How I structure circuits

As someone who doesn’t care to lift a certain amount of weight anymore or add any muscle, lifting is more about getting a hormone response, maximizing calorie burn, and hitting all the muscle groups (movement patterns) I can in the most efficient amount of time. To do that, I use a fairly simple mental algorithm.

After a warm up, I aim to have 4 movements in each circuit:

1. Lower body

2. Upper body

3. Core

4. Relevant Mobility - used as active rest, and is a movement relevant to either the upper or lower body exercise in this circuit. (i.e. if i’m doing a bench press, a pec stretch would help)

Within each group, there are different categories:

1. Lower: Push, Pull (and if you wanna get freaky, bilateral, unilateral, multi joint, single joint, planes of motion)

   1. Push examples: squats, lunges, split squats, step ups, lateral lunges, leg extensions, anything that you feel a combo of quad/glute/ham

   2. Pull examples: dead lifts, swings, cleans, hamstring curls, hip thrusts, bridges, anything that you feel glute and ham but not so much quad.

2. Upper: same as lower

   1. push examples: think chest, shoulders, triceps

   2. pull examples: think back and biceps

3. Core: anti extension (front abs), anti rotation (obliques), anti lateral flexion (obliques in a different way)

   1. anti extension examples: front planks, wheel roll outs, bear crawls, anything that you feel your front abs for

   2. Anti rotation: chops, lifts, paloff presses, russian twists, things that you either resist rotation or cause rotation with.

   3. Anti lateral flexion: single arm farmers carries, side bends, side planks, etc.

4. Mobility: upper, lower, or both

All I do in each circuit is pair a push with a pull, or a pull with a push, and vary the core from each angle. So, circuit 1 in the video looked like this:

1. Lower Push

2. Upper Pull

3. Anti extension core (worked front abs)

4. Relevant LOWER mobility.

For circuit two, I’d flip:

1. Lower Pull

2. Upper Push

3. Anti rotation or anti lateral flexion core (obliques)

4. Relevant mobility (upper or lower depending on which one needed more work).

Then I’d flip again. and again. and again, till I’ve hit everything I want.

Typically I’d move from complex to simple, as in my heaviest/craziest movements are always in the first 1-3 circuits and the easier (single joint), lower load movements would be towards the end.

As for bilateral/unilateral (single arm /single leg vs two legs/two arms) - depends on the day. Some days I do just unilateral all around, some days only bilateral, some days a blend, not picky here. I often leverage single arm/single leg movement to avoid having to do as much core, but that’s really it.

Pretty easy right? Fitness, is easy.