GIANT PROGRAM 2.0

Day 1 of my full-body Giant program workouts has you mainly doing two multi-joint exercises followed by two single-joint exercises. In most cases, I've grouped four exercises that can be done nearby one another. However, because you're only doing one set of each exercise, you won't need to save your previous station because you're one and done at each station. On day 2, I reversed the order of the exercises to provide not only built-in variety but to provide pre-exhaust. Here, for most muscle groups, single-joint exercises will be used to exhaust the target muscle group before doing the multi-joint moves. This way, when you hit the multi-joint movements and reach failure, you'll fail when the target muscle – not one of the smaller and weaker assistance muscles – reaches full exhaustion. In this workout, you will be using rep ranges of 21-25 and 9-11. On day 3, I changed the exercise order again. This time, for most muscle groups, you start with a multi-joint exercise and follow with a single-joint exercise. Then, you'll repeat that order with the next two exercises. Because you're doing four exercises every workout, you don't need to switch up exercises during this phase of the workouts. Here, adjusting exercise order and rep ranges each workout provides adequate change. Also, don't worry if you don't have the same equipment and have to swap out exercises for different ones. Any comparable exercises will work. The rep ranges in this workout will be 8-10 and 16-20. For day 4, I bring back pre-exhaust, but in a slightly different order. For most muscle groups, you'll start with one single-joint exercise followed by one multi-joint move and repeat in the same order with the last two exercises. So basically, two pre-exhaust sets, all done with no rest in between. I also swapped out a few exercises for cable versions just to show you that it's not a problem if you can't do the exact version of a given exercise. The reps in this workout are: 12-15 reps for sets 1 and 3 of each exercise, and 3-5 reps for sets 2 and 4. For day 5, which I performed at bodybuilding.com headquarters in Boise, the exercise order swaps once more. I started and finished with a multijoint exercise for most muscle groups. That means the two single-joint movements were bookended by the big movements. This allows for training one multi-joint movement first while strongest, and then allows you to fatigue the muscle with two single-joint exercises after. Because you have one more multi-joint move to do, it sets up a great pre-exhaust for that finisher. Benefits of both maximal overload on the muscle and pre-exhaust in one workout. The rep ranges jump back up, but only to the rep ranges of workout #2: 9-11 and 21-25. On day 6, the order of exercises swaps back to the original setup in day 1, where for most muscle groups you do two compound exercises followed by two single-joint exercises. Reps will be 8-10 and 16-20. In this workout, I show you that, yes, you can add machines to the routine by picking similar moves. On day 7, the last Giant 2.0 routine, I go back to the pre-exhaust order of day2. But today, rep ranges are 3-5 and 12-15 (versus 9-11 and 21-25 in Workout #2). When I did this workout, I was on the road traveling, so I had to take an early workout in my hotel gym. I adapted the workout to show you an example of how to make exercises swaps to cable movements.