1. The full body workout recruits and works more muscle groups at once. The more muscle groups you use the more energy you burn at a given intensity, and the more energy you burn, well, the better the calorie loss and fat loss as a result. Pretty straight forward. This also means this is a very time efficient method of training, and time is priceless for all of us. If you want to stay lean, lose weight, tone up, this is a pretty effective method of training. Now this isn’t to say body part split doesn’t work, but in my opinion full body workouts may have a slight edge here. And now you know why you have been doing mostly full body workouts all this time.
  1. Let’s face it, we all have days where we somehow could not make it to a workout, maybe it’s due to the weather, maybe work has you staying late, maybe family emergencies, or maybe a flat tire what have you, but you can see how that messes up our routine if we are splitting up body parts. Do we push other body parts all a day back now? Do I skip ANOTHER day or 2 just to get back to normal routine? Should I train double the body parts the next day? There’s no right answer or wrong answer here, but you can see how it’s inconvenient. Full body workouts not only help you produce a more balanced body workout, but if you happen to miss a workout, it isn’t as big of a deal. And balance is very important, we wouldn’t want to be broad as hell up top and with twig legs or vice versa now would we? Although, if you know you are going to miss a training session, please inform a trainer at Richmond Crux Fitness preferably 24 hours or more in advance. Plus, if you ever have to train on your own, it’s easier to plan your own workout when you know you are working the entire body rather than trying to plan each day for different body parts and trying to figure out the optimal combination so as to have them complement each other etc.
  1. Full body workous also provide more fun and varied workouts. This one is pretty simple, when it comes to working out your biceps, there’s only a couple different exercises that come to mind, and even if you add in faster, slower, half-range, etc there’s still probably wouldn’t be over a few dozen variations at best. For those that workout more than 4-5 times a week some exercises could get old very fast. We all want fun and engaging workouts, involving more body parts allows more exercise variations to be added to the training session making it more dynamic overall. Who wouldn’t want more interesting exercise?

As a bonus point, if you think about it, most daily activities we do involve us using multiple body parts, so it is only right that we train in a similar way to increase our functional strength with our activities of daily living.

Now it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Full body workouts can lead to more soreness and over-training, this is why we prefer timed sets at Richmond fitness where you can control your own intensity and tempo. Initially, especially if you never workout much in your life, it may be hard to grasp the intensity level to allow you to workout without soreness but as you become more aware and in tune with your body as well as the exercises, you will very quickly discover how to self adjust the intensity to keep you working out full body 4,5,or even 6 times per week. However, If you feel like you are always sore or feel unusually fatigued all the time, speak to a trainer at Richmond Crux to see how we can modify your program to avoid overtraining. Afterall, our goal is to have you build a healthy fitness lifestyle that you can stick to and uphold for the rest of your life.

Crux Fitness is the BEST personal training studio.  Two locations: Richmond, Cloverdale

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