What are the benefits of doing a full body workout?

What are the benefits of doing a full body workout instead of body part splits or a push/pull/legs type split?

A common plan for gymgoers is to hit push on Monday, pull on Wednesday, and legs on Friday. Another common plan for people is to go to the Jersey shore immediately after work on Friday (or call out of work entirely). If you hit your push and pull workouts on Monday and Wednesday, then Friday you go to the beach and have a few too many Coronas.

No big deal right? Missing one workout isn’t going to set you back that much. Let’s extend it a little further. What if you get home late Sunday and Monday you’re too tired to hit push? No problem.

You hit push on Tuesday, pull on Thursday, and then Saturday the kids have soccer. No big deal right? You only missed two workouts.

Put another way, you just went three weeks between leg days.

Confidence is at an all time high while planning. You are certain you won’t miss any workouts. I promise you, life gets in the way.

However, Fit For Life is geared towards busy, working adults. This includes parents, coaches, and people with multiple jobs. While we would recommend doing everything possible not to skip workouts, we also know that life happens. 

What if you did a full body workout instead?

Let’s imagine that same scenario except on Monday you did a full body workout. This workout included two push, two pull, and two leg movements!

On Wednesday you did the same workout.

On Friday you go down the shore for three days. 

When you get home you are exhausted so you hit a full body workout on Tuesday. Then you hit another one on Thursday. In this scenario you did six to eight sets of leg workouts over that three weeks. 

Hitting all your body parts even though you missed a workout or two is just one benefit of doing full body workouts.

This is anecdotal but I’ve also found that I can go a little heavier and put more effort into my bench press sets when I know that I don’t have to do five more push exercises right after. Same holds true for other major lifts like deadlifts, squats, and overhead pressing.

I still get six to eight push exercises every week, but I’m going 90-100% on all of them instead of the inevitable 60-75% on the last few sets when I used to do full push days.

The other beautiful thing about full body workouts is that it forces you to focus on the exercises that give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of time and fatigue. On a full pull day for example everyone sneaks some bicep curls in the mix. While they’re not super fatiguing, they do take time and they do cause some gnarly soreness. 

Some soreness is okay but intense soreness leads to missed workouts.