A full body workout exercises all of your major muscle groups, leading to overall fitness and balanced muscular development. But you can't perform a full body workout every day, or you risk overtraining, which will minimize your fitness gains. The best approach is to perform a full body workout several days a week on nonconsecutive days, which ensures you don't overtrain any particular muscle group.
Considerations
If you plan to employ a full body workout training regimen, allow at least one day between workouts so your muscles can rest. Otherwise, your muscles won't have time to heal, and you won't experience maximum strength gains and muscle development. A proper diet is also essential. Eat a healthy mix of fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, lean meats and whole grains. Protein is an essential nutrient for muscle building. Typical protein sources include meat, eggs, nuts, beans and seeds.
Full Body Workout
A typical full body workout includes a variety of exercises for the lower and upper body. You can choose from many types of exercises, but if your time is short, choose those that incorporate many muscle groups at once. For example, lunges and squats exercise the major muscles of the lower body. Crunches develop abdominal muscles. Pullups, chinups and pushups exercise the muscles of the upper body. If you're using weights, lat pulldowns, triceps extensions, biceps curls, shoulder presses and pec flies are effective exercises.
Strategy
The best approach is to perform a few sets of each exercise until you achieve a full body workout. Each set should contain enough repetitions to fatigue you, typically six to 12. If you can perform many more repetitions, add more weight to make the exercise more difficult. Before and after every workout, perform some gentle stretches to warm up and cool down.
Cardiovascular Exercise
Cardiovascular exercise is important for overall fitness, so spend part of every workout performing a vigorous activity that raises your heart rate for an extended period of time. Possible options include jogging, swimming, aerobics dance classes or playing a fast-paced sport. About 150 minutes a week of moderate aerobic activity is sufficient for most people. If you prefer vigorous activity, you need only 75 minutes per week, according to MayoClinic.com.
Member Comments