Answer Fitness®: Practical Fitness Advice for Everyone

Full Body Workout Plan | Workout Routines

Full Body Workout Routine Not Only Builds Muscle But It Torches Fat  … in Less Than 60 Minutes.

Can you spare 60 minutes, three times a week?

If the answer is “yes” I have the perfect workout routine for you: A “Full Body Workout” program that will get you in-and-out of the gym in less than an hour, will amp up your metabolism for the next 48 hours and — after about a month — will give you noticeable improvements not only in your strength, but also your physique.

Oh, and expect to drop some body fat in the process.

Why A Full Body Workout?

Full body workouts are probably the single most under-utilized workout routines in the gym.

Regardless of your experience level or existing strength, working your entire body in a single session is not only challenging, but an extremely effective way to build muscle, strength and even burn fat in the process. Even experienced bodybuilders can reap the benefits of switching to a full body workout, especially if they’ve been on a split routine plan for an extended period of time.

Before we actually take a look at a full body workout routine, let’s quickly discuss some of the advantages of working your entire body in a single session and the basics you need to know about before getting started.

The Benefits of Full Body Workouts

There are a number of benefits to performing full body workouts, including:

• Better core development
• Less overall time in the gym
• Improved recovery intervals
• Reduced risk of overtraining
• Greater training frequency per muscle group
• Increased energy expenditure during and after training
• Increases in beneficial growth hormones
• Highly customizable to different training goals, whether that is strength, muscle size (hypertrophy) , endurance or a combination of the three
• Better overall muscular development and symmetry
• Reduced risk of developing muscle imbalances, especially among smaller stabilizer muscles
• Secondary cardiovascular benefits
• Appropriate for all ages and levels of experience, from beginners to advanced trainees

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Should I Use Free Weights or Weight Machines? | Weight Training Basics from Answer Fitness®

Free weights and weight machines each have their advantages and disadvantages. Learn how to use both to get great results in the gym.

Few issues are more hotly debated among health and fitness professionals than whether free weights are better than weight machines.

The good news is that you really don’t have to choose between the two, since they both can help you increase strength, build muscle and increase muscle definition.

There are, however, differences between the two. And understanding these differences can help you make better decisions about when each type of equipment is appropriate for your weight training, and how often you want to include them in your workout routine.

The Advantages of Weight Machines

Weight machines are often the first choice of equipment for people who are new to weight and strength training. And this is for good reason.

Weight machines by design encourage good form, because they limit the range of motion to the specified exercise you are performing. They also isolate the specific muscle group you are targeting by disengaging secondary muscle groups that normally are called upon stabilize the body during performance of an exercise.

If you’ve never performed a bench press (a free weight exercise), for example, you may not be familiar with how to align your arms properly in relation to your body in order to perform the exercise effectively and with minimal risk of injury. A chest press machine, on the other hand, will ensure that your arms are positioned correctly and will give you a sense for how the movement should be performed.

By starting out on weight machines, you can work on get a feel for the exercise, which can then be applied to a free weight workout.

Machine weights also tend to allow you to use more resistance, because you aren’t limited by the smaller (and often weaker) stabilizer muscles that are called upon to balance a free weight. This can help you make bigger gains in strength, and can help beginners establish a more solid base before moving on to more challenging free weight movements.

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Weight Training Basics: The Four Principles of Weight Training

Learn the basics of weight training and start burning more fat, increase your strength and get more fit than ever before. 

The research is in: Including weight or resistance training into your weekly workout makes good health and fitness sense, regardless of your level of experience. 

You know the benefits of weight training, so now it’s just a matter of doing it.

But before you hit the weights, you should take a few minutes to understand the key principles to effective weight and resistance training.  Having knowledge of these tried-and-true rules of weight training will ensure that you make progress in the gym, no matter what your individual health and fitness goals may be.  

There is a lot of jargon thrown around by fitness trainers and gym-goers that you need to understand. Sometimes it can seem like a foreign language, but once it’s been explained in plain language (we like to call this “gumping things” at the office), it will make all of the sense in the world.

The Basics of Weight Training: What You Need to Know To Get Started

Okay, so you’re convinced you need to start including weight training in your workout routine.

Great. Now where do you begin?

Let’s start with the four basic principles of weight training:

• Overload: This just means you expose your muscles to more weight, resistance or stimulus than they are used to performing during your normal every day activities.  To do this, you need to lift an amount of weight that only allows you to complete the intended amount of repetitions. Remember, your overload weight will increase as you continue training and your body recovers and adapts. Which takes us to the next concept, progression.

• Progression: Progression means that you continually overload your muscle with more stimulus each time you weight train.  Since your muscles are constantly adapting, you will never get stronger without increasing the force they have to exert or the amount of work they do. Progression doesn’t necessarily always mean adding additional weight. You can overload the muscle progressively in a number of different ways, including performing more reps with the same weight, increasing the volume (total number) of sets performed, changing the tempo or pace of your repetitions to keep the muscle under tension for longer periods of time, or simply lifting more weight than last time. The key here is to always push your muscles harder than the last workout in some fashion.

• Specificity: Specificity is a fancy term for performing weight training with a specific and distinct goal in mind. So if your goal is to add additional muscle mass, your choice of exercises, repetitions, sets and weight used will be different than if you are training your muscles for endurance.  Know your goals before you start weight training, since it will impact how workout routine.

• Rest and Recovery: There is a common saying that muscle is built outside of the gym, not in it. Weight training stresses your muscles and requires that you allow yourself adequate rest and recovery time. Typically that will mean giving your muscles 48 hours to recover before training that same muscle or group of muscles again. Understand that recovery time is highly individual. Some advanced trainees need less recovery time than beginners. And the intensity of your weight training will in large part determine the length of rest that’s right for you.

Next up, we’ll learn about choosing the appropriate weight,  repetitions (reps),  and sets to meet your goals.

As always, you should consult your physician before undertaking any resistance, weight or cardio training program.

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Overload (Principles of Weight Training): Fitness and Exercise Glossary

One of the four principles of weight training, overload states that a greater than normal amount of stress or load on the body is required for training adaptation to occur. 

Once overload has been achieved, the body will adapt to this stimulus, which requires you to change the stimulus yet again to progress in your training goals, whether that is increased strength, size or endurance. 

Muscles may be overload by adding additional weight, increasing reps or increasing sets (volume), as well as slowing the tempo of an exercise.  Maintaining the same level of stimulus will maintain previous gains (but not increase them) and removing or pulling back on the level of stimulus, will cause regression in strength, size or endurance.

The act of continuously overloading muscles is called progression.

Also see: progression, principles of weight training

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Weight Training: Burn Fat, Be Strong & Stay Healthy

Find out how adding weight training into your fitness routine can pay off big with more muscle and less fat

Weight training is one of the most effective additions anyone can make to their workout routine. It improves overall strength; encourages a more lean, “toned” appearance; can reduce the risk of injury (especially as you age) and is a potent metabolism booster, helping you burn fat even when you aren’t exercising.

Yet many people never even start weight training because they either don’t know where to begin, are intimidated by the idea of lifting weights, or think weight training is something only bodybuilders or power lifters can benefit from.  

What Exactly Is Weight Training?

Weight training is simply performing an exercise under resistance or with added weight to challenge the muscle to become stronger and larger.

When you weight train, you are resisting the force of gravity (which is increased by adding weight to the movement) during the exercise. You can increase resistance by adding additional weight in the form of dumbbells or weighted bars, or by utilizing a cable and pulley-based weight machine or cable-station.

Weight training improves strength and increases muscle size because it “overloads” the muscle and works it beyond what is normally required every day to meet your basic physical needs. This overload literally damages the muscle. However, the body, being the wonderful machine it is, responds by repairing the muscle in a way that over time allows it to meet the increased strength needs that regular weight training requires. So you get stronger over time, and your muscle also becomes larger to meet the demand.

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How Often Should I Workout? | Fitness Tips

Workout frequency is highly individual. Learn how to find your perfect schedule and avoid over training.

How often you should work out is really a matter of your current fitness level, the types of exercises you are performing, the intensity of your workouts, and how much time you actually have available to spend in the gym.

Current Fitness Level

Your current fitness level is one of the primary factors used to determine workout frequency.

Beginners will typically need more recovery time between workouts than more advanced trainees, bodybuilders or well-conditioned athletes or runners.  Nearly everyone has experienced one of those workouts where you “over did” it and couldn’t move for three days. While this can happen at all levels of fitness, it’s more common among beginners who are still gauging their strength, stamina and recovery ability.

The body also makes certain adaptations with training over time that may shorten the required recovery time. So while some people can go heavy in the gym every day, others may need to take a break every-other-day.  

As a general rule of thumb, a good training frequency for someone who is new to the gym, or returning after a lengthy break, is three resistance workouts a week lasting between 45 and 60 minutes. This will allow you to work each major muscle group with at least one exercise and give yourself 48 hours for recovery between workouts.

This full-body workout is ideal because it helps build a solid foundation for later, more advanced training; encourages overall core development; discourages the development of muscle imbalances that can accompany “split routines”; and may burn more calories after training.

And by the way, this is actually also an excellent workout for an advanced trainee. The difference is they will work with heavier weights and may do more total sets for each exercise than a person who is less-experienced in the gym.

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