Muscle Groups & Tips For Workouts

Resistance training should be a regular appointment in your weekly schedule, especially if you are not mixing concrete by hand or hauling buckets of water up hills. You begin to lose muscle around the age of 30; you begin to lose bone around the age of 40. Training your muscles in groups improves your muscular and bone health.

Upper Body vs. Lower Body

Weight training twice per week is all you need to do to improve your health, your strength and reduce your rate of muscle and bone loss. An upper body workout should include two exercises each for your chest, back, biceps and triceps. Do four sets of each exercise. Complete all chest and back sets before your arm exercises. Schedule a leg and shoulder workout two days after your upper body session. Include an exercise focusing on your quads, hamstrings, gluteal and calf muscles. Pair a leg exercise with an exercise for the front, back or middle of your shoulder muscles, completing four sets per exercise.

Full Body

A full body workout includes one exercise per muscle group in the same workout session. This is an excellent way to train all of your muscles if you can only make it to the gym one day during the week. Many gyms have machines set aside for circuit training. Essentially, these arrangements have one machine per muscle. Complete four sets per exercise in a full body workout, or four rounds in a circuit.

Opposing Muscles

Opposing muscles are muscles which produce opposite actions. For instance, your pectoral muscles flex your shoulders while your back muscles extend your shoulders. For this type of routine, you should train your chest and back on Mondays; quadriceps, hamstrings and shoulders on Thursdays; and your biceps, triceps, abdominals and lower back on Fridays. Bodybuilders commonly train opposing muscles as they strive to increase the size of all their muscles. One of the benefits of training opposite muscles in the same session is that you rest one muscle while working the other muscle.

Frequency, Intensity and Volume

Train your muscles according to the results you seek. If you simply want to become healthy and fit, do a weight training workout at least two days per week with light to moderate resistance. Complete 10 to 15 repetitions for three to four sets per exercise. To build massive muscles, train three to six days per week using moderate to heavy weights for four to six sets of six to 12 repetitions.