Your Cart
Loading

Having an effective upper body workout at the gym

Just because there are many muscle groups in the upper body this does not mean you have to spend hours in the gym to get an effective workout. This is a huge misconception and is even the reason why people stray away from doing upper-body workouts.


As long as you are strategic with your exercise selection while making sure your intensity during these exercises is high, your workout can be under one hour and a half.


Exercise selection. You can experience results by doing one exercise for each muscle group. One for the chest, one for the back, one for the shoulders, one for the biceps, and one for the triceps. If you have a weak muscle group that you want to work extra on, you can do an extra exercise for that particular muscle group if you have the energy.


Intensity of exercises. You can get away with doing 3 sets per exercise as long as you are making sure those sets are hard. By hard I mean at least an 8/10 in terms of difficulty. If your working sets are not at least an 8/10 difficulty then you are making this workout sub-optimal and you will have to either do more sets or more exercises to make up for this lack of intensity to see muscle development following an upper body workout. If we do not include doing 2 exercises for that weak muscle group and you do upper body twice per week you will be getting in at minimum 6 working sets per muscle group per week which is sufficient for muscle growth assuming these are hard sets. Even well-known science-based lifter Jeff Nippard believes in this.


Frequency of training. If you are doing an upper body workout and your goal is muscle development for every muscle group on your body then your workout program should be an upper/lower split. This would be a 4-day workout program. An example of how this can look during the week would be - upper, lower, rest, upper lower, rest, rest. This workout routine will suit someone who is extremely busy and doesn't have time to be in the gym for more than 4 days a week.



Ultimately tackling an upper body workout does not have to be complicated as long as your exercise selection and intensity is carefully guided.If you are looking for more context and interested in seeing how I currently run one of my upper body workouts, I posted a longer video on YouTube or you can also purchase my custom-made upper/lower program that is made for any and everyone interested in making gains.