Are you interested in personalizing a bodybuilding workout to meet your goals, but not sure where to start? One recommendation for people working to achieve a specific aesthetic physique goal is to get more strategic with training and nutrition to force muscular adaptations. This comes down to proper training splits, principles of prioritization, muscle isolation, and effective programming and periodization.
In this blog, we’ll talk about how you can personalize your workouts to optimize your results.
Step One: Analyzing Start by assessing your physique for aesthetic strengths and deficiencies and comparing it to an ideal physique that you would like to achieve. This will help you visualize the goals more clearly and start to develop your program based on these specific outcomes.
Bodybuilding is an art where you are the artist, and your body is the canvas! Bodybuilders create their masterpieces through training and nutrition plans in the same way that artists use tools like clay to create works of art. Hypertrophy: A Closer Look The majority of training will take place during the muscular development (hypertrophy) phase, assuming you (or the athlete) are at a high level of training and work capacity, stabilization and strength endurance are sufficient. This training phase is most appropriate to create muscular adaptations for bodybuilding goals.
A bodybuilding plan can be structured in a variety of ways and tailored to your specific objectives. A basic training split might consist of a push day, a pull day, one to two total leg days, and a total body workout four days per week. You can prioritize lagging areas with higher set volumes per week and more isolated exercise choices to target these muscle groups with this strategy. As you become more advanced, your training split should evolve to avoid a plateau. You could, for instance, add more training days to your weekly schedule for a more complex training split that focuses on the muscles you want to develop the most. Progressive overloading and undulating periodization are two additional training principles that can help you personalize your bodybuilding workouts and achieve your goals. Want to know more about how you can implement these tips into your training? For more information, take our Physique and Bodybuilding Coach course. Over time, overloading In order to avoid a plateau or stalled progress, the principle of progressive overload states that one or more of the acute variables should gradually increase over time. Increasing the resistance or load used by 3-5 percent every few weeks is the most common strategy. However, there are many different variables at your disposal such as time under tension (tempo), duration, distance, intensity, resistance, and more.
As for undulating periodization, this is another great tool to help keep clients in a specific training plan much longer without plateauing while still achieving personalized goals. The strategy here is to integrate multiple training phases of NASM’s OPT™ Model into a weekly or bi-weekly program.
Including days for phase 2 strength endurance, phase 3 hypertrophy, and even phase 4 or 5 max strength/power in a one-week block is one example of undulating periodization. The bi-weekly method is to train in a given phase for week 1 (i.e., phase 2 strength endurance) and alternate with a different phase in week 2 (i.e., phase 3 hypertrophy).
You can create the ideal road map for creating your individual bodybuilding plan by combining these undulating techniques with progressive overload, higher volumes around weaker areas, and strategic training splits.
Be Selective, Be Smart
Another key tool in developing your physique is exercise selection. Be sure to mix in a variety of exercises including free weights, machines, cables, and compound movements that challenge your body. You can personalize the exercises to meet your specific goals and emphasize the exercises that tend to work best for you (or that you simply enjoy most!)
Bonus Tip: Apply and integrate Corrective Exercises into your warm-ups or on rest days! By reducing the risk of injuries and inefficient movement patterns, lengthening and inhibiting overactive muscles, increasing muscle activity in target muscle groups, and increasing the joint’s ROM, this will help speed up results. To take your training and coaching knowledge to the next level, be sure to check out NASM’s Physique and Bodybuilding Coach (NASM-PBC) course!
