How to program workouts for beginners MEN | Become A Successful Personal Trainer SUF CPT

How to program workouts for beginners, if you're a struggling personal trainer, SUF-CPT is the certification that will help you become qualified.

Most trainers don’t struggle with effort, they struggle with structure. A listener asks a deceptively simple programming question: if you bench press on Monday, should you bench again later in the week or swap it out to “keep it fresh”? We break down why constant reinvention often kills progress, and how a smart plan makes clients feel challenged, confident, and motivated because the numbers actually move.

We walk through a clear three-day, full-body routine that still emphasizes upper body development using the CCA approach. You’ll hear how we pair push, pull, and press patterns, where to place legs so you don’t turn strength training into an unintended cardio session, and how to use accessories for variety without compromising force production on the main lifts. We also cover practical exercise progressions, like turning pull-ups into loaded chin-ups, switching from bilateral to single-arm dumbbell pressing, and adjusting rep targets based on training age.

Then we zoom out into the coaching side: why straight sets can waste time, how to think about metabolic conditioning and METCON placement, and how to manage volume, frequency, and intensity with simple periodization so months two through four are easier, not harder. If you coach clients who want a bigger chest, stronger upper body, and consistent results, this gives you a template you can apply immediately.

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Transcript

Welcome And Quick Calls To Action

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Show Up Fitness Podcast, where great personal trainers are made. We are changing the fitness industry one qualified trainer at a time with our in-person and online personal training certification. If you want to become an elite personal trainer, head on over to showufffitness.com. Also make sure to check out my book, How to Become a Successful Personal Trainer. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Have a great day and keep showing up.

The Bench Press Progression Question

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Bell Buckle Trainer helping you optimize your programming as a personal trainer. We had a great response on one of our YouTubes. Thank you for everything that you're doing. I watched a lot of your videos. You are a big hunk with giant biceps. Okay, he didn't say that, that's my words. But he was getting a little confused on how they should progress during the week. Do you change the core exercises or do they stay the same? For example, if Monday you did bench press with the client, should you do it again on the same week? Thank you so much. So let's dissect this pun intended. We're gonna go through a three-day program. Hypothesizing, since he said bench, it's gonna be a dude who wants to focus more on upper body. Three days would still be full body. With the CCA, the first C is based on what their goals are. So if I'm working with a hunkett and she wants to get that caboose train, it will be a hinge, a squat, or a unilateral. But since it said upper body, we're going to go off of the fact that they want to focus more on pushing, pulling, and pressing. We still will incorporate legs as I'll show you, but I'll show you what that looks like progression on the second workout as well as the third on non-consecutive days.

Build Day One With CCA

SPEAKER_00 1:32

So assuming you want to focus more on upper body, we do a push. Here I would do a pull, and then here we'll have a press. Now, if the individual just loves upper body pushing, you can make the all first Cs a push and then incorporate the pulling and pressing to make sure it doesn't compromise force production. So if we're doing a push here, opposite antagonist would be a pull. So let's do a pull. Since we did a horizontal push, pull here, let's do a vertical pull, complement that with another push. And then if we do a press, let's throw it in a leg. Now the nice thing about the CCA, we don't just choose random exercises. So we're doing a push here, we're gonna do a bench press. And then let's do a pull. We're gonna do a three-stance row. One of my favorites. You have the dumbbell down here. You could do it on a bench if you'd like. It's just a regression for a bent over a row, as that can put a lot of stress on someone's little back if they're a beginner. And then for an accessory, this is where you have fun. This is where you throw in variety, novelty. Your clients love this stuff, just like the warm-up. We're gonna keep the core patterns the same throughout the week, but the accessories where you're gonna have fun as long as it doesn't compromise force production. Meaning, I wouldn't want to do a tricep extension here. Because when I come back to the bench, I've compromised force production for the bench press. We don't want that. Let's do a bench press into that three-stance row and let's do a plank for some ab work. You can do bicycles, whatever you would like. Go back to your bench press, add weight, add weight with the row, do another plank. Get involved, slap their hands, lift their leg up, have them touch different objects, yell out capitals, yell out states, whatever. Make it fun. Do that for three rounds. Then we're gonna get into the second CCA. We're gonna do a pull up, followed by a push pattern. Let's do some incline dumbbells. So we have a barbell up here, then we're gonna do some dumbbell presses. Let's throw in some more ab work. And I'll just leave these kind of blanket because you throw in the creativity or your favorite ab exercises to target that area. As we know, you can't spot reduce, but your clients love focusing on areas. They want that burn. Do some ab work there, three rounds. The last circuit for the press down here, let's do a landmine press into a landmine RDL into an anti-rotation on the landmine. Now, because of the angle that you're pressing, you're still getting the clavicular portion of the pec major. So we're emphasizing upper body, specifically the chest. You don't have to do an RDL, you could do a back squat. If you want to switch the leg here, you can do that as well. Back squat into a military press, into a farmer's carry or something like that. That's the whole workout, which would

Day Two Variations Without Losing Progress

SPEAKER_00 4:32

take you roughly one hour. Now I see a lot of trainers, they make this mistake. The second time your client comes in on non-consecutive days, it's a completely different workout. I don't want them to get bored. Your clients get bored of not getting results. You have to have the confidence, knowing it's progressive overload, it's consistently showing up. But playing the game by changing up the accessories, that's how you're gonna make it enjoyable. So, what I would do here is I would take the second CCA where we're doing a pull, a push, and an ab. And I'm just gonna move this into the first workout. Here we're doing a pull up, let's do a chin up, and let's add some load because it's in the second portion here. Here we add some load. It's a totally different exercise. So maybe they were doing six to eight reps. Now we're doing two to four, but we're loading it up. Maybe we put a quarter, a dime, something like that. We're doing a dumbbell press, do it again. Dumbbell press, but now I'm gonna do it single arm, just that small variation. Whereas on day one, we did bilateral dumbbell pressing. Day two, I'm gonna do a single arm press. I'll take the weight, bring it to the other arm, and let's add in some more ab work. That's the first CCA. I would then take this first CCA and move it to the second one. Doing bench press here, so we're bench pressing on day two. Three stance row, you could do a bench row and throw in some more ab work. When I'm benching here versus here, I'm lifting more. Even though they're a beginner, let's say they get up to 185. So you warm up on the bar, you get to 135, 185 here, because this is when I'm the freshest, I'm not doing as much. So maybe you're getting to 155, but you're doing more reps. For a beginner, we want to keep it 10 to 15, optimize that neuromuscular communication, strengthen ligaments and tendons. But if you've been training for a while, say you get up to 225 for three to five reps here, I would just do it as the second CCA and work more in that quote unquote hypertrophy range. There's no such thing as a hypertrophy range. I'm just talking six to 12 reps. So then on that third one, we just move this sucker over and now we change up the leg pattern. So let's do a military press into a squat, into a uh lateral raise. Sorry about my chicken scratch. You can read it. Use your AI stuff to decipher what I'm saying here. So now the second workout is complete.

Day Three Sequencing And Metcon Rules

SPEAKER_00 7:16

For the third one, I'm still gonna keep legs at the end because what happens when you put legs in the beginning, especially with a compound movement like a push or a pull, you're really taxing the system. It's almost more aerobic. If I were to do a bench press into a goblet squat into abs, heart rate's gonna be through the roof. So when you do rest for two or three minutes and you come back to the bench press, you're not optimizing that tension. So that's why I'm gonna keep legs at the bottom for now because most dudes don't want to train legs. If you have someone who comes in and says, I really want to focus on my legs, you could do a CAA, which would be like a back squat into a bicep curl and a tricep extension, or you could do a compound movement like a squat, hinge, unilateral, followed by body weight just to get some work done. The reason I don't like straight sets is because we're sitting around doing nothing. What are you doing as a trainer? Hey, yeah, how's it going? Yeah, what's uh five minutes goes by, people are watching you. Why would you pay a trainer just to sit down and do nothing? Whereas if you do a back squat into a close grip push-up, you're getting work done, but it's not so taxing. You can still get the optimal tension when you come back for that second round. So, here let's do a military press standing into a row variation. If you want to do a barbell row into some ab work. Notice how I didn't do a military press and a horizontal press in the same circuit. Triceps are involved. Overhead pressing when I get into the push, I'm really taxing my triceps, not getting a ton of work on my pectros major. So when I rest a couple minutes, again, I'm compromising force for that military press. We got our press in the beginning of the week. We have our back emphasis one day of the week, we have our chest emphasis. So for the second CCA, let's get some back work and do some aussies. Complement that with some more landmine work. And then if you want to do some curls for the girls, something along those lines, that's fine. At the end here, I'm gonna throw in my bench press variation again. So we'll do bench into walking lunges into carries or cardio. The reason I do cardio at the end, it's more metabolic conditioning. Again, what I said earlier. Imagine if I were to do ski erg up here, military press, barbell row into ski erg. You're kicking the hell out of your clients. Unless they're training for something like a hyrox and you're trying to produce that metabolic effect. Most of our clients don't need that, and it's not optimal. Annihilating your clients is not gonna get them the results they want. There's strategy behind this. We're resting so we can work more. So on bench down here, just bring your hands in a little closer, focus more on your triceps, and then through some walking lunges. And then if you do some jumping jacks or a ski erg, yeah, you are compromising force on the bench press, but we've already done upper body work, not too concerned about it. You're getting that metabolic effect. You're only doing 135, 95, whatever it is, and you set those clear expectations for your clients. You're getting the heart effect down there at the end. That's why we call metabolic conditioning or METCON. And again, this will take roughly one hour.

Volume Frequency Intensity And Periodization

SPEAKER_00 10:40

So when we take a step back, we're benching, we're doing a lot of pull-up variations, chin up, pull-up ossies, we're doing landmine for the shoulders. The accessories are what we change. Don't compromise the force production. That's the biggest thing. And really just to make your life a lot easier as the trainer, because that's the only thing I'm really changing up. We're focusing on upper body, we're getting legwork done for the whole week. Your VFI, volume, frequency, intensity, frequency, obviously, the three days, the intensity after that first month can start going up towards you know, 80%, eight reps, maybe even 85, which should be five. The volume for a beginner, you're looking at 10 to maybe 15 total working sets for them one muscle group that you're trying to emphasize. Increase that about 10 to 20 percent. Months two, three, and four, you could start doing supersets if you wanted to do a block like that. Just increase that endurance as well as total volume on the muscle. Each block, you put a different emphasis. Week two, I start back here. I'm just gonna increase the weight a little bit. So if I did 135, 155, 185, now I do 135 into 185, 185. So now we're hitting two sets of 185. The volume is going to increase for the intensity which you did prior. Week three, same exact workout, but the accessories are just gonna change. If you want to throw a bicep curl in there or some farmers' walks down here, that's okay. You're gonna have this trial on error. If you did a farmer's carry here, you might notice because of the pull-ups, the pull-ups are now being compromised because you have to hold the bar. You're walking with the weight, your forearms are gonna be taxed. It's not the end of the world. Probably not the best to put the carries here. Let's move it down here. That's the beauty of a trainer. There's right ways to do it, and then there's suboptimal ways. In a suboptimal way, just be crushing your client with a ton of cardio and random exercise. They want a giant chest. Let's do bench press into chest flies into push-ups because I saw some bodybuilder doing that. It's not appropriate for that individual. So as you pan out, periodization for your clients becomes significantly easier because you're able to adjust those acute variables and help your clients

Closing Advice And Listener Prompt

SPEAKER_00 12:56

get the results. If you enjoyed today's podcast andor if you're watching this on YouTube, leave a comment. Let us know where we can help you become a successful personal trainer. And remember big biceps are better than small ones, and keep showing up.