If you are looking for an effective full body workout, look no further. I am going to go through step by step on how you can create an effective full body workout to help you build muscle. Don’t worry, you won’t be doing any burpees or jumping jacks because we can all agree that they suck. They are also ineffective in helping you build muscle. Just because you are jacking up your heart rate and suffering, it doesn’t mean you are doing an effective workout. If you want to see the full video to this article, it will be down below.
Before I get into how you can create an effective full body workout to build muscle, I want to clarify that there are many different ways to structure a workout. The way I’m going to help you structure your workout in this video is what I find to be effective for most general population folks. If you’re looking for more of an extreme bodybuilding workout, than this isn’t for you.
So why a full body workout? Why not just do one body part for each day of the week?
The reason why I think full body workouts will be best suited for most people is because they have other responsibilities. If you have multiple kids that you need to take care of or a very busy work schedule, working out 6 days a week is just not realistic. Full body workouts 2 to 3 times a week can still produce great results and help you build muscle.
How many exercises are there?
In this entire workout you only need to be doing 6-8 exercises. Since you will have another training session for the week, there’s no need to jam pack a single workout with a ton of exercises. Also, doing more exercises with too many sets will just lead to not putting in the right amount of intensity for each exercise.
Warm up
What you first want to do is make sure you have a short an effective warm up. 5-10 minutes is all you really need in order to get yourself prepare for your workout. The world’s greatest stretch here is a great warm up exercise to target the entire body.
What you want to do is first start off by reaching for your toes.
2. Then you will walk yourself out into a push up position.
3.Next you will bring one leg up so you’re in a deep lunge position and from here you want to reach towards the ceiling with the arm on the same side to create a straight line.
4. You will then repeat the movement on the other side and finish by walking your toes to your hands while keeping your legs straight.
You can perform this exercise for 2-3 sets of 5 reps.
The Structure For The Weight Lifting
Exercise 1
You want to first choose a compound lower body exercise that you’re going to do for the day. This is because the legs are your biggest muscle group and it’s the most taxing exercise. So this will usually be in the form of a squat or deadlift.
Depending on the equipment you have available, you can use a barbell, dumbbell, or machine to perform the exercise. You will be doing anywhere between 3 sets of 5-10 reps on the exercise.
What if I'm a beginner?
If you are a beginner, I recommend the higher end of the rep range so you get more practice with the movement. This way you won’t have to stress over lifting a heavy load that you’re not use to. But if you have some experience lifting, you can go towards the lower end of the rep range to build your sub max strength.
Exercise 2 and 3
Next, you want to choose two upper body exercises that are antagonistic of each other. This will save you time so you can just perform them within a superset, which means doing it back to back. You can also choose to do them separately if you want to get more rest in between each set. But if you are limited on time with your workouts,
I recommend super setting them. A good example of two antagonistic upper body exercises would be a incline dumbbell press into a chest supported dumbbell row.
You can also do some type of dumbbell or machine shoulder press into a pull down movement. Remember to just use the equipment you have available, I won’t go into the details of which equipment is better. It really depends on what your goals are.
For these two exercises, you will do 3 sets of 6-12 reps. With this rep scheme you can work towards getting all 3 sets to 12 reps before moving up in weight. Then you can use a heavier weight, start at the bottom of the ladder for the reps and work your way back up.
Exercise 4
You pretty much worked the full body already with the 3 exercises from before. Now you can choose exercises that are more specific at targeting a smaller muscle group. What I recommend is choosing another lower body exercise, but have it be unilateral.
What that means is just using one leg at a time for exercise. This can be a split squat, walking lunge, reverse lunge, etc.
I recommend doing 3 sets of 6-10 reps for them. You can also rest in between the set for each leg. Don’t feel like you need to go straight into working the next leg. That’s pretty much it for your leg exercises for the workout.
Exercise 5-8
Now you have the option to choose exercises in areas you really want to target. That can be some bicep curls or Triceps push downs. It can also be some glute specific or ab exercises. An example of this can be dumbbell lateral raises, bicep curls, and then a reverse crunch. I’ll list some exercises here that will fit this last category of exercises which I recommend to finish up the workout.
You can choose 2-3 of these and just perform them back to back since they aren’t as fatiguing as some of the exercises in the earlier part of the workout.
I recommend 3 sets of 10-20 reps on these exercises. Since they are only working one specific muscle, you can typically go into the higher rep range for these if you like.
That's how you create an effective full body workout to help you build muscle. This full body workout should only take you about an hour to complete if you are using your time wisely. Make sure you superset and group the specific exercises together to help save you some time.
Also, don’t forget about unilateral work for your upper body as well. Add in some single arm dumbbell row or single arm press if you feel the need to.
Since you got to the end of this article, here are two full body workouts you can do a week.
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