In six days, you can do diverse, challenging workouts that burn calories while building your strength and endurance. The key to a six-day total body workout is to combine aerobic exercise, strength training and flexibility work. Alternate your resistance exercises and stretching so that you target different muscle groups throughout the week.
Cardiovascular Exercise
Daily cardiovascular exercise is a key component of a weekly workout regimen. To burn more fat and improve your cardiovascular health, do a vigorous weight-bearing aerobic exercise, which means you use your large muscle groups continuously for an extended time frame. Warm up for your cardiovascular workout for up to 10 minutes by marching in place or walking slowly. Breathe deeply and stretch your arms overhead. For your workout, spend 30 minutes skipping rope, race-walking, doing vigorous calisthenics, running, climbing stairs, kickboxing, swimming laps or doing dance aerobics.
Strength Training
Strength training is any activity that uses resistance or weight to target your major muscle groups. Do three sessions of strength exercises per week, allowing a day of rest between. You can pump hand weights, lift barbells, use resistance machines or use your own body weight as resistance. Target your upper body with pullups, biceps curls, bench presses, triceps extensions, pectoral presses, triceps dips or standing flies. Work your core muscles by doing situps on an incline or bicycling your legs while doing crunches. Strengthen your lower body with squats and lunges. Whole-body strengthening activities include pushups and burpees.
Flexibility
Improve your range of motion and overall strength with flexibility exercises. The prime time to do stretching is after you have warmed up your muscles with cardiovascular exercise. Spend 10 minutes doing yoga sun salutations or other types of full-body stretches. Inhale deeply, expanding your belly as well as your chest, and you deliver more oxygen to your bloodstream and muscles. You keep your heart rate higher and burn more fat if you move through stretches fluidly rather than resting between them.
Adding Challenges
As you get more fit, you need to make your full-body workout more challenging so that you continue to burn fat and build strength. Adding more minutes to your total workout time is one option but you can also make the workout more intense. If you walk, jog or run, do the workout at an incline. Pump hand weights while doing aerobic exercise to add a strengthening component. Do speed intervals every few minutes, increasing your pace to a sprint level for up to a minute before returning to a recovery pace.
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