Alternative Intermediate Home Workout Program

You have been training on the intermediate level for a while and need a new home workout plan? Get or improvise a barbell  and try this one!

The “Other” Intermediate Workout Plan

This plan is for those of you who did my first intermediate home workout plan, got a bit tired with it and now want something fresh.

For this you’ll already have most equipment in place, except for one: a barbell.  Why do I introduce it here? Because a barbell allows us some muscular mechanics we so far didn’t do and we’ll make good use of that.

It doesn’t mean you have to buy a barbell, because you can improvise it. If you do prefer to have real one, I compiled a load of handy tips right over here – what length, what weights etc.

The Alternative Intermediate Workout Program

 
Once more rest between sets is 60 seconds and “to failure” means you do as many repetitions as you can without cheating or using bad form.

Compounds Is Again Where It’s At

As you see, I put your new barbell into a lot of this plan and you should immediately feel the difference. Did you notice the one between barbell curls and dumbbell curls? When I first did barbell curls that gave me a huge surprise!

Nonetheless, barbell or not, we once more stay with compound exercises that involve loads of muscles in one go. Only as finishers we resort to an isolation that targets a single muscle. For example, the flyes you do on Mondays single out the main chest muscle right after it worked along with the triceps when doing push-ups.

Those compounds also allow us to only do two shoulder exercises despite the shoulder consisting of three muscles. The military presses train the front and side delts. The rear delt rows train the rear delts and the side delts.

Another note about the front delts: you have them involved in a number of exercises on Monday (push-ups, close grip push-ups, triceps extensions). If you feel it’s too much for your front delts, drop the military presses on Fridays and replace them with lying side raises.

A good workout isn’t doing a lot of exercises. It’s doing a few exercises intelligently!

Changing It Up

Because you just got your barbell this plan should work for you longer than the usual two months. But at some point progress will slow and boredom set in.

At that point fill free to mix and mingle the barbell and dumbbell exercises. Just remember the rule of replacing a compound with a compound and an isolation with an isolation.