Beginners Bodybuilding Workout

People new to bodybuilding benefit most from following workout program designed for beginners. Although intermediate and advanced bodybuilders often use low-repetition workouts with several sets, beginners should lay a foundation with more repetitions and fewer sets. This reduces the chances of overtraining, which could lead to injury.

Upper-Body Workout

Bodybuilder workouts generally fall into three categories: full-body, split and body-part-specific. Beginners can do any of the three. In a split workout, you work half the body in one workout and do a different workout on the other half on the following day. One way to break this down is to perform an upper-body-only workout, which can include dumbbell bench presses, butterflys, military presses, triceps pushdowns, lying tricep presses, side lateral raises, preacher curls, seated dumbbell curls, lat pulldowns, one-arm dumbbell rows and dumbbell shrugs. Perform two sets of 10 to 12 repetitions per exercise. Even though you do only two sets, there are at least two exercises each for the chest, back, triceps, biceps and shoulders. Weight amounts should always be the heaviest that you can control for the entire set.

Lower-Body Workout

Lower-body workouts target the lower legs, thighs and glutes. You can add core exercises to a lower-body workout. A sample lower-body workout might include leg presses, leg extensions, seated leg curls, lying leg curls, standing calf raises, seated calf raises, ab machine crunches and floor crunches. Perform 10 to 12 repetitions for each exercise except crunches, which should be done for 15 to 20 repetitions. Do three sets of leg presses, standing calf raises and floor crunches. Do only two sets of everything else. Alternate upper- and lower-body workouts; for example, do upper-body workouts on Mondays and Thursdays and lower-body workouts on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Women's Full-Body Workout

There is no reason that women cannot do bodybuilding workouts. Women generally have a more difficult time adding muscle mass, but their muscles perform the same actions and can do the same exercises. A beginner's full-body workout appropriate for women might include dumbbell squats, dumbbell bench presses, dumbbell pullovers, dumbbell lateral raises, dumbbell hammer curls, two-arm dumbbell overhead tricep extensions, standing calf raises, reverse hyperextensions and ab crunches. Perform three sets of all exercises, but do only two sets of standing calf raises. Do 15 repetitions of the lateral raises, 30 calf raises and 20 repetitions of everything else. This is a full-body workout because it includes at least one exercise each for thighs, glutes, chest, back, shoulders, biceps, triceps and lower legs. The last two are core exercises.

Your Own Beginner Workout

Having written workouts to follow may be comforting for people new to bodybuilding but putting together a workout is not that hard. As a beginner, you can keep it really simple and do workouts for certain body parts. Often, two muscle groups will be paired together for one workout, such as a chest and ab workout on Monday, a back and shoulder workout on Tuesday, a bicep and tricep workout on Thursday and a leg workout for hamstrings, quadriceps and possibly calves on Friday. The other days are rest days. Choose three to four exercises per body part and perform 10 to 15 repetitions each. The abs can handle 20 to 30 repetitions. Two to three sets reduce the likelihood of overtraining.