[ShadowByte]

What is the best way to exercise?

Well, this all depends, I’ve worked in both applications of bodybuilding and athletic performance for sports. Both training may be specific to your goals. For example, a basketball player will focus more on his lower limbs' endurance rather than building muscle and showing more tissue on his legs. Also, the amount of energy needed to maintain his muscle size and endurance based on his diet would be too difficult resulting in less performance because the body is expanding so much energy trying to use those muscles and maintain them. In this scenario, I will use the application of creating a more desirable physique, because that’s what most people want. Also at my younger age, I think it’s cooler to look like you can lift a lot of weight rather than be able to push more weight. The type of training that gives you the fastest muscle growth and growth that is visible is hypertrophy training. You might ask what is hypertrophy training? Hypertrophy training is based on intensity and tension. The more tension and strain on a muscle, the more it will be broken down and repaired. Ofc the only way to adequately repair a muscle is by fueling the body with sufficient protein. The body takes what you eat and creates it into muscle, so the saying you are what you eat is exactly correct. If you fuel your body with nutrient-rich food and Lean protein you’ll see a difference in a few days. Anyway, time under tension is what you want when hypertrophy training. I have always done 4 sets, and the more focused you can work out a muscle the better as localized hypertrophy of a muscle is an actual thing, so you could grow any part of pf your muscle with the right exercise, tension, and patience. My favorite saying is that your body is a block of stone and you are the one sculpting your body out of stone.

Now let's talk about weight, you should use a weight that you can slowly control, keeping that tension in the muscles. I use the idea that you should fail the weight you are doing at around your 6-7th rep. If you're doing more than 8 reps you need to up the weight another 5 lbs. Most of the time when I lift I fail around my 5th rep.

How to set up your weekly split. Going to the gym 5 days a week is the perfect amount. It allows you the ability to train hard during the week and rest up on the weekend. It also prevents you from doing Junk volume (doing more sets than needed). Some people think doing more sets is better but in reality, doing more sets makes it take longer for your body to recover from the damage done. The more sets you do per muscle the longer it’s gonna take to recover. I like to run at a MAXIMUM of 2 exercises per muscle, 4 sets each exercise.

The weekly split to start would be,
Monday-chest
Tuesday-arms
Wednesday-back
Thursday-shoulders
Friday-legs

Once you start to understand what muscles on your body grow faster than others you can start manipulating your days and weeks and adding subsets, for example, my chest is overdeveloped compared to my legs. So I adapted my split to hit my legs 2x a week for 1 week and skip chest that week, then the following week I’ll hit 1 chest day and 1 leg day. And I’ll keep doing that.

I also add subsets, for example, on my arms day I’ll also at least do 2 sets of a deltoid/ shoulder exercise. Usually later raises because I also want to put a little more emphasis on my shoulders. As well I will add a subset of 2 biceps and 2 tricep sets on my shoulder day as a subset muscle.
This is more advanced though and should be done further into your lifting career.

I’ll make another thread on nutrition but the basic idea is just to prioritize protein at 1g of protein per pound of body weight. So I weigh 200 lbs so on a daily I will eat 200 grams of protein. It sounds like a lot but it’s not.