rola643 said:
Best way to balance muscle groups
The best way to balance the muscle groups, great question. Here's the answer:
Full body compound movements.
Meaning, try to involve as many limbs moving as possible with each lift. Plus, the metabolic tissue activation is a lot higher so you will burn more calories as wells as develop a deeper neural connection between your brain and your muscles.
So this means doing:
Kettlebell swings
Turkish Get Ups
Farmers Walks (love this one)
Deadlifts with trap bar or kettlebell
Standing and pushing/pulling (great exercise)
Over DB/KB press (great anti cycling exercise)
Hip hinge row
Anti rotation holds
Planks
Pretty much anything the involves the arms and legs moving together through the trunk.
Once your master these, you can take most of the above mentioned lifts to a single leg variation. YouTube "glute triple threat." it doesn't get much better than this to hammer the posterior chain (back half of the body) on one leg which is critical to anyone who rides a bike.
I'm not a big isolation exercise fan (bi curls, Tri extensions, etc) because they waste a lot of time, and aren't very functional. Now, if you want the big guns, you can do them. Just know there are more efficient ways to train.
Plus, you can get all of the shoulder, tricep shoulder work from chest work and bicep and forearm work from back work. Hit the same beach muscles, just do it in a way that incorporates the whole body.
If you do perform these lifts, use alternate arm patterns. This will involve diagonal trunk stabilization more. Split your stance and this demand goes up even more.
I'm also not a seated machine fan. Based on what I've read and seen first hand, it's an inferior way to train by far due to the reduced stabilizer demands, repetitive stress/pattern overload affect that can damage soft tissues, loss of flexibility from single plane movement (same reason why cycling kills flexibility) and the potential to rewire neural commands to the muscles.
Plus, depending on the exercise, you can put a ton of sheer forces into the lumbar spine which is never a good thing. It isn't uncommon for people
To develop lumbar spine disc issues from a leg press and a prone ham curls machine as well.
Standing exercise will always be superior to anything seated because of the direct carry over to our daily movements.
As far as frequency, we use 2x/week and 3x/week programs. If you go on a Tu/Th schedule it should look like this:
Tu: legs + compound pulls
Th: legs + compound press
MWF looks like this you can manipulate the workouts however you'd like, but here's a couple of ways it can look:
Day 1: lower body + standing trunk work
Day 2: upper body pull + lower body unloading (body weight work) + core
Day 3: upper body press + single leg lower body + core
Option 2 (this is what I use for myself)
Day 1: total body + core
Day 2: total body + core
Day 3: total body + core + mobility for the weekend
If you need even more programming ideas, pick any of the books from the "New Rules of Lifting" book series. Hope this helps!!!