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Weight Lifting Exercise Chart

A Complete List of Weightlifting Exercises

Download your Weight Lifting Exercise Chart Here!

Right click on link above and save target as to download your file. The file is in Zip format.

The file was created with Microsoft Excel but can be viewed using either Excel or Open Office.

Open Office is free! You can download it for free at openoffice.org

Choosing Exercises

Whenever you are planning a weight lifting cycle, you need to have a good list of weightlifting exercises available so you can pick the best exercises to meet your goals.

I've organized all exercises by major muscle group in a spreadsheet. Download the spreadsheet and copy it to your weight lifting log for use in planning future weightlifting cycles.

Exercise selection is very important to your success in getting the body of your dreams.

I always suggest you choose the exercises for each major muscle group that allow you to lift heavy weights.

When selecting an exercise, always choose the more compound exercise. How do you distinguish beween the better compound exercise? It's rather simple. Which exercise can you lift the most amount of weight with? This is usually the better compound exercise.

Let's look at a quick example for bicep exercises. Would you choose Barbell Curls or Concentration Curls? You can lift 95 pounds for 8 reps on Barbell Curls and only 60 pounds total for Concentration Curls. You would choose Barbell Curls. Get it?

Plan of Progression

Now that you've chosen your exercises with the weight lifting exercise chart, you need to know what to do with them. Progressing in the amount of weight you lift and reps completed is a proven method of building muscle! So, you've got to have a plan for progression...

There are different plans of progression with weight lifting. I want to talk about a few plans that I personally use. All of these work and work very well:

Decrease reps while increasing weight.

It's very important that you increase the amount of weight you lift over the course of a weight lifting cycle. When it becomes difficult to get stronger in a certain rep range, simply decrease the rep range and continue to increase the amount of weight you lift.

I use decreasing rep ranges and increasing weight over a 12 week period in the WLC Program that I developed. Find out more about the plan of progression I use on the WLC Program.
Increase weight when you reach a target number of reps.

This is a another one of my favorite plans of progression. Many beginners use this plan on several different programs. For example, let's say you are trying to lift between 6 and 8 reps for 2 sets of a certain exercise.

When you do both sets of Squats, for example, at a weight of 185 pounds for 8 reps, you increase the weight 5 pounds. Or, whenever you reach 8 reps at a certain weight, increase the weight by 5 pounds.

This plan can sometimes get tough for advanced weight lifters. The advanced will have a plan to decrease the weight or total load when a strength limit is reached.
Rest/Pause mini sets for advanced weight lifters.

Advanced lifters can make great strength gains when using the rest pause technique. Simply do your first mini set, set the weight down and rest for 20 seconds, do another mini set, set the weight down and rest for 20 seconds, and do the final mini set.

When using this plan of progression, always try to beat the previous total reps. When you reach a certain target amount of reps that you set, increase the weight and continue again until you reach that target number. Then increase the weight again!

Now that you have your weight lifting exercise chart along with a plan of progression for your exercises, you can start building some serious muscle!

Enjoy the free weight lifting exercise chart. You can download at the top of this page in case you missed it. You can find more charts related to the weight lifting exercise chart at the main weightlifting charts section of the site.

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