The Daily Workout: May 1

How to Structure a Strength Workout

Happy 1st of May, Experience family! Whether you're working out from home or gearing up to return to your home gym soon, we wanted to share a few high-level tips on best ways to get creative and structure a strength workout for yourself.

Common Strength Routine Muscle Groups
Strength routines are often grouped by a "pull day", which emphasizes the back and biceps (your pulling muscles); a "push day" which focuses on chest, shoulders and triceps (your pushing muscles); and a "leg day", which center around building strength in your quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes. These categories are most common for their effectiveness in targeting (and exhausting) each muscle group in the body over the course of three workouts. Nonetheless, what's most important is finding a routine that you enjoy, whether you choose to combine back and chest muscles in one workout, or shoulders and glutes in another - designing a routine that you look forward to will be most effective for long-term results.

Incorporating Supersets into your Routine
A superset is a pair of exercises performed back-to-back with no or minimal rest in between. Supersets can save time in the gym by cutting out extra rest between two exercises, and are also a great way to keep your heart rate up during a strength routine. There are several different ways to effectively use supersets in a strength workout but we'll discuss two primary strategies: supersetting opposing muscle groups or exhausting the same muscle with a superset. The former might look something like this - pairing a stiff legged deadlift (which targets the glutes and hamstrings) with a quad extension. This strategy will allow you to hit two muscle groups at once without exhausting either so you can go for more weight or more reps in each. Alternatively, you can use a superset to fully exhaust a muscle group at once. For example, this time you might pair a hamstring curl with your deadlift to keep the hamstrings firing the whole time. This is a good strategy if you are trying to develop more strength in a singular muscle group, as fully exhausting them in a workout can accelerate the growth process.

Designing a Workout
Below we've included a sample leg day routine with explanations on its structure so you can follow a similar approach when building your own home or gym workouts!

• Squats - starting with a compound movement (or one that uses a variety of muscles in the body) will help warm up all the muscles you're looking to target, while also helping you to build a functional physique. 

• (Superset) Weighted hip thrusts + unweighted hip thrusts - In this superset, we are exhausting the glutes by supersetting a heavy, low-rep glute movement with a high-rep, bodyweight variation of the same movement
• Walking lunges - It's easy to feel the quads in any type of lunge or squat. By completing these after a glute-centric superset, you'll feel the glutes activating more so you're not overcompensating with quads.
• (Superset) Stiff legged deadlifts + hamstring curls - Don't forget about the hamstrings! This superset will allow you to target them with a lengthening movement (during the deadlift) and a contraction-based movement so you're able to target the hamstrings from a variety of angles.

And that's it! Thinking strategically about which muscles you are targeting with each exercise will help you build a well-rounded strength routine that you can put to use at home and in the gym.