Muscle Building Workouts: The Difference Between
Beginners and Advanced Lifters
By Jason Ferruggia
Many people often ask me how a beginners and/or weak hardgainers muscle building workouts should differ from the programs of strong, advanced lifters.There are four important things that differentiate the training of a beginner or hardgainer and an advanced trainee. Firstly, beginners and hardgainers who want to build muscle fast need to do fewer exercises than advanced lifters. A basic upper body push, an upper body pull and a compound lower body movement makes up a great beginner/hardgainer workout. The more exercises you are doing the more difficult it becomes to master them. So keep them to a minimum.
Secondly, a beginners muscle building workouts need to include more sets per exercise. While advanced lifters can get away with working up to one or two heavy sets per exercise it is much more beneficial to the weaker newbie to do multiple sets at a lower intensity in order to perfect their technique and improve intramuscular coordination. Instead of the 1-3 sets per exercise that I recommend to advanced lifters I recommend 4-6 sets per exercise for the weak newbie.
Thirdly, they need to train each body part and exercise or movement pattern with a higher frequency than advanced trainees. Again, this has to do with improving intramuscular coordination and perfecting technique. It also has to do with the fact that when you are weak it takes you a lot less time to recover between workouts because the training is far less demanding on your muscles, your joints and your nervous system. So while an advanced trainee may be able to wait 7-10 days between squats and make improvements, a weak newbie would actually get weaker by waiting more than 48-72 hours. Squatting 500 pounds takes a lot more out of your system than squatting 95 pounds does and thus requires a lot more recovery time.
The fourth difference between the training of weak newbies and advanced lifters trying to build muscle is that the beginners should keep most of their training on the lower end of the rep scale. Despite what you may have been told or read, high rep training is a waste for beginners. Not only that but it’s dangerous and only teaches you poor form on your exercises. An advanced lifter may be able to make tremendous size gains by doing one arm rows with a 130 pound dumbbell for 20 reps or squatting 315 for 20, but a beginner wont have anywhere near the same success.
Weak newbies don’t have the control or the stabilizer muscle strength to maintain the proper postures need to safely perform a high rep set. Nor do they have the strength to get anything out of high reps. If you can only squat 95 pounds for five, squatting 65 for twenty isn’t going to elicit much of a growth response. You need to keep the reps low in order to perfect your form, keep yourself safe and place the maximum possible overload on your muscles. This can only be done with sets consisting of five to eight reps and no more than that.
