design your gym workouts

This workout schedule can give you some great tips on how to design your workouts and how to keep them interesting.

I have been working out for more than 2 years, I am a personal trainer and I enjoy training a lot 😊.

I follow an easy schedule for my workouts. I go to the gym 4-5 times a week.

Every workout is about 1 hour 15 minutes long.
I always start with a warmup. First I do abdominal exercises to get my core muscles activated. I do some crunches, air bicycles, side crunches, leg lifts.
Then I do a 10 minute warmup on a cardio machine (a stepper, elliptical, treadmill or rowing machine).
This part of the workout is always the same.

After that the actual workout starts. This takes me about 50 minutes to an hour. I divide my workouts into upper body and lower body days and routines and then I mix these up.

Day 1:

• Butt workout. I do regular barbell squats, sumo squats, leg presses or lunges.
• 15 minutes ab exercises. The last muscle I work on at the end of each workout is my core.

Day 2:

• Upper body routine – shoulders and back.
  Shoulders: dumbbell front raises, lateral raises, Arnold presses and maybe some more exercises on the cable machine. Back: lateral raises, dumbbell rows, bent over rows with a barbell or the cable machine. Then I do 15 minutes abs.
• 15 min abs workout

Day 3:

• Lower body
  Box step ups (find a high box for this) superseted with kettlebell sumo squats.
  Kettlebell deadlifts superseted with bodyweight lunges or burpees.
  Adductor and abductor machine (always have muscle fever when I use those!)
• Upper body – chest, biceps ad triceps with some lower body combined.
  Chest: barbell chest press on a bench and dumbbell flies, both pyramid style (starting with a lower weight and high number of reps, progressing to a bigger weight and a lower number of reps). For biceps and triceps I’ll do triceps pushdown combined in a superset with cable hammer curls for biceps.
• 15 min abs workout

Day 4:
Rest day with vinyasa or hatha yoga

Day 5:

• Lower body workout only or a lower body combined with upper body
  Machines only workout of different muscles (2 exercises for each muscle I work on) or bodyweight exercises only, like using TRX and a stability ball
• 15 min abs workout

Day 6:

• Cardio day - use 3 different cardio machines, each for 20 minutes.
• 15 min abs workout

Extra tips:
Do 3 or max 4 exercises for every body part you're working on, with 10 reps and 3-4 sets. Use supersets - two exercises back to back with no rest, one is with an added weight and the other is a bodyweight exercise.

Alternate between the following ab exercises: cable crunches (kneeling and standing), leg raises (lying on a bench or hanging off a pull up bar), ab rollouts, holding the plank and the side plank, Russian twist, side raises with a dumbbell or kettlebell crunches on a stability ball and stability ball leg tucks.

You can find many different exercises to do online, the best sites where I get my ideas from are muscleandfitness.com and bodybuilding.com. You won’t get bored with your routine if you keep alternating what you do and make it more interesting this way.