Walking Into the Gym - Setting a Split

When starting at the gym, organizing your workouts can feel overwhelming. This can be a huge deterrent for beginner gym-goers. You walk in not knowing which exercises to put together, what to start with, or how much of each movement you should be doing.

Due to this confusion or lack of knowledge about organizing a workout, most people end up doing a variety of exercises on a single day or do a "full body" workout.

So how do you organize a workout?

You may hear people use the term "split" when referring to a workout schedule. While this is the term used within the gym community, a "split" simply refers to how you've decided to organize your workouts based on the day of the week.

A split is important because it helps keep gym-goers on a schedule and allows for better planning outside the gym for higher level workout enthusiasts.

The next question is how do you create a split?

While there are many different ways to go about this process, I usually encourage people to first set a goal that they want to achieve by going to the gym. What purpose do you want to lift for? For simple exercise and body movement, to build muscle, loose fat, strength train, or body competition train? Once you've decided on a goal, you can then begin to find the exercises that will work best for you to reach that goal.

For example, my current workout split is five days each week. I lift for the purpose of strength training and the goal of progressive overload. This means that I am focusing on 4-5 exercises each day with higher weight and a lower (5-8) rep count.

My split is the following:

Monday- Full leg day (quad and glute focus)

• Back squats

• Quad extensions

• Single leg glute cable kickbacks

• Dumbbell Bulgarian split squats

• Ab circuit end

Tuesday- Back and biceps

• Bent over barbell rows

• Lat pull downs

• Singe arm bent over dumbbell rows

• Super set of dumbbell bicep curls, hammer curls, diagonal hammer curls

• Ab circuit end

Wednesday- Glute and hamstrings

• RDL's with barbell

• Machine hip thrusts

• Glute abductors

• Back extensions

• Ab circuit end

Thursday- Triceps and shoulders

• Barbell overhead standing shoulder press

• Super set of dumbbell front shoulder raises, diagonal raises, and lateral raises

• Overhead triceps press with dumbbell

• Dumbbell triceps kick backs

• Ab circuit end

Friday- Flexibility focused recovery day

• Varies based on week

• Includes sauna, message chair, and stretching

Find your gym goal, the exercises to help you get there, and the split that works best for you!

Look for upcoming posts that will help you through your beginner and intermediate gym-goer phases!