight for when you need to slap a 1.25lbs on each side of a dumbbell for a total of 2.5lbs.

If you're successfully gaining size using 2.5lbs (1.15kg) increments between gym visits, increasing the weight delta further shouldn't produce faster gains. Research suggests your muscles don't grow proportionally to how heavy you lift; they grow by the same fixed amount each time they experience a sufficient volume of proper weight stress they haven't experienced before.

If you feel that the 2.5lbs increment isn't producing consistent gains, either (1) you started at too low of a weight and you still need to find what your real starting weight is or (2) your lack of gains is likely the result of something else. Consult the plateaus section at the bottom of the cheatsheet for help pinpointing the culprit.

Quick note on pulley machines

If you switch an exercise from free weights (dumbbells and barbells) to its pulley machine variant, consider dropping 7.5-10lbs (3.5-4.5kg) when doing the exercise on the pulley.

Pulley exercises do a better job than free weights at keeping tension through an exercise's range of motion, and your muscles may need to ramp up to this new tension profile. Failing to lower the weight during the transition can lead to overworking your muscle, which can cause you to lose a workout's worth of size due to muscle catabolism.

Celebrity bodies

Let's take a break. You've done a lot of reading.

Below is a comparison I put together to compare celebrity superhero physiques. I wanted to know if their sizes were the result of Hollywood magic or if the actors were genuinely large.

Click the image to expand it:

Celebrity muscle size comparison

This is not a scientific comparison; I couldn't control for camera angle, distance, and lighting. All I could do was scale their heads to similar sizes and line up their clavicles.

Some of these actors may take steroids and other performance/size-enhancing drugs, so be careful using all of them as natural physique targets. (That doesn't mean they didn't put a ton of hard work in, though. Hear them talk about it.)

Off topic: This year, I got tired of overlong books and bad book summaries. So I made a newsletter that just shares the most interesting highlights from famous books. I distill each book's key lessons into short paragraphs. 50,000 people read it. Subscribe to see the first issue. I only email once per month.

Measuring muscle growth

It’s time to learn how to measure your muscle size gains so you know when you're doing things right and wrong. And a secondary benefit to measuring your growth is staying motivated week to week by verifying we're growing despite the visual changes being too subtle to notice.

This section is the unique result of my year-long experimentation. I have not seen this information shared elsewhere online. Which is strange because what I'm about to say is so easily provable for any beginner taking measurements.

So if I seem over-confident about anything I’m about to say for which I don't have corresponding research to link to, remember that you can prove all of this to yourself by just working out then measuring your muscles the next day. Also, remember that there's a detailed The Science section that dives into the research.

When your muscles grow

For muscles to grow after a workout, you must get enough calories and sleep on the day you worked out. Calories provide energy for new muscle to be built, and it’s in your sleep that your muscles recover.

When you wake up the morning after a workout, the size growth resulting from the previous day's workout should likely be complete, and you'll need to hit the gym again for those muscles to grow further.

Meaning, if you gain 1/8” (3.2mm) on your arm after a workout, that 1/8” can be measured the next day and should not increase throughout the coming days.

The timing of this cycle might come as a surprise. People often assume that because muscles might remain sore for multiple days, that muscles also grow over the same number of days. According to the measurements I've anecdotally done, that's not the case. Hopefully you can prove this to yourself by taking measurements too.

The fact that muscles mostly grow within a 12 hour post-workout period is why it's so important that you nail your nutrition and sleep regimens on your workout days.

Measuring your muscle growth

We will use the arm we write with as a proxy for the progression of our growth.  I've found that arm increases are the easiest to track because the combined minor growth of two muscle groups (biceps and triceps) is easier to measure than one muscle group. It's hard to detect small gains. The arm is also easy to get a fairly consistent size measurement on.

While our arm is not a full representation of how our body is doing—it’s possible that you worked your arms properly but not your other muscles, and vice versa—it's a simple proxy for whether we're eating, sleeping, and lifting right.

That said, once every 6 weeks, measure your shoulders, chest, calf, forearm, legs, and glutes to make sure everything else is growing too. For each muscle, measure its circumference at its thickest point. If one muscle hasn't been growing while others have, consult the plateaus advice at the bottom of the cheatsheet.

To measure your arm, wrap body tape around its thickest part. Measure this exact same part each time you do this. To get an accurate measurement, stand in front of a mirror and follow this:

The reason we don't measure with a flexed arm is because it's very difficult to always ensure you flex to the same degree each time. If you flex just a tiny bit harder than the last time you measured (and this would be impossible to keep track of), you can skew your measurement by greater than the 1/8” (3.2mm) increment we’re looking for.

How to measure muscle growth

Watch this video to see how a measurement is performed:

How big your muscles can get

In your first 3-6 months, you should hopefully see an increase of around 1/8” (3.2mm) in arm size after each workout day that worked both your biceps and triceps. This is enough of a difference to see on a tape measure so long as you’re measuring consistently.

If a workout trains only your biceps or triceps, expect half that growth (1/16" or 1.8mm).

Given how this program's workout plans are structured, a beginner might see about 1” (25mm) per month or 3” (75mm) for each arm after 3 months.That might not sound like a lot, but it is. 2–3” around your arms can be the difference between looking frail or athletic. (Again, here’s the reference for a 2.5” gain.)

Depending on your frame, after 6-12 months, you will begin to see diminishing size returns from working out.

Commit to your workout plan

You now have everything you need to complete a body change. It's time to start.

Continue to the last page

Nutrition is critical for these workout plans to be effective. You have to learn how to eat—or the advice on this page will prove useless. So, the next page covers how to eat for building muscle. 

What's left on this page is the cheatsheet and the research behind this guide.

Cheatsheet

Below is the cheat sheet for this entire handbook. It's the same as the one on the previous page.

If you enter your email below, the cheat sheet is emailed to you so you can easily reference it in your inbox. I will not send you any other emails.

Check your inbox and respond to the email with "Yes." If you don't get an email, tell me on Twitter: @Julian


Four principles of gaining muscle

Workout plans

How to work out

Supplements

Food

Overcoming plateaus

The science of working out (optional)

This guide contradicts some of the popular workout advice. But, it tries to back up its claims. Below, I explore the science behind my recommendations.

If you have suggestions or criticisms, please do reach out. I love hearing about any mistakes I've made, and I want to make sure this guide is kept up to date.

Warming up+

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Rest times+

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Reps+

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Sets+

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Exercise form+

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Switching up exercises+

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Compound, isolated, and pulley exercises+

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Cardio+

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FAQ

Does all this advice equally apply to women?+

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What should I do when I lose muscle?+

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Why is so much workout advice wrong?+

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Why are there so many protein myths?+

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Why is [exercise] missing from the workout plans?+

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Should I eat a specific macronutrient ratio?+

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Why is it ineffective to do more than 4 sets?+

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What if the weights in my gym aren't heavy enough?+

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Should I do supersets?+

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I have an unanswered question.+

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Next page — Workout diet

How to eat so your workouts are effective. It truly matters.

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Workout Plans
Measuring Your Muscles
Cheatsheet
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