The Case for Full-Body Training
First off, as with anything, it depends what your goal is. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to dive into the considerations, assuming muscle growth (hypertrophy) is the main intent of training.
*As a side note, if your goals are maximal strength or general health, training frequency doesn’t really matter as much.
Training Frequency
Training frequency is how often a muscle group is trained each week. This varies largely depending on what “training split” is chosen in a workout routine. It also depends on how many days each week that you are willing to exercise. Here are a few common examples:
“Bro/Bodybuilding Split”:
Trains each muscle group 1x/week
Monday | Chest |
Tuesday | Back |
Wednesday | Rest Day |
Thursday | Shoulders |
Friday | Legs |
Saturday | Arms |
Sunday | Rest Day |
Push/Pull/Legs:
Trains each muscle group 1-2x/week
Frequency: 1x/week
Monday | Push (Chest, Shoulders, Triceps) |
Tuesday | Rest Day |
Wednesday | Pull (Back, Traps, Biceps) |
Thursday | Rest Day |
Friday | Legs (Quads, Hamstrings, Calves) |
Saturday | Rest Day |
Sunday | Rest Day |
Frequency: 2x/week
Monday | Push (Chest, Shoulders, Triceps) |
Tuesday | Pull (Back, Traps, Biceps) |
Wednesday | Legs (Quads, Hamstrings, Calves) |
Thursday | Push (Chest, Shoulders, Triceps) |
Friday | Pull (Back, Traps, Biceps) |
Saturday | Legs (Quads, Hamstrings, Calves) |
Sunday | Rest Day |
Upper/Lower Split:
Trains each muscle group 2x/week
Monday | Upper (Chest, Back, Shoulders, Arms) |
Tuesday | Lower (Legs, Abs) |
Wednesday | Rest Day |
Thursday | Upper (Chest, Back, Shoulders, Arms) |
Friday | Lower (Legs, Abs) |
Saturday | Rest Day |
Sunday | Rest Day |
Full Body:
Trains each muscle group 3x/week
Monday | Full Body |
Tuesday | Rest Day |
Wednesday | Full Body |
Thursday | Rest Day |
Friday | Full Body |
Saturday | Rest Day |
Sunday | Rest Day |
Clearly, as you can see, the conventional full body routine maximizes frequency without needing to spend more than 3 days in the gym. You might ask: “Who cares how frequently I train each muscle?”
I’ll explain why it matters.
Frequency is an important variable if your goal is build muscle and you’re a natural lifter (not taking anabolic steroids). In order to stimulate muscle-protein synthesis (MPS), which is the primary mechanism responsible for repairing and rebuilding muscle fibers, you need to actively train your muscles. Each muscle group needs to be stimulated individually for it to grow.
When you train effectively with the right amount of intensity and volume, muscle protein synthesis is elevated notably for 24-48 hours. After about 2 days, it mostly returns to its baseline. This is why training each muscle group every 2 days makes a lot of sense, so that you can keep this mechanism elevated as often as possible.
If you do a body part split, and only work out a muscle group once per week, you’re only simulating muscle growth for each muscle for only a couple days total out of the whole week! Spreading out the body-part specific exercises throughout the week and increasing the frequency at which you train each muscle can keep muscle protein synthesis elevated more continuously. Training multiple muscle groups per session is the best way to optimize your routine if you want to build muscle most effectively.
For bodybuilders who take anabolic steroids (which is most of them), muscle protein synthesis is constantly elevated, regardless of whether or not they are training. This is why you can literally build muscle on anabolics without ever lifting a weight. Body part splits became popular because many bodybuilders were promoting them, but this doesn’t mean that they are most effective for most people.
Since most of us aren’t taking these performance-enhancing drugs, we must rely on exercise to naturally stimulate anabolism. Increasing your training frequency should be a no-brainer for natural lifters!
Training Volume
As a recap, training volume is the amount of reps × sets × weight lifted.
For example, if you do 5 sets of 5 repetitions of squats with 250 lbs., your volume is 5 × 5 × 250, which equals 6,250 lbs. We know that increasing training volume is a primary driver of muscle growth, so finding ways to increase volume without any side effects (like over-training or excessive time consumption) is advantageous.
Favorable Exercise Pairings
When you work your entire body in a single workout, you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to exercise selection and ordering. The ability to pair exercises back-to-back (also called super-sets or alternate sets) without detracting from the amount of weight you can lift is a massive time-saver and can really increase your training density (the amount of work you can do in a set amount of time).
Antagonist super-sets are what I’m referring to here. This is when you perform one exercise in one plane of motion (ex. pushing) and then almost immediately, perform another exercise in the opposite plane of motion (ex. pulling). Since the muscles worked in the first exercise don’t overlap with the muscles worked in the second exercise, you can essentially “rest” while completing another exercise. This basically doubles your training density.
Here’s an example:
Perform 8 reps of bench press
Rest 30 seconds.
Then perform 8 reps of barbell rows.
Rest 30 seconds, and repeat with bench press.
By alternating between the two exercises, while being able to lift the approximately the same amount of weight as if you did each exercise in isolation, you can drastically improve the efficiency of the time spent in the gym.
This same methodology applies to any antagonistic muscle groups. Here are some common examples of where these exercise pairings can be used:
- Chest/Shoulders and Back (both push/pull)
- Biceps and Triceps
- Hamstrings and Quads (ex. Romanian deadlift and front squat)
- Abs and any Isolation Exercise
- And the list goes on…
The Distribution of Fatigue
Obviously, when you exert yourself and perform reps and sets in the gym, you develop muscular fatigue. Fatigue tends to be muscle dependent, meaning that you can fatigue one muscle independent of another. As you accumulate fatigue for a muscle group, the amount of weight you can lift decreases.
For example, let’s say that you do your first set of bench press with maximum intensity and complete 8 reps. When you go to do your second set with the same weight, you’ll probably only get 7 reps.
Throughout the course of a workout with lots of chest-focused exercises, as your pecs, shoulders, and triceps fatigue, the amount of weight you’ll be able to lift in the succeeding exercises decreases. Here’s a sample push workout that uses this example:
- Barbell Bench Press – 3 sets of 8 reps @ 150 lbs.
- Dumbbell Bench Press – 3 sets of 8 @ 50 lbs.
- Dumbbell Shoulder Press – 3 sets of 10 @ 35 lbs.
- Chest Flies – 3 sets of 12 @ 20 lbs.
- Tricep Extensions – 3 sets of 12 @ 40 lbs.
When you complete the first exercise, your pecs, shoulders, and triceps are fresh, so you’ll be the strongest. However, with every set of every exercise, fatigue begins to settle in for those muscles and you’ll get weaker. This is not favorable for volume!
You might think, “isn’t fatigue good for muscle growth?”. In actuality, it really doesn’t matter. Muscle damage (breaking down muscle tissue) may be important, but hammering one body part to induce fatigue and consequently soreness likely doesn’t necessarily have any hypertrophic benefit, and may actually detract from your long-term progress.
If you want to maximize volume, distributing fatigue for the same muscle group among separate workouts makes a lot of sense. With a full-body split, if you do one exercise per muscle group per workout (spread throughout the week), you’re at your best for each exercise. If you apply this logic, and perform the same core-pushing exercises from above, it may result in the following training log:
Monday – Barbell Bench Press – 3 sets of 8 reps @ 150 lbs.
Wednesday – Dumbbell Shoulder Press – 3 sets of 10 @ 40 lbs.
Friday – Dumbbell Bench Press – 3 sets of 8 @ 55 lbs.
As you can see, you should be able to lift more weight for both the dumbbell shoulder press and dumbbell bench press because you shouldn’t have accumulated any muscular fatigue from performing a prior chest-focused exercise in that workout. By limiting yourself to one compound exercise for each muscle group, you won’t develop as much fatigue per session, but you’ll still hit the same amount of sets and reps per week.
If you equate the number of sets and reps between both training splits, you’ll be able to lift more weight (therefore more overall volume) with the full-body split without needing to do any more sets.
The same methodology applies to each muscle group. Performing an exercise from one muscle group shouldn’t affect the power output from another muscle group (assuming there isn’t muscular overlap between the two exercises). For example, if do squats and then bench press in the same training session, you should be able to perform at a high level for both exercises because each exercise hits entirely different muscle groups. You can see a full sample training program in this article.
Now, spreading out muscular fatigue among different training sessions doesn’t guarantee increased volume. However, simply reordering your exercises among different days throughout the week can allow you to lift more weight overall. This approach favors increased volume by combating fatigue for individual muscles, contributing to increased training density.
Muscle Glycogen and Performance
Glycogen, your body’s preferred fuel source, is stored in both your liver and muscle tissue. Ensuring that your glycogen reserves are relatively full is advantageous for improved muscular performance. As glycogen depletes, fatigue increases, and performance tends to decline (way before these reserves near complete depletion).
Your liver can only store about 100g of glycogen, while your skeletal muscle can store ~350-700g (dependent on a variety of factors, including how much actual muscle tissue you have). Liver glycogen is not function dependent, meaning that it can be shuttled to different parts of your body, providing energy wherever it’s demanded. Muscle glycogen on the other hand, is function dependent. It can only provide energy to the muscle that it is stored in.
This is where full body training can favor improved performance. As I stated earlier with muscular fatigue, which is closely related to glycogen levels, concentrating several exercises that challenge the same muscle groups in the same training session can inhibit overall performance.
If you do multiple exercises that target the same muscle group, glycogen levels in that muscle will deplete more quickly, and performance will suffer. Conventional body part splits tend to induce lots of volume on the same muscle group, which can eat into your glycogen reserves.
Using the same pushing-focused example, you’ll deplete the glycogen stores in your chest, shoulders and triceps, but leave the rest of your body untouched! Unfortunately, you can’t redistribute some of that leftover glycogen in your quads to aid your glycogen-depleted pecs. If you simply spread out these exercises throughout the week and hit all the major muscles in your body in a single workout, you can utilize your capped levels of glycogen for improved muscular performance.
Adherence and Consistency
As with any exercise program, the ability to adhere to it over the long-term and remain consistent is extremely important. A less-optimal program for your goals that you can stick with is still more effective than an optimal one that isn’t sustainable.
This subject is less objective than the past few sections because personal preference is highly subjective. However, some of the considerations presented may sway your preference.
Specific “Body-Part” Days Are Highly Variable
A traditional body part split trains select muscle groups in specific workouts. Reiterating the “bro-split” from above, you’d train a single muscle group on a dedicated day of the week.
Now, in a perfect world, you would look forward to each training day equally and exert the same amount of effort in each training session. However, since we are humans, we naturally have preferences towards our preferred body parts. For guys, it’s typically chest, arms, or maybe abs. For girls, it’s often legs or abs.
Since chest day and arm day may be the most enjoyable workouts for guys and leg day may be the most motivating for girls, some of the other muscle-group days may take the backseat in terms of adherence and exerted effort.
Anatomically speaking, some muscle groups are larger, and therefore more energy demanding than others. Quadriceps and hamstrings, are two of the largest muscle groups in the human body. By working both in a traditional “leg day”, you’re bound to have a pretty grueling workout. The opposite goes for your arms, which have a comparatively tiny amount of muscle mass. This large discrepancy between workout difficulty may lead to the dreading of certain workouts and cause overall adherence to suffer.
Lastly, we are all busy people with sporadic schedules. Something is bound to come up to cause you to miss a workout at some point! With a body-part split, if you miss a workout, your progress might be set back for the muscle group that supposed to be hit on that day. This effect can potentially snowball if a certain workout is especially less desirable than others (ex. leg day vs. chest day). For example, if leg day is skipped because of an unexpected commitment, restarting the training cycle with chest day can be pretty tempting to “get back on track”!
No Specific “Body-Part” Days Are Worse Than Others
A full-body routine trains every muscle group in every workout, which provides balance to the routine. This sense of balance should nullify certain workouts from being more favorable than others. If you’re hitting chest, arms, legs, and abs all in the same workout, you get a compromise of more and less enjoyable exercises.
Balance once again offers value to workout routines in terms of overall effort. By incorporating exercises that train more and less energy intensive muscle groups, each workout session should be relatively equal in terms of the amount of energy that they require for sustained performance.
Full-body training makes getting back on track a breeze. If you are forced to skip a workout, you can simply resume with the next workout in the program without any specific muscle group suffering.
Exercise Selection
We know that some exercises give you more “bang for your buck” than others. For the vast majority, the barbell bench press is going to build more muscle than the chest fly. The same goes for the barbell squat and the leg extension. These multi-joint/compound exercises recruit significantly more muscle fibers and enable you to move a lot more weight than single-joint/isolation exercises.
A body-part split with a dedicated “day” to each muscle group usually consists of a relatively equal balance of compound and isolation exercises. Performing a large volume of solely compound exercises for a single muscle group for one workout session would be too much for your central nervous system and joints to handle. This makes the addition of isolation exercises necessary to add extra volume without the neurological or physiological demand.
A full-body routine requires you to be more selective with the exercises that you choose because you really only get one per muscle group if you don’t want to be in the gym all day. This highly favors the emphasis on compound exercises, as it should be. Compound exercises should be the “meat” of your routine, with isolation exercises present to supplement.
A routine made up of almost entirely compound exercises may seem contradictory to what I said earlier, but with a full body routine, there’s a key distinction. Compound exercises are only neurologically and physiologically demanding to the specific muscles involved in that exercise. By spreading out these compound exercises among different muscle groups, you can avoid excess central nervous system fatigue and joint distress.
Personal Preference Exceeds All Else
Now that you understand some of the benefits that full body training can provide, you can make a more informed decision on what type of program design you’d like to incorporate into your own routine.
Many of the benefits that I mentioned demonstrate from a scientific standpoint how a full body training approach may exceed that of a body-part split for the goal of maximizing muscle growth.
However, several of the benefits that I mentioned are more preferential, and they justify how the full-body approach may favor maximal muscle growth.
This where the key distinction lies. Even if your routine has you set up for success, you won’t reap the benefits if you can’t stick with it. As I mentioned earlier, adherence and consistency are by far the most important factors for long term sustained success. After all, health and fitness are a lifelong journey, not just a short-term stunt.
The hypertrophic advantages that a full-body training approach may provide are relatively minimal in the grand scheme of things. They do not outweigh the overall impact and results that hard work will bring over years of dedication.
At the end of the day, the best program is the one that you prefer. Use this article as a guide to make the most of your time spent in the gym. If a full-body plan sounds intriguing, I wrote this article on how you can design your own effective training plan.
Good luck!