Quote Originally Posted by Nokomis View Post
Thanks equus!! I am proud & motivated - just trying to identify the right changes to reach my goals.

Simplification of the plan so it doesn't take forever to explain.. hopefully this is clear.

Workout rotation is Cardio / Upper Body / Cardio / Lower Body , repeat. 6 days on, 1 day off, pick up the rotation w/ next work out. So one week will be 2 days upper body, the next week would be 2 days lower body.

Upper: Chest, Back, Shoulders, Bicep & Tricep work.
Lower: Quads/Glutes, Hamstring, Calf, Ab work
Increase weight per set, reps go 12, 10, 8, 6, then lower weight for 12, and add 12 more of a second exercize for the same muscle group - totalling 6 sets per muscle. Goal is to fatigue the muscle group w/ the final set.

I do change up the exercizes and challenge the muscles in different ways, and am seeing progress in tone, strength, and definition.

That actually looks pretty good and sounds like you know what you're doing. That's VERY good. Couple comments - do you take rest & recover weeks? That's the one major flag that's raised in initially looking at your schedule. As long as every few weeks you take a couple days off during a week or a few consecutive days to rest then you're okay.

How do you feel with the amount of lifting you do? Are you okay with the total time spent in the gym per day or per week? I'm asking this because you can actually combine muscle groups and reduce the number of exercises - if that's an option you would like. Another thing I notice is that you seem to be doing a lot of sets. This in combination with only having 1 day off per week for recovery might come back and nip you in the butt later on down the road. Please be careful about overtraining. Lifting takes a good 2 days to recover from so if you never give your body the opportunity to do so then you might fatigue and do your body harm. Did somebody prescribe this workout for you or did you create it yourself?

I have some suggestions but they would be to change what you're doing and how you're doing it. I'm sure you don't want to do that because I know how good it feels when you finally get into a schedule but if you're interested, I'm more than happy to share other ideas of what you could do to continue strength training but modify the way in which you're doing it to help elicit a more aerobic type of lifting.