Full Body Training

To optimise muscle development you want to stimulate each muscle group more than once per week, just like for optimal dental hygiene you want to brush all your teeth more than once per week. You wouldn’t designate a tooth-brushing session to completely smashing one-fourth of your teeth while neglecting the other three quarters till the following days of the week, but it’s become the norm to do this with training. Many people, or even most people, designate a session to completely obliterating a muscle group, training the other muscle groups in the following days and not rotating back to hitting the same muscle group until the next week. This is known as a body part split and there is a much more effective way to train, and it’s called full body training!

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Full body training is where you train every muscle group within a single training session and perform these sessions two to five times per week. It's the training split I use, my clients use and one that's becoming ever more popular in the evidence-based community.

Why? Well, there's a growing body of evidence showing that training a muscle group at least twice per week is optimal for muscle and strength gains, as shown in a systematic review and meta-analysis done by Schoenfeld and colleagues. This means more conventional training splits, such as bro splits, where a muscle is stimulated only once per week are a suboptimal approach. As a coach, it’s my job to ensure each client obtains the best results possible and to do so I need to manipulate a few very important training variables; volume (total reps and sets), intensity (effort/resistance) and recovery. I’ve coached people for almost 10 years and I’ve found full-body training to be the best way to manage these three variables and produce the best results.

The benefits of full-body training splits 

Reduced fatigue and higher quality reps

The benefits of full-body training when it comes to more quality reps and sets are significant! Anyone who has performed a full leg day session will understand the impact fatigue has on the quality of their reps, sets and the weight they can lift – particularly in the final sets. After the third leg exercise and your 10th set, the exercise technique has certainly taken a hit. Those lunges are wobbly, lack range of motion, have a drastically reduced load and have very little time under tension – they suck! Conversely, suppose you were to spread that leg volume out through the week with multiple full-body sessions containing much fewer leg sets per session. In that case, you'll perform higher quality reps and sets, with more weight during each session. Resulting in a much higher weekly total volume (weight x reps x sets) and have a greater hypertrophic (muscle building) response. 

Research shows [1, 2, 3, 4] that the training volume that induces the most muscle growth seems to be around five sets per muscle group, per session, around 20 sets per muscle group per week, which means training each muscle 2-5 times per week will allow most lifters to hit their optimal training volume.

More frequent spikes in muscle protein synthesis (MPS)

Following a workout, there is a spike in muscle protein synthesis [5], where the muscles are more sensitive to amino acids and primed for growth. You feed those muscles with some dietary protein and let them grow! When it comes to dietary protein, you're looking for around 1.8 grams of protein per kg of your body weight.

Multiple studies [6, 7, 8, 9] show that higher training frequency can result in more muscle and strength gains, though the evidence is limited and more needed to conclude that more spikes in MPS = more overall gains.

Here are some protein-rich foods to help you take full advantage of the increase in MPS following a workout:

Obtaining the benefits of peripheral heart action (PHA) training

The nature of full-body training allows us to superset lower body exercises with upper body exercises – pumping blood to the lower body then to the upper body and obtaining the benefits of PHA training.

A study done by Alessandro Piras and colleagues showed the benefits of PHA whole-body resistance training mirror those of HIIT training – increase in muscular strength and maximum oxygen consumption!

Quicker sessions 

If you're training one muscle group during each session, you're likely to require an immense amount of rest to get you through those sessions, especially leg day. Training your full-body, as mentioned above, allows you to hit your lower body while your upper body is resting – reducing rest periods and allowing the session to run much smoother compared to conventional training splits.

Improved recovery

You probably think I’m crazy adding this to the list of benefits but hear me out. If you’re like me you’ve likely done your fair share of leg days, chest days, and even shoulder days and it can take a long time to recover from these sessions. The thought of hitting the muscle again the following day sounds mad, but remember, we’re no longer committing one session to fully destroying a muscle group – we’re spreading that volume out through the entire body and you’ll find yourself to be much less sore. Moreover, after the second or possibly the third week, the repeated bout effect (RBE) [10] kicks in, this response allows your body to get used to the repeated stimulus and becomes even less sore over time.

Conclusion

For me, full-body training is a no-brainer – there are huge upsides with very few potential drawbacks. I love never having to endure a full leg day, having a full-body pump following each session and generally having more fun and varied workouts. The main benefit to full body training is it facilitates more training volume and does so with less fatigue – it’s an intelligent way to spread out your weekly training volume. Most studies match volume when comparing low frequency to high-frequency training, but in the real world, people who train more frequently hit more volume and do so with better quality reps and sets – this my friend translates into more gains!