If your goal is to be lean and muscular, then it should be rather intuitive that the majority of your time in the gym should be spent lifting weights. This is not to say that cardiovascular exercise doesn't have a place in your regimen, but just that weight training is paramount to developing skeletal muscle tissue, strength and metabolic capacity.
The trap that most people seem to slip into when they begin a fat-loss plan is focusing way too much on long bouts of cardio instead of doing weights. Ultimately, these individuals just end up looking skinny and soft.
Compare the physique of any Olympic sprinter to that of an Olympic distance athlete and you'll notice the sprinter is built quite like a bodybuilder. The reason for that is simple — the sprinters train with weights, and when they do cardio it's mostly high-intensity interval training (HIIT) which has metabolic ramifications quite similar to weight training.
Muscle building is often seen as a very confusing process. There are so many workouts and articles that it can make it hard for gym-goers to see the bigger picture.
It's safe to say that the most efficient muscle-building exercises are going to be compound/multi-joint movements. They work multiple muscle groups at once and allow for greater progression than isolation exercises. The most basic, fundamental compound exercises are the barbell bench press, squat and deadlift.
Again, everything has its place in a sound training regimen, but keep the isolation exercises secondary to compound lifts. Each workout should be built around compound exercises that target the muscles you're training that given day. For example, if you are training your upper body, a solid routine may look like this:
| Exercise | Type of exercise |
|---|---|
| Deadlifts / Barbell Rows | Compound |
| Seated Cable Rows / Machine Rows | Compound |
| Pull Ups / Lat Pull Downs | Compound |
| Bench Press | Compound |
| Incline Dumbbell Bench Press | Compound |
| Dumbbell Flyes / Pec Dec | Isolation |
| Cable Crunches / Weighted Sit Ups | Isolation |
This gives a total of 7 exercises in the workout, with 5 of those being compound movements. You could even superset many of these movements in an "A-then-B" fashion to save time and up the intensity of the program.
Ultimately, there are many ways you can structure your workouts but it is best to spend the majority of your time focusing on compound movements and consistent progression. To give a rule-of-thumb, try and design your workouts so you have at least a 2:1 ratio of compound to isolation movements, respectively.