Full-body workout
Full-body workouts allow you to work a large range of muscle fibres in a relatively short space of time. That prompts your body to release a flood of growth hormones that will make your muscles get bigger and stronger. If you’re new to training, they’re useful because they get your muscles used to lifting weights without putting them under too much stress.
The downside of a full-body workout is that it’s hard to exhaust your muscle fibres fully, so you may want to also do some more targeted sessions such as body-focus or post-exhaustion workouts, which we’ll explore later.
Designing your workouts
Your full-body workouts need to be balanced. So, for every pushing motion you should do a pulling one, and you should spend as much time on your upper body as you do on your lower.
Stick to compound moves (exercises that work several muscle groups at once), because these will give you maximum muscle development for the time you have available.
And leave any abdominal moves to the end of your workout, because you don’t want them to be fatigued when you perform ‘big’ moves, such as squats and rows.
Full-body sample workout
Body-focus workout
While full-body workouts let you work a big range of muscle groups, the advantage of body-focus workouts is that you can completely fatigue the target muscles. You can then let them recover for a week while you train different body parts.
It’s a good way of being specific about how you put on muscle, but the downside is that doing lots of single-joint exercises won’t produce as large a growth hormone release as doing compound moves. You also need to exercise frequently if you want to work every major muscle group once a week.
Designing your workouts
The structure of your session is particularly important if you’re doing a body-focus routine, because you want to train the target muscle hard, but without overtraining or risking injury.
Start by doing light exercises that will
