Fool Proof Mass Building Guide: The Workout Plan

With this workout plan, you’ll make some big changes to your physique in just 4 weeks. You’ll feel better and look better.

Whilst the emphasis with this program is for the beginner, we’re presuming you’re not a complete noob. You’ll need to be healthy and have just a base of fitness to get through it. You’ll be familiar with the exercises too. 

After the 4 weeks, you’ll be ready to move onto an intermediate muscle building plan. Alternatively, you can turn this plan into an 8 or even 12-week plan by extending the training weeks – you can repeat week 1 for a total of 3 weeks if you wish to. The plan is purposely flexible.

This will be a challenging month. You’ll be working hard throughout, but it’ll be worth it when you see the end product.

This is your foolproof 4-week mass building plan.

Week 1: Full Body

You’ll begin your program with alternate day, full body workouts. That equates to 4 sessions in the first week. Each session contains exercises to hit all of your major muscles, but never the same exercise in two corresponding workouts. This ensures that you’re hitting each muscle from different angles.

You’ll load up enough to start to target the muscle fibers needed to grow, but you’ll adapt the rep range each session just enough to target the full aspect of the strength-muscle growth continuum. The rep range is specifically chosen to boost muscle growth so the weight you choose should be challenging – you should just about be able to squeeze the last reps out.

The exercises should be relatively simple, but if you’re unfamiliar with any of them then get advice from one of the professionals at your gym. Although these are the ‘core’ lifts for beginners, they are still make up the bulk of an advanced lifter’s program.

It is important to allow a day of rest in-between your sessions to allow your body to recover. You can still be active on these days but shouldn’t do anything too strenuous – walking is a great way of promoting blood flow and recovery and a low-intensity calorie burner.

If you’re still a little sore on the day of your next session don’t worry. Stick with it. You shouldn’t be overly sore but if you are then you may need to regress your volume just a touch – reduce the number of sets if necessary.

Week 2: Full Body

Well done you’ve got through the hardest week – not physically, but mentally. You’ve started the process and that’s the biggest obstacle to get over.

Week two follows a similar full body approach – we’ve kept the strength-growth continuum reps in there but this time you’ll ramp up the volume just a touch to allow progression. Again the exercises are different each session but may crossover from week 1 in places. This will allow you to practice in preparation for the following weeks.

Week 3: Split Training

For the first time, you’ll be splitting your workouts into one of two body parts. This allows you to up the volume and creates a more challenging stimulus. As the sessions are split

The plan for week 3 follows an upper and lower body split to allow sufficient rest time. We’ve kept the rep ranges the same throughout the whole week – muscle building is the priority here.

Unlike many other training programs we’ve added two leg sessions per week – one has a very quad based emphasis and the other has a hamstring, glute and calf approach. We feel that for such big muscle groups once per week is just not enough. Plus there’s nothing more impressive than a good set of wheels.

Week 4: Split Training

Well done you’re at the last week of the program. It’ll no doubt have been a tough month – once this week’s finished, make sure you give yourself a week off. The rest and recovery will be essential. We promise you that by the end of your recovery week you’ll be much fuller and your muscles will have optimized their growth.

You’ll be following the same split again – legs twice a week and 3 upper body sessions. The exercise order is slightly different for each session and largely you’ve got different exercises to week 3.

We’ve taken your rep range down a little which means you’ll be lifting heavier weights – you’ll remain in the muscle building range but you’ll also improve your strength too. This bump up in load will ensure you continue to overload your muscles and promote as much growth as possible.