Full Body Routine for Hypertrophy. Week 1

Javier Colomer 6 min. of reading Full Body Leave a comment

We’ve finally started the second microcycle of our Hypertrophy Routine

Remember: first we performed a mesocycle of strength, followed by a mesocycle of hypertrophy, and we’ve now just finished the upper body-leg routine.

What is a Full Body routine?

Full Body means training all muscle groups every day

Obviously, this doesn’t mean we perform 3-4 sets for each muscle – that type of routine wouldn’t make sense – we’d be better to do an upper body-leg, or another, like the Weider or frequency 1 routines.

The full body routine is based on sufficient stimulation with few weekly sessions, and then having more rest days.

This method allows better recovery, and even, in certain people, better muscle gains

The key is maintaining a new stimulus continuously, and what better way than to modify our training guidelines

3-Day Full Body Hypertrophy Routine

The routine we’ll look at here corresponds to a training routine designed for 3 days (Frequency 3)

Like its predecessor, it’ll last for three weeks. I think that’s an appropriate training frequency. However, in another post we’re going to introduce a Full Body routine for 5 days, but for users with certain characteristics, either because they have more experience or to distribute their training time.

As we’ve been doing during the whole macro training cycle, we’ll not forget about a cardio day, which would be most efficient to introduce between 1 or 2 HIIT sessions

What HIIT exercises can we do? I think we could dedicate one day to sets of slope sprints, while the rest would fit around our equipment: rowing machine, indoor bike, airdyne, elliptical…

Another strategy would be to make a brief HIIT post weight training. For example, a sets of tape sprints.

We should use a 2:1 type plan for the HIIT training, and respecting rest time, i.e if we do a 30″ sprint ,we rest for 60”

On the other hand, I’d also recommend doing active rests: walking at a fast pace for at least one hour

Full Body Muscle Mass Gaining Routine

The full body routine is based on the concept of: training, recovering and retraining. But unlike other routines, here a nearly complete recovery is kept between each training session.

The goal is to gain (continue to gain) muscle mass.

Full Body Routine Benefits

It allows for high frequency, generating a more effective stimulus. By training the same muscle group more times a week, we can improve it as we wish.
You can plan to have different versions: Full Body Routine for Hypertrophy or Strong for Strength. The latter is ideal if we want to prioritise an exercise (such as improving squatting).
By not «punishing» each muscle group as in a daily muscle group training routine, in this routine, these muscle groups will be better rested and recovered, without having accumulated excessive fatigue, which is what usually happens with a high number of sets and repetitions.
Full Body routines are a good place to start for beginners, although they shouldn’t be underestimated, as they can be designed for more experienced athletes.
They can be combined with other activities or sports, as they allow for more easygoing plans.

Full Body Routine Exercises

This week we’re going to give you an exercise plan, starting with a basic one and varying the order: Squat, Bench/Military/Deadweight.

With regard to training techniques, we’ll implement those we’ve already seen before, or even some new ones: supersets, trisets, or mega-sets.

What weights should be used?

In the exercises you will find the reference “RiR”, which indicates the “reps you should leave in reserve”.

If we see that: [RiR-2, increasing the load] -> we indicate that we should stop when we notice that if we do 2 more repetitions we reach muscle failure; on the other hand, we will increase the load for the new series.

To clarify this concept I recommend you visit this link.