Answer Fitness®: Practical Fitness Advice for Everyone

Total Body Workout with Weight Machines | Workout Routines

June 15, 2008 on 1:33 pm | By Matt | In Workout Routines | 3 Comments

Not ready for the free weight room? This total body workout routine uses the most common weight machines at the gym to give your entire body a great workout in under 60 minutes.

Total body workouts (also known as “full body workouts”) are a great way to build muscle, burn fat, develop core stability and strength, and cut down on your overall time in the gym. Generally, total body workouts are most effective when they are built around compound, multi-joint exercises that use free weights like dumbbells and barbells.

But not everyone feels comfortable in the free weight room, and if you are just starting a resistance or weight training routine, it can take some practice to learn how to perform free weight exercises with good form.  Weight machines can provide a way for newcomers to get a feel for basic form and movement, build a nice strength foundation, and eventually feel more comfortable transitioning into free weight exercises.

Incorporating weight training machines into your workout can also benefit advanced trainees as well, since machines allow you to go with heavier weight than you can typically use in a free weight lift. This can be useful for breaking training plateaus. And because weight machines don’t require you to swap out plates, you can typically move through your workout more quickly — a plus if you are pressed for time.

So by popular demand, I’ve created a version of my free weight full body workout that is adapted to give you a total body workout using weight machines alone. Actually, this workout uses a combination of multi station weight training machines, cable exercise machines and some body weight exercise equipment like chin/dip stations. With a few exceptions, the same rules and guidelines of that total body workout apply to this version. We’ll recap those a bit later.

But first, let’s take a quick look at the advantages and disadvantages of using weight machines, instead of free weights, as part of a total body workout routine.

Continue reading Total Body Workout with Weight Machines | Workout Routines…

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Popularity: 22% [?]

Sphere: Related Content