Welcome to Workout of the Week, number 61. This time we have a four-day athletic muscle building workout.
What is athletic muscle building? We had athletic muscle building before, which basically refers to the concept of Nick Gill, who outlined that in the interview I had with him. You can watch that on my website. Fairly simple: we have in our muscle contractile elements and we have non-contractile elements. So something that can shorten and actively produce force—these are the myofibrils. And then we also have the sarcoplasm—the non-contractile elements.
So the training goal is athletic muscle, which is also called functional hypertrophy or myofibrillar hypertrophy—so focusing on the hypertrophy of the contractile elements.
The training variables: 80% to 85% of the one-rep max, and the reps are 4 to 6. The exertion is near maximum to maximum, and it’s a repeated effort.
If we look at the exercises, it’s based on variations of the Olympic lifts, squatting, hinging, pushing, and pulling. The exercise order goes from the technically most complex to least complex.
We have more training variables: Four days a week is the training frequency. It’s a station training. We do a push-pull training split, but there’s more to it. It’s also an explosive focus and a strength focus. So we have the explosive push and the explosive pull day, and then we have the strength push day and the strength pull day.
How does it look? This is the program, and we’ll jump right into it.
Here we are inside the workout—four-day push-pull athletic muscle building program. You get an overview outlining what the program is about, then you get the table of contents. And then you can see here what I was alluding to earlier: we have Workout One—the explosive push, and Workout Two—the explosive pull. Then we have Workout Three—the push with the strength focus, and Workout Four—the pull with the strength focus.
If we go to Workout Number One: the push explosive. You can see we focus on push presses as the first exercise. Then we go to the back squat band-resisted. Then we go to the bench press band-resisted. And then we do the Bulgarian split squat band-resisted. Yeah, so for the exercises, we do three sets of six at 80% of the one-rep max, which equates to an RPE of 9.
If we go to Workout Number Two: the explosive pull. We do the power clean—we do cluster sets. Then we do the trap bar deadlift band-resisted. Then we do the bench row band-resisted. And then we do the RDL band-resisted. Yeah, and also here we do three sets of six at 80% of the one-rep max, which equates to an RPE of 9—so near maximum exertion.
Workout Number Three: the push with a strength focus. Here we have our front squat, then the bench press, then we do the Bulgarian split squat and the shoulder press. Yeah, for all exercises we do three sets of four at 85% of the one-rep max, which equates to an RPE of 8.
If we go to our Workout Number Four: the pull with the strength focus. We have the deadlift, the pull-up, the single-leg hip thrust, and the dumbbell single-arm bent-over row. Also here, we do three sets of four at 85% of the one-rep max, which equates to an RPE of 8.
If you download the PDF, you get a glossary explaining the terms. You can read about myself, what others have to say about me—my former athletes, my mentees, my colleagues and former colleagues. And last but certainly not least, you can join the membership. Inside the membership, you get the four-week periodized program. So this was just the first week of the four-week training program. Inside the membership, you get the four-week program plus another 60 four-week training programs.
So let’s go back and finish the presentation. What are the next steps?
You download the PDF. You join the membership. And then you like and subscribe. I’ll see you next week with the next program. You can grab all workouts here. You can watch the previous workout, and if you haven’t already, subscribe.
I’ll see you next week
