Previewing Weight Routine Essentials

If an orchestra were to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons minus the string section, the piece would lack a certain vitality and depth. Likewise, if you leave out a key element of your weight workout, you may end up with disappointing results. So follow the guidelines in this section.

Working all of your major muscle groups

Be sure that your routines include at least one exercise for each of the following muscle groups. (In Part III, we show you precisely where each muscle is located.)

• Butt or buttocks (glutes)
• Front thighs (quadriceps)
• Rear thighs (hamstrings)
• Calves
• Chest (pecs)
• Back
• Abdominals (abs)
• Shoulders (delts)
• Front of upper arm (biceps)
• Rear of upper arm (triceps)

For general fitness, the preceding muscles should be your highest priorities. If you neglect any of these muscle groups, you’ll have a gap in your strength, and you may set yourself up for injury.

If you avoid training any particular muscle group, you also may end up with a body that looks out of proportion. You don’t need to hit all your muscle groups on the same day — just make sure that you work each group twice a week.

Doing exercises in the right order

In general, work your large muscles before your small muscles. This practice ensures that your larger muscles — such as your butt, back, and chest — are challenged sufficiently. Suppose that you’re performing the dumbbell chest press. This exercise primarily works your chest muscles, but your pecs do require assistance from your shoulders and triceps. If you were to work these smaller muscles first, they’d be too tired to help the chest.

On occasion, however, you may specifically want to target a smaller muscle group, like your shoulders, because they’re lagging behind in development compared to other parts of your body. If that’s the case, you may want to design a program where you do shoulder exercises first one or two days a week for several weeks to build them up. In general, follow the rule of training larger to smaller.

In order to perform your exercises in the right order, you need to understand which exercises work which muscle groups. Many people do their routines in the wrong sequence because they don’t realize the purpose of a particular exercise (the purpose isn’t always obvious). When you pull a bar down to your chest, as in the lat pulldown (see Chapter 11), you may think that you’re doing an arm exercise when, in fact, the exercise primarily strengthens your back. So, make a point to understand which muscles are involved in each move that you do. In addition, studies show that concentrating on the specific muscle that you’re working and visualizing it becoming stronger increases the effectiveness of your training. You definitely want to make sure that you’re focusing on the right muscles to get the best results.

When choosing the sequence of a workout, imagine your body splitting into three zones: upper, middle, and lower. Within each zone, do your exercises in the following order. Feel free to mix exercises from the upper and lower body. It’s a good idea to train your middle body or core stabilizer muscles last as they stabilize your body during all the preceding exercises and help to prevent injury.

Upper body

1. Chest and back (It doesn’t matter which comes first.
2. Shoulders
3. Biceps and triceps (It doesn’t matter which comes first.)
4. Wrists

Middle body

You can perform your abdominal and lower back muscle exercises in any
order you want.

Lower body

1. Butt
2. Thighs
3. Calves and shins (It doesn’t matter which comes first although we prefer
   to work our calves before our shins.)

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