A fter criticizing Power Hypertrophy Upper lower workout (PHUL) in this video, several of my NYC personal training clients asked on how to set up a workout.
Good question, so we will pick a day, assuming we know the muscles we are training. In this case it will be pull, so back, trap and biceps.
1. Decide whether you are training for strength or hypertrophy, meaning do not mix rep ranges in the workout. We will train for gains, aka 8-12 reps.
2. Decide overal volume of sets. We shall set it at 16 total, excluding warm up sets.
3. From there on, figure out number of exercises. Since we have to train the biceps, which is a smaller muscle we can get 5 exercises in, since we also need to cover horizontal as well as vertical pulling . If this was a push workout and we are mainly working in one plane of motion I might go with four exercises only.
4. Start with a single joint feel exercise to get the muscles ready, meaning and exercise where the focus is on contraction of the target muscle.
5. You need over the entire strength curve, therefore add another exercise for the midrange asn we ll as for the stretched phase.
So here is what would we do in real life (as in a NYC personal trainer of my company would set up as such).
A. 3 sets of either stiff arm pull down of flex deadlifts to get proper lat activation
B. 4 sets of medium wide grip lat pull down
C. 3 sets of seated cable rows, start with a wide grip ,switch to narrow after six reps. This way we are integrating the mid traps and inner parts of the back.
D. 3 sets of lat pull overs for the stretch
E. 3 mechanical drop sets of biceps such as incline curl, midrange and concentration curls to train the biceps fast and effectively in 8 minutes.
Have a great weekend everyone and please check out the shop for your next workout!!
Maik