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Planning the way you perform your full body exercise is almost as important as the exercise itself. Lifting heavy is important when using weight training for a full body workout routine. Use between 65 to 90 percent of your maximum weight capability for each exercise. Your max weight should be the heaviest weight you can lift doing an exercise for at least five repetitions.
Beyond lifting heavier, you should also only perform one exercise per major muscle group. Start with a different muscle group each time you do a workout so that your best effort is not placed on the same body part. An example of this would be doing chest exercises first on one workout day then doing leg exercises first on another day, ensuring to rotate major groups such as back, abs, arms and shoulders until you return to chest.
Since you are working out every major part of your body each workout, your body will need time to recover before doing another full body workout. Giving your body two to three days of rest before another full body workout session is important to allow your muscles time to heal and grow. You can use the days between workouts to perform needed cardio or aerobic exercises that will begin to physically show your improvement and results. -
Swimming is a great full body exercise as it adds some resistance to nearly every muscle evenly and constantly. Although abdominal muscles are usually worked during most exercises, it is still important to isolate this muscle group during each full body workout. Abs and calf muscles require more exercise, as they are accustomed to high amounts of stress.
Another rule of thumb to remember when performing full body workouts is that using free weights is generally better than using machines. Machines isolate specific muscle groups while exercises with dumbbells and barbells require you to balance and stabilize movement with supporting muscles.
Some of the best full body exercises to perform are the dead lift, squats, bench press, sit-ups and pull-ups. It is important that you switch to a different exercise for each major muscle group each full body workout as well so that you challenge a different response in the same muscle. Using bench press to work the chest then switching to dumbbell flies the next routine, for example, will help to vary your program and work a separate part of the same muscle. -
As stated before, varying your exercises for each muscle group is important. The major muscle groups in the body to focus on are chest and triceps, biceps, shoulders, deltoids (back), quadriceps (thigh), hamstrings (back of thigh), calves and the infamous abdominal muscles. Each of these muscles doesn't have to be worked out each routine to perform a full body workout. Instead, a simplified routine would be more fitting by combining the aforementioned muscle groups into compound groups.
Push-ups, incline bench press and dumbbell flies all work your chest, shoulders and triceps. Squats, dead lifts and lunges will work your quadriceps, hamstring and lower back. Your calf and abs should be focused on specifically as they are used heavily every day. Calf raises, climbing stairs and jumping rope are all good to help you focus on calf development. Abs can be stimulated by doing sit-ups, leg lifts and oblique crunches.
