When you begin a workout program, you must customize it to both your fitness desires and time constraints. You can do any weightlifting program and see improvement in strength, size and tone, but in order to achieve maximal strength gains, you must schedule your workouts and select your exercises with your specific goals in mind. Full body workouts are popular for people who are not able to get to the gym frequently.
Recovery
Full body workouts are typically longer than workouts that focus specifically on the upper or lower body, so it is important that you give your body ample recovery time. In a four-day split workout routine you must give each muscle group at least 72 hours to recover because of the volume of work each muscle group is required to perform, but in a three-day total body routine, you should only rest 48 hours before stressing the muscle again. In this routine it is most common to do your workouts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays
Sets and Reps
A periodized program is ideal for developing maximum strength because it lessens the plateau effect seen in many training routines. For the first two weeks of your program you will perform three or four sets of 12 to 15 reps. This phase should provide a solid base of strength and should acclimate your muscles to the work. In most of your exercises you will lift 60 percent of your best lift. Phase two lasts two weeks, and while the sets go up to four or five, the reps drop to six to eight. In this phase you should be lifting 75 or 80 percent of your best lift. This phase is known for increasing the size of the muscles. Your final phase lasts four weeks. You should complete at least five sets of no more than three to five reps at 90 percent of your best lift or more. This final phase is the one that provides the greatest strength gains.
Upper Body Lifts
Each day of your workout you should select five to seven upper body lifts to complete. You must include all major muscle groups in the upper body, so it is generally best to include compound movements such as military press instead of isolation movements such as lateral and anterior dumbbell raises. To help avoid plateauing you can change up the exercises you do frequently while still working all major muscle groups. A few exercises you should perform regularly are bench, incline, and military presses, bicep curls and tricep extensions, lat pulls, rear deltoid raises, upright rows and shoulder shrugs.
Lower Body Lifts
Lower body workouts are easy to plan because of the small number of exercises available. You should include three to five lower body workouts in every workout. You will have some flexibility in choosing exercises, so you can still change up your workouts to avoid plateau effects. The most common exercises for lower body workouts are squats, which can be alternated with leg presses, lunges, deadlifts, leg curls, leg extensions and calf raises.
References
- "Strength Training"; National Strength and Conditioning Association; 2006.
- "Practical Programming for Strength Training"; Lon Kilgore and Mark Rippetoe; 2009
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