Hello Wellness Warriors! If you have been around for awhile, you know that I am a huge fan of strength training. (If you are new here, welcome, stay a bit and click around!) Over my cough cough many years of strength training, my routine has taken on a number of different formats. And today, I’d like to discuss one of my favorite ones with you.
Circuit training refers to any group of strength exercises that are done in a loop or circle structure. Typically, we pick one exercise, bust out 10-15 reps, wait two or three minutes, and then lather, rinse, repeat a few times. Those are known as straight sets. And while they are perfectly fine and useful, they do tend to waste time.
To create a circuit, you pick ALL of the strength exercises you’d like to accomplish during the session, start with one exercise, do your 10-15 reps and then move through the whole list with one right after the next waiting to rest until the end. Then you would repeat the entire loop, or circuit.
The overload of your program isn’t changing. If your straight sets workout is usually three sets of eight, you would do the same for the circuit. In other words, you would complete eight repetitions of each exercise and you would complete the entire loop three times. Since the volume (sets and reps) aren’t changing, neither should your intensity (weight). Again, you should be able to lift the same amount of weight as you typically would.
The only thing that really changes is the actual structure of your workout. And luckily, changing the structure of a workout is less finicky than messing around with the overload. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
First, you need to address the issue of in-workout rest. Straight sets has this built right in; you do a bunch of reps and then you wait to do it again. But in a circuit, you don’t have a true full body rest until the end of the loop. This just means that you need to be careful about how you order your exercises.
If you are completing a full body circuit, all you need to do is alternate your upper and lower body exercises and you are good to go. This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get an effective and thorough workout done. You can get a total body workout (including a bit of cardio) in a half hour or so. This design is part of what made those women’s only workout centers so popular a decade ago.
If you are doing a circuit for smaller portion of your body, it gets a bit trickier. If you have an upper/lower split for your program, you might want to alternate chest and back exercises (or front side of the body and back side of the body). This still allows muscle groups to rest appropriately and has the bonus of ensuring muscle balance. You would do the same for your lower body day, alternating quads with glutes and hamstrings.
If you have the more functional push/pull/lower split as your typical workout structure, you can still make a circuit work, you just need to plan a bit more. In the previous two examples, it is possible to wait until the minute you walk into the gym (or wherever you lift) to decide which exercises you want to accomplish, although I don’t recommend this. For the lower body day, you can do as you would have in the previous example, alternating between exercises for your quads on the front side of your legs and your glutes and hamstrings on the back.
But the upper body is now split further. So you will need to think about matching the number of exercises with the muscles they go with. In other words, if you are planning on doing three big pushing exercises (say push ups, dumbbell bench presses, and pec flyes) for the pectoral/chest group, then you will need to match that on pull day (maybe with lat pull downs, one arm dumbbell rows, and reverse flyes).
This particular training split is further complicated by the fact that it is, as I’ve said, a functional split. Meaning that the muscle groups being trained all work together. If you add triceps dips and dumbbell front raises to the push day, you are taxing the assisting muscles, too. I like to get around this by spacing out the main exercises with isolation movements (motion at only one joint like the triceps dips or front raises) and throwing my abdominal and lower back exercises in the middle.
And, some other things to keep in mind: Each muscle group should have at least 48 hours of rest between sessions, so the full body can be done 3 times in a week. The upper/lower can be 4 or 6 times (alternating the two circuits) and the push/pull/lower can be done 3 or 6 times (working through the workouts). Think about your goals and time commitments before choosing, and as always, leave a comment or shoot me some email if you have questions!
Until next time, be well friends!
