Bodybuilding & Microsoft Excel Part 2: Workout Selection

Back by the =power of popular demand and through the =product of at least 15 minutes research playing around with Excel, I’m able to bring you the second installment in my groundbreaking series of blog posts entitled ‘Bodybuilding and Microsoft Excel’.

(You can read Part 1: 1RM Percentages by clicking here.)

Selecting your workout

To start us off, let’s consider, for example, the back, that big ol’ hunk of muscle.

Get it right and you could look like Dorian Yates.

Get it wrong and you could look like W B Yeats.

OK, so he wasn’t trying to impress anyone with his physique, but if it came down to a “Who can describe that tree protruding out of the picturesque Irish Landscape in the most overtly phallic syntax” competition, then Uncle Dorian would find himself equally wanting.

But I digress.

The point of this latest foray into the vistas of MS Excel is all about selecting the exercises for an upcoming workout.

Returning to ‘the back’, and how vast a muscle group it represents, you need to hit it from a lot of different angles, utilising varied exercises to really stimulate muscular growth.

At risk of repeating myself, bodybuilding for me is all about forward planning.

If you turn up to the gym and just charge from available machine to available work bench then “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (W B Yates: The Second Coming).

Now I’ve shoe-horned that in slightly, but W B had the right attitude there.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that without forward planning your workout will be a ruddy disaster.

The formula

The two functions I’ll be using here are RANDBETWEEN and RANK.

On their own, fairly innocuous.

But, put together, we’re gonna get Excel to do the thinking for us.

The fun (if you can call it that) begins…

To start, enter all the back exercises (or any other body part you wish to use) into one column (B).

Also, take into consideration that your list may be longer or shorter based on your gym’s specification.

Then into the following column, (C), next to your first exercise, enter the formula =randbetween(1,20)

20 because I have 20 exercises in column B.

Simply adjust to match your number of exercises – the more the better with this.

Then hit ‘Enter’ and drag the box down until all exercises have a random number next to them.

Rank/strong

Now to select which exercises you’re going to use, in column D enter =rank(c2,c2:c21)>7.

Be sure to hit ‘F4’ after selecting ‘c2’ (2nd only) and ‘c21’.

Therefore your sum will look like =rank(c2,$c$2:$c$24)>7.

Then, drag the formula down until all relevant cells in the column have returned a ‘True’ or ‘False’ value.

Depending on what you’ve entered as your less than (<) or more than (>) figure will determine how many exercises you’ll do – and which particular ones.

In this case, all values that were < 7 of the overall range (20) have returned a false value.

Therefore my workout will be:

• Deadlift
• Hammer Strength Row
• Pull Ups
• Pullovers
• Hammer Strength Pull down
• T bar row

Pretty varied I think you’ll agree – and Excel took all the need for thought out of the process.

Isaac Asimov would be worried indeed.

If the formula returns too many or too few exercises then simply refresh it, and if you still have too many then just remove one or two, you utter simpleton.

Signing off

So, there we have it.

While there’s no substitute to hard work in the gym, here’s a pretty simple way to make the machines do all the work for you outside of it.

Next time we’ll be using Excel to predict your personal best lifts for added motivation in your workouts.

Just call me mystic Greg.

Until then, lift smart and lift strong!