All Around Strength and Conditioning

This is perhaps my most favorite program because for the past 7 months give or take a month of other program experimentation this has given me the greatest gains.  Notice there is no real day off, you can always substitute one work day for a day of rest, depending upon which area needs the least improvement.  For me I usually scrap a push day in favor of rest. 

So here's how it all works:

I break each day up into fundamental movements, not so much specific exercises, but planes of movement to work through.  I always start with my weakest movement which is usually some sort of vertical pulling motion.  Using a pull up, chin up, or front lever.  Then onto some form of horizontal pulling motion, usually a body row, or towel row, and then onto a ground based pull like a deadlift.  Some of my favorite movements for that are:

Vertical Pulling 

Weighted chin up, clapping pull ups, side to side pull ups, muscle ups, pike pull ups, one arm chins (w/ assist from the other arm, static holds, or negatives) and circular pull ups.  There are a lot more choices but those have been the ones that have worked best for me in terms of developing both strength, power and skill.

Horizontal Pulling

Body rows, and lots of variations, mainly using one arm at various levels, wide grip with feet on a stability ball, clapping body row, as well as weaving body row.  If you can find parallel bars in your gym, then I would highly recommend using those to increase your R.O.M.  Towels can be useful to increase grip strength, and all you need is a towel looped around a stationary object and while one hand pulls, the other resists.

Ground Based Pulling

Deadlifts, deadlifts, and more deadlifts, that's the fundamental ground based pull, and usually has the most to offer.  I almost exclusively use the sumo deadlift, or the snatch style with feet on a block.  Hang cleans are the next biggy, going more for speed and endurance then max weight.  Jump shrugs, and sandbag shouldering works great as well.

Legs 1

This is perahps my favorite day, the goal behind this one is that everything is moving up and down.  I break this one down into movements that the legs excel at such as squatting, jumping, lunging, kicking, hip extensions, and plantar flexion.  I usually include some sort of squat, and lunge variation with every leg day, and vary whether or not I go up and down or multiplanar.  The top exercises for this day are:

Front squats, sumo squats, pistols, split squats, dumbbell or kettlebell swings, jump squats, jumping split squats, Romanian deadlifts,  elevated hip extensions, jump rope work, and lots of calf raises, using standing, sitting, and angled.  Now these are just some of the favorites that I've been using for awhile, but there are others that substitute nicely, I just try to keep the movements to up and down this day, and save the traveling movements for leg day 2.

Legs 2

This is the most challenging day of the week, lots of jumping, lunging, glute ham raising, bounding, lateral slipping, kicking, and weight pushing and pulling. 

Some of the top ones for this day are any sort of lunge that moves either forwards, backwards, oblique, or lateral.  Leap frog, broad jumps, band sprints, pushing weights across the floor, dragon twists, and ham-gastroc raises.

Legs 3

This is the easiest day of the week, this one relies on the machines (dare I say it?  I do use machines from time to time).  This is to train the muscles in a more limited way, but also to let the muscles relax a bit and helps you work on accessory exercises to supplement the big ones.

The top ones are leg press, hack squat, leg extension, leg curls, and calf raises.  Nothing exciting, nothing that requires rocket science but a simple back off day that keeps things stimulated, and helps to strengthen the weaker areas of the legs.

 Push

This one is a breeze, and follows three complimentary movements to pull, such as vertical push, horizontal push, and depressive push.  I usually order this in terms of my weakest movements, usually and overhead press is weaker than a ring push up, or dip.  This is usually a ring training day, or kettlebell day, I rarely use dumbbells unless I want to substitute a barbell overhead press, or to add weight to the dips.

The top exercises for this are ordered more in terms of equipment than not

Rings- ring pike pushups, archer pushups, ring flys, dips, supinated dips, static holds for the iron cross.

Bodyweight- HSPU's, weighted push ups, weighted dips, paralell press, muscle ups, static planche holds, and the occasional one arm push up.

Freeweights- barbell overhead press, kettlebell push press, behind the neck push jerks, and floor press.

That's about it for the most part, nothing magical, fairly versatile, and the results just keep coming.

What about Core?

Ah, that's a simple one, try to fit in one to two core days a week, whenever I have a chance, usually pairs with leg days.  I've found that short and sweet works best, usually less than 20 minutes long.  I follow movements more than exercises, so the main ones are forward flexion, hip extension, lateral flexion, rotation, and vacuum.

In a nutshell lots of evil wheel stuff, dragon flag practice, human flag practice, hyperextensions, reverse hypers, Saxon side bends, medicine ball rotations, cable woodchoppers, and winshield wipers.  I've erred away from the hyperextension of the back to avoid any more back spasms, and have slowed down the gains, but I prefer longevity over the quick fix.

Supplemental exercises

I generally avoid things like curls, skull crushers, crunches, and anything that gives the body a lot of support.  But they do offer their benefits, and it would be ignorant to knock those exercises all together.  They work well at then end of a session for a couple of sets, merely to keep thing symmetrical, and proportional.  I would venture to say that instead of spending a whole day towards arms, you should try doing weight pulls ups in excess of 100 lbs. and HSPU's if you want big arms.  Four variations of curls and elbow extensions will not do that much with low intensity in terms of the functional world.  Usually at the end of a pull day I do 2 sets of reverse curls using just an olympic bar going for speed to failure, and a set of bodyweight tricep extensions for push day.

Ballistics

I love ballistic movements and incorporate them in every workout, I recommend using them if you're an athlete or are training for something that involves speed.  The slow counts are great for skill training, but are rarely useful for the athletic realm.  I have rarely found machines to be useful in this area, so I stick to bodyweight stuff with extra weight.  Swings and snatches are great, clapping push ups, and pull ups add variety, and leap frogging around a basketball court can give you good cardiorespiratory fitness as well as up your explosiveness.

Medicine Balls

My workout has more balls than yours does.  To some extent that can be true, I love to use medicine balls for throwing, ballistics, balance training, and a way to keep an exercise exciting, a partner works well, but so does a reinforced wall.  Get in the habit of slamming medicine balls around to up your explosive, reactive, and plyometric strength.

Balance Training

No BOSU's here, and that's mainly because my gym does not carry them, I think they're useful for a few things but I try to avoid spending too much of a workout dedicated to balance.  The best things I've found for balance training are pistols, handstands, single leg RDL's, and superman planks.  For the most part anything unilateral tends to become a balance exercise, but holding weights off centered can also help significantly with core stability. 

That's the main program that has yielded quick and consistent results.  This is the bread and butter of my training minus rep schemes, and intensity intervals.  A lot of the workout is done "by feel" and is almost completley instinctive, go with what feels right, stop short of failure, and keep the rest short, so that you can factor in your cardio as well.

This was a two week experiment that I nabbed off T-Nation, and found it extremely useful to help bring up any problem areas.  I used this program to emphasize leg training, and found that although it was extremely challenging, and chalk full of sore days. I'll lay out the basic idea that I used, which was a bit different, but worked well for me, and helped to add a good inch and a half to my thighs.

 I used a split workout with half the body in the morning and half in the evening.  I found that training lower body every morning while my energy was the highest helped to keep me working hard, instead of later on in the evening.  The main idea behind this is to stimulate not annihilate.  It took a lot of B-Mod to avoid overdoing it.  I did legs every day but changed up the order of exercises and only went for the compound stuff.  Always started with a squat variation, and then onto a split stance variation, followed by some sort of hip extension, or knee flexion, and then heavy calves for lots of reps.  Some days are going to be harder than others, and I saved the leg press, hack squat, and standing leg curl for a day when my grip was too sore to hold heavy enough weight (usually the fourth day).  

In the evenings I would alternate between upper body and core.  This worked well to keep those areas maintained as I strove to build up my legs.  With the upperbody I did four bodyweight exercises with as much weight as I could handle for exactly 8 reps, not sure why I used 8 it just sounded good at the time.  I basically did a lot of weighted dips, HSPU's, weighted chins, and one arm body rows.  That worked for the most part, and on core days I did evil wheel stuff, rotational work, and hyperextensions.  Nothing magical, just enough to support and maintain as I hammered the legs.

I  won't go into the details about which exercises I chose, just know that I wasn't too creative just the tried and true stuff, no slow tempos, and lots of speed stuff.  

For the most part this worked well for a short period of time, I would recommend limiting this to 10 working days, and then go back to an older program to avoid major overtraining, and adaptation to the higher volume work.