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Our next installment in our Basement Series is a hypertrophy-based workout. For this workout, you won’t need anything other than your body weight, kettlebells (or dumbbells), and some exercise bands. This workout takes 48 minutes and targets all four of the major body groups we like to focus on – check, shoulders, back, and legs.
What is Hypertrophy?
You may be asking yourself, what the heck is hypertrophy? Well, quite simply hypertrophy refers to growth in muscle mass. Not really a helpful definition, but that’s what we are shooting for right? We are looking for growth in muscle mass and that’s why we spend hours in the basement pushing and pulling.
How to Train for Hypertrophy?
Now that we know that hypertrophy is growth in muscle mass, how do we train for it? This is the key question, right?
Well, there are a handful of ways to train for hypertrophy including, but not limited to, tempo eccentric training, low-weight training with blood-flow restriction, cluster sets, and our method for today’s workout – drop sets.
What are Drop Sets?
Drop sets are a training technique that involves stressing the same muscle group over multiple sets. As you progress through the sets you “drop” weight. This results in higher reps and decreasing weights. It is very effective in pushing the muscle group to exhaustion.
The Workout
Enough about what kind of workout we did, let’s talk about the actual workout.
We have four major body groups we are targeting with this workout – chest, back, shoulders, and legs. I’m going to share with you the weights we used, but these aren’t by any means suggested weights. Do what you can do on these movements and just look for growth:
- Chest:
- Weighted Dips (guy – 45lb kettlebell; girls – 10lb kettlebell)
- Unweighted Dips
- Push-ups
- Back
- Elevated Plank with Kettlebell Row (guy – 53lb kettlebell; girls – 20lb kettlebell)
- Shoulder Salutation (guy – 20lb kettlebell; girls – 10lb kettlebell) – you can find more on salutation here.
- Overhand Banded Pull-Over – we used a moderate band for this exercise. Here is a good video.
- Shoulder
- Kettlebell Shoulder Press (guys did handstand push-ups; girls – 25lb kettlebell)
- Kettlebell Front Raise (guy – 35lb kettlebell; girls 15lb kettlebell)
- Side Raise – we used a 10lb resistance band for this movement.
- Legs
- Sumo Squat (guy – 53lb kettlebell; girls – 25lb)
- Weighted Walking Lunges (same weight)
- Lunge Pulses
That’s the workout. Each round (chest, back, shoulder, legs) is allocated 3:00. So, an entire round will take 12:00. We did 4 rounds getting us to 48 minutes.
The beauty of this workout is once you get the structure down, all you have to do is swap in and out workouts in these major muscle groups.
Want to know how long to rest to maximize your hypertrophy workout? Check out this article!