8-Week Body Recomposition Guide: Lose Fat & Gain Muscle 2025

Having proper form and technique is important with any muscle-building endeavor. For instance, performing squats with incorrect form can compromise muscle recruitment and hinder growth. If you have bad form with your squat, you might be challenging the wrong muscle groups and could alter your outcome.

Day 2: Lower Body

I would suggest searching Yelp for a “strength gym” in your city. The senior trainers there can push you further than I ever could. You can do all three workout types on back-to-back days if desired.

We found a split that gives you 85% of the gains of the top split but with 30% less time in the gym every week. It’s one of the reasons why, despite the 5-day full body routine having the highest hypertrophy score, I still choose not to use it. But unless you’re someone who would live, eat, and sleep in the gym if it meant more gains, you should also consider time efficiency. But what’s interesting is this training style may provide additional benefits for growth, especially as you get more advanced. Now, although this sounds like a bad idea, in each workout, you’re only doing a few sets per muscle.

The Full Body Split

While muscle and bone mass decline as you age, you can combat this with proper exercise. You are probably wondering, how many sets per muscle group do I need to perform to gain muscle mass? Research shows that performing ten weekly sets per muscle group produces hypertrophy. The final workout of the week aims to build lower-body muscle mass. Using a combination of machines and dumbbells, these moves focus on the hamstrings, glutes, calves, and quadriceps. The squat and leg press exercises are multi-joint actions that work all the major muscle groups of the leg simultaneously.

Fast forward to 2024, and we’ve got a bit more knowledge under our belts and know that ideally, we want to be hitting each muscle group more frequently than that (ideally twice a week). The body part workout split takes the foundations of the bro workout split, breaking up training into specific body parts, usually focusing on two body parts per day. This gives plenty of time in each session to focus on heavy compound exercises combined with lighter accessory work. Advanced lifters may further increase the intensity by cycling the push pull legs split workout plan 3 days on, 1 day off to increase the training volume and maximise gains [3]. This phase continues to employ a four-day split, but bodyparts are paired differently—namely, chest and back are trained on the same day (Day 1), as are biceps and triceps (Day 4). This is little more than a means of changing things up, giving your muscles a slightly different stimulus to spark new muscle growth.

tips for finding & maintaining fitness motivation

In this example, the first three exercises are compound exercises that will focus on the pressing motion. Afterward, the last three exercises are isolation exercises that will promote growth in the chest, the arms, and the shoulders separately. Supersets should provide no benefit other than reducing your gym time. If you do them, make sure you’re still taking your normal rest time between sets. Otherwise, an elevated heart rate or unrecovered muscles prevent you from completing madmuscles review your reps. It might just mean you’re rushing yourself and you’re mistaking discomfort for progress.

Add One or Two Explosive Movements

Your goal is to lift a slightly heavier weight or get slightly more reps than last time. If you’re training at a full gym, another option is an underhand lat pulldown. It works similar muscles to the chin-up, but it’s a bit easier to learn. It makes for a good place to start, and it remains effective forever.

Which muscle is toughest to grow?

• For each exercise, I have prescribed a number of sets to do.
• It’s best to consult a registered dietician to determine your individual needs and ensure your diet is nutritionally adequate.
• For maximal biceps growth, select at least one movement where your upper arm is fixed behind your torso, like an incline dumbbell curl, and one with your arm in front like a preacher curl.
• The current consensus among the scientific community is that, for most folks, the number of sets and reps you should do per muscle group, per week, falls between 10 and 20.
• And if you don’t want to figure any of this out and just want to be told exactly how what exercises, sets, and reps to do, our online coaches can take care of that for you.
• These three exercises are also known as compound exercises.

Consult the plateaus section at the bottom of the cheatsheet for help pinpointing the culprit. You need a reference point for how heavy you can lift when you first start. To do this, refer to the find your starting weights section from Prep Week. You can use these results to prove to yourself everything I’m claiming is working for you. But before we cover that, let’s cover the topic of weight heaviness. It’s also worth pointing out, however, that Plan B doesn’t have to end.

According to some studies, women will build muscle faster by choosing a heaviness that lets them get closer to 10 reps rather than 8. So, if you’re a woman lifting a weight that’s too heavy to complete 10 reps with, perhaps go lighter. According to studies, this is because women have muscle fiber distribution that responds better when stimulated with higher reps (study, study, article). In short, with strategic calorie-cycling, generous protein intake, and a diligent training routine that emphasizes resistance training. Don’t worry — this guide provides a calorie-cycling template to help with your body recomposition journey. Trainees over age 40 may have to adjust their workout routine to account for injuries or slower recovery times.

Determine Training Frequency

Yup, even with all else (total weekly volume, exercise selection, rep ranges, etc.) being equal. The higher frequency of a full body program certainly helps in this regard, as it allows you to spread the same optimal total weekly volume up over 3-4 workouts instead. For example, the bench press is thought of as a chest exercise.

Why Should You Do a 6-Day Workout Split

When you’re ready, we have an article about how to eat for muscle growth. If you ever start to feel worn down, or if you’re coming back after a long break, start the cycle over again, going back to just two sets per exercise. Another advantage of spamming the best exercises is that it makes the workout plan incredibly efficient. You’re lugging out the biggest guns every single workout, stimulating a tremendous amount of growth. Beginner exercises are simpler, quicker to learn, and make it intuitive to lift with good, safe technique.

Fitbod: Gym & Fitness Planner

This aids in building hypertrophy in the lower, short head of the muscle. You don’t have to be a fitness expert to see results, but you do need to stay consistent and push yourself. If you hit a plateau, try new exercises or bump up the intensity. The key is to take control of your fitness and tailor it to what works best for you. To balance out your pushing exercises (like bench press and overhead press), you need to pull—and barbell rows are perfect for that.

Week 10 — Refine Technique and Track Progress

Instead, focus on metrics that provide a more qualitative assessment of your body’s changes. Tools like body fat calipers, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scans, and even simple progress photos can give you a better understanding of your progress. Body composition is simply a term used to describe the quality of someone’s body mass.