At a time when more and more people are taking care of their bodies, the routines offered by sports professionals are plethoric. Each coach highlights his method which guarantees more results over ever shorter periods of time. Some claim that in just 8 minutes a day, it is possible to sculpt an athlete’s body…
Two main principles
Let’s be serious, although there are many methods or training techniques that allow you to work your body (muscles) effectively, some rules remain immutable. A well-balanced routine, taking into account the order in which the exercises are performed , allows you to optimize your sessions.
When you are a beginner or of an average level, to guarantee effective training , you must respect two basic principles. Then, with experience and a good knowledge of biomechanics, you can create many variations.
At the start of the session, focus on the large muscle groups (quadriceps, back, pectorals). Then, continue with a less voluminous muscle (shoulders, triceps, biceps, hamstrings, calves, abdominals).
Two muscle groups per session, not exceeding 40 to 45 minutes for large groups and 20 to 25 minutes for smaller ones.
Advantage: This method allows you to have a lot of strength and energy on the muscles that require the most and end the session with the less voluminous muscles where the mobilized loads are less important.
Both methods
Choose from the following two methods: either you work muscles that are agonists , or you work antagonists .
Agonist : muscle that participates in the effort of another muscle or muscle group.
Advantage: This creates a pre-fatigue on the muscle to follow and makes it possible to shorten the work of the muscles coming second.
Advantage: This allows you to start the second part of your session on “fresher” muscles… You will therefore be able to work with heavier loads than during the previous technique which induces pre-fatigue.
To avoid any controversy, I would like to point out that this list is not exhaustive but allows you to visualize some possible combinations.
Then, it is always useful to vary your routine by changing the training method to always surprise the muscles which will be forced to continually adapt.