My bodybuilding routine: Fatloss & maintaining muscle
You can find me at the gym 6 days a week. And when I’m at the gym, I am probably there for almost 2 hours. It seems like a long time, also it was me who said you have to hit the gym short and hard. But I don’t just do weight training in those 2 hours. It’s a complete workout. Right now I am trying to maintain my muscle and lose some more bodyfat (<10%) and it’s working out well so far. Here’s my routine to do so.
1. Core (20 min)
I mostly start off with some basic core excercises. I use them to warm up my body. Besides warming up the body, it keeps my waist slim and tight. It strengthens your lower back and your abs.
- Plank
- Side plank
- Hip raise/ crunches / leg raise
- Ab rollouts
Details on this exercise can be found here
2. Weight training (40-60 mins)
Of course weight training is a big part of my workout. Weight training takes up about 40-60 minutes, depended on the musclegroups that I will be training on that day. Sometimes I hit two groups, sometimes one. My schema is as follows:
- Day 1: Chest & biceps
- Day 2: Back & triceps
- Day 3: Legs
- Day 4: Shoulders
I will go into the details of my weight training sessions in seperate blog posts. But this is how I split them up. I normally have one or two days rest in a week, also depends on my workweek and private life 😉 I tend to skip core exercises on legday, since leg workouts are so intense, I really want to give my full 100.
3. High Intensity Interval Training (10-15 min)
I always try to end my training session with High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). HIIT boosts your metabolism and is anabolic. It keeps myself flexible, my stamina on par and keeps my fat percentage low, without burning (too much) muscle.
With HIIT you do some short exercises (30 sec) to increase your heart rate and just really get exhausted. Have a small pause between exercises (10-20 sec) to get your heart rate down and do the next one. You can think of squat jumps, jumping jacks, burpees, short sprints, rowing, pushups, mountain climbers, stairs etc. I can really recommend this to everyone! It helped me get my stamina back on track and lose a lot of body fat!
I will also get into details on this in a different post. Meanwhile, here is an example of a HIIT workout:
