The Maniac's Workout

So for my blog post today I figured I would go through a brief overview of my workout plan. If you haven’t viewed my bodyspace.com profile yet it can be found at: http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/wrestler236/. You can find my goals and stats on here such as weight, body fat percentage, body measurements, and lifting stats. My goal right now is to be able to drop my body fat percentage from 11% down to 8% and to be back up to 170 lbs from my current weight of 161 lbs. I want to do all of this by January 31st, 2012. This is about 11 weeks from now, and I am already into my second week of working out.

The workout I’m on now has me doing:

Monday – Chest, Back, Biceps, and Triceps

Tuesday – Quads, Hamstrings, Calves, and Shoulders

Wednesday – Abs and Cardio

Thursday – Chest, Back, Biceps, and Triceps

Friday – Quads, Hamstrings, Calves, and Shoulders

Saturday – Abs and Cardio

Sunday – Rest Day

This workout seems very involved, but is actually fairly low in intensity, which is just what I need for starting to get back into shape. The lifting sessions only take 45 to 60 minutes. I am doing 2 to 3 sets per exercise with a rep range of 10 to 12 reps per set. I’m taking a 90 second rest between exercises and I superset exercises together of opposing muscle groups. i.e. chest and back or biceps and triceps. This workout is fairly easy to get me acclimated to lifting again and will increase in intensity every two weeks.

I am training my abs two days a week for right now, but will step it up to three days a week when I feel ready. I am training them on a separate day and will be doing lower reps with resistance to strengthen my core. I need to strengthen my core since I haven’t worked out in awhile. This will give me a solid base to perform exercises that require heavy weight when I get ready to do these exercises later. Your core is the most important area on your body. A strong core will enable you to handle more weight, which in turn will mean more muscle. I train my core on a separate day so that I can devote all my focus and energy that day on my core, in order to obtain better results.

As for the cardio, two days a week is all I will need. I have a very fast metabolism and any more than this will make it difficult for me to gain muscle. I may add in another day of cardio down the road if I feel like I’m not losing enough fat. For my cardio I am doing intervals. Right now I am doing about a 40 second sprint followed by low intensity jog for about a minute and a half. I will do a 3 to 5 minute warm up and a 3 to 5 minute cool down. The total amount of time I spend on cardio during a session right now is about 15 minutes. This is why I love doing intervals, I can get all the cardio I need to kick-start my metabolism in a cool 15 to 20 minutes.

As for my diet right now, I really haven’t started dieting. I eat pretty healthy already and I am eating 5 to 6 meals a day. I will eventually need to clean up my diet in order to reach my goal. Right now I am monitoring how my body is reacting to my workouts and I will change my dieting accordingly. I will eventually start keeping track of all my calories I’m taking in and monitor my carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake. Being able to monitor and listen to how your body is reacting to your diet is essential to shaping your body. I am slowing changing my diet, because this is a great way to ease myself back into eating lean and having a strict diet. Most of you will find this to be extremely helpful when starting a new diet. If you start out changing a little at a time you are way more likely to follow a diet than jumping full steam into something completely foreign.

If you have any questions, comments, or would like to suggest a topic please feel free to comment below!

The Gym Maniac