Workout of the Week #69

Welcome to Workout of the Week, number 69. This time we have a five-day-a-week hypertrophy—AKA muscle building—program.

So what is the training goal? I just said it. It’s to build muscle mass, also known as hypertrophy.

The training variables: 70% to 80% of the one-rep max for 6 to 10 repetitions. The exertion is near maximum, and the training effort is a repeated effort.

If we look at the exercises, it’s a muscle group split, also known as a bro split, where we have chest, back, shoulders, legs, and arms. We have mainly compound exercises but also some isolation exercises. The exercises are ordered from starting with a heavy compound going to the lighter isolation.

If we have a look at more training variables, five days a week is the training frequency. It’s mainly a station training, but it includes some supersets for the legs and the arms. The training split is a muscle group split.

So the question stands: how does it look? We’ll jump into it and look at it.

Here we are inside our Workout of the Week, number 69: the five-day-a-week hypertrophy workout. So you get an overview of the workout—what it is about, how it is structured—the table of contents, and then here you see the weekly overview. Yeah, so five days a week. Each day is dedicated to a muscle group or more muscle groups—mainly for the legs and the arms. There are more muscle groups obviously than one.

Workout Number One: the chest day. Yeah, so we have three exercises: bench press, dumbbell incline bench press, and the dumbbell flyes. You can see here the structure is the same: three sets of 10 at 70% of the one-rep max, which equates to an RPE of 9. The inter-set rest is five minutes. Why is that? Yeah, because it’s near maximum exertion. You do need your time to recover from that after a set to do the next set. You read maybe in articles and magazines 60 to 90 seconds for hypertrophy. Good luck with that.

So, okay. Bench press, dumbbell incline bench press, and flyes: three sets of 10 at 70% of the one-rep max.

Workout Number Two: the back day. Here you do the deadlift, the bent-over row, and the lat pulldowns or pull-ups. Same structure here. Yeah, three sets of 10 at 70% of the one-rep max and five minutes of inter-set rest.

Going to Workout Number Three: the shoulder day. Here we have the shoulder press—it can be done with dumbbells or the barbell—the upright row, and the bent-over raises. Yeah, same here. Surprise, surprise: three sets of 10 at 70% of the one-rep max. Inter-set rest: five minutes.

And then we go to our leg day, Workout Number Four: the leg day. So here we change it up slightly. We start with the back squat. Yeah, you can see a small mistake here: three minutes. That has to be changed. I will change it immediately, and once you download it, it’ll be okay. Anyway, so that has to be five minutes. And we have our three sets of 10 at 70% of the one-rep max.

And then we do leg press and RDL, and leg extension and leg curls. Yeah, same thing: three sets of 10 at 70% of the one-rep max. Here it’s not a mistake: 90 seconds after the leg press and then three minutes after the RDL. That is going to be exhausting, and it’ll work a bit also on the metabolic system. But anyway, because it’s alternating antagonistic muscle groups, then it is possible to do that because the fatigue within the muscle group isn’t as accumulated as if you do it set after set. Yeah, I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, Workout Number Five: the arm day. Yeah, same here. We do barbell curls and the French press, and then dumbbell incline curls and the dumbbell overhead extension. Yeah, so three sets of 10 with 70% of the one-rep max. Also here: 90 seconds and three minutes. Yes, it is going to be taxing, but it is possible to do that.

And this brings us to the end of this workout. You can download the PDF. You have a glossary explaining the terms if you don’t know them already. You can read a bit about myself. You can read about what my former athletes, what my colleagues have to say about me, my mentees. And certainly, last but not least, you can sign up for the membership. What’s the membership? Inside the membership, you get the four-week periodized program. This was just the first week.

Let’s go back and finish this presentation. So what are the next steps?

You download the program. You join the membership. Again, the perks of the membership: you get the four-week periodized program, not only the first week. Considering we are at Workout of the Week 69, you get another 68 four-week workouts. So do your math—how long you’ll be busy training each and every single workout.

And you like and subscribe. Yeah, you can grab all previous workouts here.