WORKOUT SCHEDULE FOR WOMEN TRYING TO GAIN WEIGHT & MUSCLE

Photo Credit female bodybuilder image by Steve Lovegrove from Fotolia.com

Weight-training to build muscle means training your body specifically for growth. It requires heavy lifting, utilizing tri-set techniques and low repetitions. Your goal will be to lift as much weight as you can with clean form for limited reps of four to eight per set and two to four sets per body part. Together, this formula will result in muscle growth and development, and overall weight-gain.

TRI-SET TRAINING

Super-sets, tri-sets and giant-sets are a pretty regular term in bodybuilding lingo, but if you are new to the weight-training scene these may not be familiar. “Tri-set training is an extended compound set,” according to Jim Stoppani in his weight-training development book, “Encyclopedia of Muscle and Fitness.” He continues: “It uses three exercises for the same muscle group back-to-back with no rest between sets.” Choose three exercises for the same muscle group and perform one set of each, only resting at the end of each tri-set cycle. This style of training is demanding yet effective.

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TRAINING DAYS 1 & 4: LOWER BODY MUSCLES

Train the largest muscles of your body, the thigh and gluteal muscles, twice a week, but with a different focus each day. Through muscle-fiber recruitment, training your legs first stimulates growth throughout your body and primes you for the rest of the training week. Focus your training on quadriceps and calves one day and on hamstrings and glutes the next lower-body training day. Group exercises like squats, leg press and leg extensions in a tri-set for quads and deadlifts, one-legged squats and leg curls for hamstrings.

TRAINING DAYS 2 & 5: BACK AND BICEPS

Fitness expert Ellington Darden recommends training large muscle groups before small to pre-exhaust larger muscle groups and as a well-rounded approach to chiseling down the body as you would a block of marble. With this in mind, train your large back muscles before your smaller detail muscles. Focus training day two on your back muscles with a tri-set of bent-over dumbbell rows, lat pull-downs and seated cable rows. Then, focus on your smaller biceps and forearms on training day five with another series of tri-sets.

TRAINING DAYS 3 & 6: CHEST AND TRICEPS

Employ the same strategy by training the larger chest muscles on training day three and the smaller triceps and deltoid muscles on day six. A tri-set for your chest muscles may begin with incline bench presses, then flat-bench dumbbell flies and finish with cable cross-overs. Triceps would begin with tricep bench dips, followed immediately by overhead tricep extensions and finishing up the set with dumbbell kick-backs.

TIME AND REST

Jim Stoppani contends that beyond the resulting muscle-growth, one of the major benefits of tri-set training is that you can have a more effective training session in less time than single-set training. This enables you to get in, get your workout completed and get out the door to the rest of your busy life. Allow one day of full rest each training week and take a full week off from training completely every six to eight weeks. You will return to training stronger and fully rejuvenated for another training cycle.

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WORKOUT SCHEDULE FOR WOMEN TRYING TO GAIN WEIGHT & MUSCLE