A Four-Week Full Body Workout Plan for Men

Full body workouts have many advantages for men. They don't require as much gym time as body part split routines, you get a higher calorie burn each workout and each major muscle group gets trained more frequently than it would if you only trained one or two muscles each workout. Four weeks isn't a long time to see drastic changes in your body, but splitting your training up into four-week blocks helps you maintain focus and can be enough time to have a last push towards your beach vacation body. Surprisingly, the basic principles for a man's training routine are exactly the same as a woman's, according to strength coach Joe DeFranco.

  1. Weekly Routine

    • Full body training allows you to hit each major muscle groups every workout, but the downside to this is that you can't train on consecutive days as your muscles need time to recover. As a minimum, schedule two sessions each week, though three or four will give greater results. If your goals are fat loss-based, perform cardiovascular work on your non-weights days. For busy men who can only train twice a week, one weekday and one weekend session works well. If you have a little more time, try a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday split, or if you don't have many other time commitments, train every other day.

    Exercises

    • Your exercise selection can make or break your routine. With only four weeks, time really is of the essence, so pick movements that give you the most value. Full body workouts typically only involve one exercise for each major area -- your back, chest, quads, hamstrings and shoulders. By picking multi-joint compound exercises though, you hit more than one muscle at once. Squats for instance work not just your quads, but your hamstrings, calves, glutes and core too. The same goes for chin-ups, they mainly work your back, but also hit your biceps, forearms and traps. Switch your exercises every session, advises Ben Black of "Iron Man Magazine." One session could include bench presses, shoulder presses, squats, leg curls and bent over rows and the next could be dumbbell bench presses, dumbbell shoulder presses, chin-ups, glute-ham raises and leg presses.

    Periodization

    • Planning your training so you can progress week to week is known as periodization. A typical four-week periodization model would consist of one week of easy exercise, a week of moderate exercise, a week of harder exercise and one final week of maximum-intensity exercise. Use this model to plan your training schedule -- it will ease you in to the four weeks and allow you to peak just in time for your end date.

    Sets and Reps

    • Select your sets and reps to coincide with your periodization schedule. In week one perform each exercise for three sets of 12 to 15 repetitions using a weight with which you could complete and extra two to three reps with in each set if needed to. In week two perform four sets of 10 to 12 reps with a weight that you could get one more rep out on each. In week three increase the weight again and drop to three sets of eight to 10 reps using your 10 repetition maximum. In week four perform four sets of six to 10 reps using a weight that causes you to reach muscular failure on the final rep of each set. The benefit of this changing set and rep pattern is that you build muscular endurance, size and strength in the four weeks.