Three-day Full-body Workout Routine To Gain Muscle

The American College of Sports Medicine recommends working out your total body at least two to three times per week for health maintenance. However, if your goal is strength gain, it is best to split your workouts into specific body parts to ultimately fatigue you muscles. A typical three-day split involves two upper body days and a lower body day. This allows you to focus all you energy on two major muscle groups per day to see optimal results.

Guidelines

If you are new to exercise, start with a lighter weight and do higher repetitions of 12 to 15 for one or two sets, building baseline strength and stability. According to the National Strength and Conditioning Association, after about four to six weeks, increase your lifting weight to fatigue your muscles by three sets of eight to 10 repetitions. Do three to four exercises per muscle group each day. Weight train on nonconsecutive days to allow your muscles to fully recover.

Back and Chest

Start with larger, multijoint exercises, and progress to single-joint exercises. For the chest, start with horizontal dumbbell chest presses as a warm-up, and then progress to barbell bench press. Do dumbbell horizontal flys, followed by pushups then incline or cable flys. For the back, start with lat pulldowns or wide-grip pullups. Progress to narrow grip seated rows, and then dumbbell or cable reverse flys. Finish with single arm bent-over dumbbell rows.

Shoulders and Arms

To maximize shoulder or deltoid growth, start with overhead dumbbell shoulder press as a warm-up. For muscle building, do shoulder presses on a fixed motion machine or Smith machine. For frontal deltoids, do dumbbell frontal raises, and for middle deltoids, do dumbbell lateral raises. For rear deltoids, use a pec-dec machine, which are available in most gyms. Progress to biceps by doing dumbbell curl and hammer curls, cable curls and single-arm concentration curls. For triceps, do overhead triceps extensions, cable-rope pulldowns and dumbbell kickbacks.

Legs and Calves

To warm up the lower body, start with bodyweight squats or lunges. Progress to the leg press machine to help develop quadriceps, glutes and hamstrings. To target the glutes and hamstrings, do walking lunges with dumbbells in each hand, and stepups onto a 24-inch platform holding weights. Also try stiff-legged barbell deadlifts for the hamstrings. For quad growth, do barbell front squats and machine leg extensions. Finish off with standing calf raises and seated weighted calf raises.

Variation

To keep your routine from getting stale, vary the order of exercises each week. Still keep larger muscle groups first and finish with smaller muscle groups. Bodybuilding.com recommends adding drop sets, and super sets every three or four weeks to shock your body so you continue to see results. Supersets involve combining two exercises of the same body part and working them back to back. To do drop sets, do your three sets like normal, and on the last set immediately decrease the weight by about 10 percent and continue repetitions until muscular failure.