Drawing up a 3 day full body routine for myself, would appreciate suggestions

[heartboy]

@godisworking101 My suggestion is add deadlifts on Friday and take something else out like shrugs. Your traps and cardiovascular fitness will benefit more from deadlifts than they will from shrugs anyway. Not to mentioned the added benefit of deadlifts being a leg dominant movement of which you have none programmed on Friday. Maximize your time when doing full body by favoring compound movements and supersets where possible.

 

[godisworking101]

@heartboy that's actually what i just did a few minutes ago

i removed the shrugs and added RDLs

 

[uzezi]

@godisworking101 Don’t draw

 

[amn]

@godisworking101

#3 All exercises are done for 3 sets, with 1st 2 sets for 10 reps, the 3rd to failure (usually around the 15th rep)

This jumped out at me --

So if your first two sets are 10 reps, but you can still do 15 reps on your 3rd set, then sets 1 and 2 are too easy (5 or possibly 6-7 reps from failure). I think you need to make your work sets harder, like 0-3 reps from failure. To accomplish this you pick a weight that you expect to get you in some rep range (5-10, 10-20, etc). And if you do make your sets harder, I think you might want to reduce the number of sets even more (like 4-8 total sets per muscle group), until you adjust to the harder sets. (i.e. recovering on time for your next session, not being very sore by the next session).

Does that make sense?

The plan seems pretty good. I would replace kickbacks with skullcrushers ever day of the week.

I think you could arguably save some time by adding sets to the bench, make one of them a narrow grip bench and skip one of your direct triceps exercises. Might also want to throw in an incline bench periodically. (Incline Narrow Grip Bench could serve both functions).

 

[amn]

Delts

Overhead Press

Overhead Press

Overhead Press

9

Actually -- this seems like a bit much too. If you want full delt development, benching gets plenty of front delts too, and side delts would be served well with side laterals (very low fatigue compared to overhead press). Doing these once a week seems fine though.

Good luck

 

[godisworking101]

@amn Very helpful, thank you

I found that the amount of weight I put in that lets me go to ~15 reps on the 3rd set, is about as much as I can lift while keeping my form correct. As in, I feel that increasing a bit more will force me to do some bad reps at the end. But I suppose I can stop at about 6-8 reps in the 1st 2 sets.

I can definitely switch the OHP to lateral raise.

I find skullcrushers difficult to keep proper form in, so I preferred overhead extension/kickbacks, but I can certainly give it another go.

Thanks again.

 

[amn]

@godisworking101 I don't think you should need 15 reps to learn technique with barbell movements. With dumbbells I can understand if the weight jumps are too big. Going from 15s to 20s is a huge % increase. But if you've got loadable barbells, you can small increases that shouldn't alter your technique. Maybe you need to just focus more on technique in general. Use slow eccentrics, pauses at the bottom, etc.

But in general though, without changing anything, I would keep the weight the same, and just take sets 1 and 2 to higher reps. So instead of saying "everything sets of 10", do "everything 10-20 with 2-3 reps in reserve". Going to failure is probably overrated for you at this point.

And if your first set is over 20 reps, then definitely increase the weight, at least on the first set.

What do you think of that approach?

Skullcrushers might need to be lighter than you think. Overhead extensions are great, keep those too. If you have an ez-curl bar, I like it for those. Dumbbells work too. Check out this video:

 

[godisworking101]

@amn i use overhead extensions with dumbbells so that i stress my wrists less, after my injury in 2018, 2023 is the first year where i can actually put any weight on it, so i'm just being careful for now, my biceps are with the ez barbell though

i should educate myself more on the concepts of reps in reserve first

this is all very helpful, thanks very much

 

[amn]

@godisworking101 If you follow Dr Mike and the RP content you'll learn plenty of reps in reserve. His style might be a bit abrasive though, so it's not for everyone.

A more family-friendly source would be Dr Eric Helms, or the Stronger By Science folks.

 

[godisworking101]

@amn i like dr mike, the issue with him is that sometimes he throws around acronyms and highly technical terms which makes the video hard to understand for noobs like myself

i will seek out the other two, thanks again

 

[amn]

@godisworking101 yeah, if you dig a bit deeper on the RP channel, or search like "Dr Mike MRV, MEV," he's been interviewed about this stuff dozens of times, and made a lot of his own videos. It would be helpful if his one-off videos like the one I linked had a links to basic explainer stuff.