High-Intensity Full-Body Workouts

Full-body workouts are tough. By hitting every major muscle group in a session, you maximize calorie burn and muscle tissue breakdown and can leave the gym feeling exhausted. High-intensity full-body training was originally popularized by body builder and trainer Mike Mentzer as a way of breaking through training plateaus and building muscle mass.

  1. Schedule

    • Train with weights twice per week. Your muscles need time to recover after lifting, and due to the high demand of these full-body workouts, you need at least three days of rest between sessions. Workout quality is far more important than total volume or number of exercises, according to Mentzer in "High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way."

    Exercise Selection

    • Quality over quantity applies to your exercises too. Rather than choosing lots of exercises for every muscle group, high-intensity training advocates performing just three to five exercises to work your whole body. Pick one exercise each for your quads, hamstrings, chest and back. Choose compound exercises such as back squats, front squats or leg presses for your quads, deadlifts or stiff-legged deadlifts for your hamstrings, incline dumbbell presses or dips for your chest and pull-downs, pullups or rows for your back. Your shoulders and arms get worked during the upper-body moves and your calves are hit with lower-body movements.

    Sets and Reps

    • In true high-intensity training, you only perform one working set of each exercise, but it needs to be done at maximum effort. Perform three or four lighter warm-up sets, then a maximum set of eight to 12 reps to reach muscular failure. The key to high-intensity workouts is rep tempo and the intensity techniques used. Mentzer advises taking three seconds to lift the weight and another three seconds to lower it. This increases time under tension and will lead to greater muscle breakdown and eventual growth. To further fatigue the muscle, have a partner help you with three or four forced reps at the end of your set, or perform a drop set, for which you reduce the weight by 30 to 40 percent and perform another few reps until failure.

    Considerations

    • High-intensity full-body workouts are for more advanced trainees. If you're just starting out, you may fare better on a basic full-body routine performed three times per week, stopping each set one or two reps short of muscular failure. Aim to add weight or extra reps in every workout and change an exercise if you plateau on it. Should you start to feel overtrained on this routine, split your full-body workout into two separate days, advises trainer John Little. Perform legs chest and triceps exercises on one day, and back, shoulders, traps and biceps on another.