According to Rodney Corn, co-founder of PTA Global, full-body exercises emphasize more than one major body part or region. Traditional workouts focus on one muscle group at a time and concentric contraction, which is shortening of your muscles as they develop tension and contract to move a resistance. However, that is not how your body moves in real life and in sports because every muscle and joint work together to produce movement. Full-body workouts allow you to train in many ways that traditional workouts do not.
Benefits
According to Corn, full-body exercises increase your metabolism because you are moving different muscle groups and tissues together. By changing the resistance, speed, foot positions and range of motion, you can change the exercise intensity to avoid plateaus and boredom in your workouts. You can also use full-body workouts to improve sports performance, activities in daily life, and recover from a injury with or without any exercise equipment.
Fat Metabolism
You can use full-body workouts to increase muscle mass, which helps you metabolize fat. The more muscles you have, the more calories and fat you will burn. During exercise, fat stored in muscle and adipose tissues is broken down into fatty acids and glycerol, which are fat's basic building blocks. Then they are released into the bloodstream, and the fatty acids are transported into the muscle cells' mitochondria to make energy. Glycerol is transported to your liver for storage or gets converted to glucose. Fatty acids are broken down into their basic carbon and hydrogen components. Carbon joins oxygen atoms to form carbon dioxide, and hydrogen atoms join oxygen to form water. Your body removes these products through respiration and sweating.
Multi-planar Movement
Juan Carlos Santana, who is the director of the Institute of Human Performance in Boca Raton, Fla., suggests you do full-body workouts by moving in different planes of motion, such as front to back, side to side, and rotating left and right. This trains your balance, core stabilization and mobility, and it improves movement patterns in sports and post-rehabilitation.
Another movement pattern is level change, which is changing the height of your body, such as moving from a standing position to a prone position, or moving from a supine position to a standing position.
Sample Workout
According to Santana, circuit training with full-body exercises will help you develop muscular endurance and strength while burning many calories in less time than traditional training. Circuit training is where you do six to 10 exercises that train different movement patterns with no rest between exercises. For each exercise, do it for 30 seconds. When the time is up, proceed to the next exercise.
A sample circuit would include squat and dumbbell press, push-ups, pull-ups, kettlebell swings, vertical jumps and shadow boxing.
Expert Insight
According to Santana, rest for 24 to 48 hours after your workout, but that does not mean you become sedentary during that time. To help you recover faster, do other gentle forms of exercise, such as yoga, tai chi, water-treading and corrective exercises, which help improve posture and alleviate stiff joints and muscles.
References
- "IDEA Fitness Journal"; Creative Total Body Exercises; Rodney Corn; February 2010
- "Essence of Program Design"; Juan Carlos Santana; 2004
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