How To Create The Most Effective Full Body Training Program

Full Body vs. Split Training…? Which is better?

This question has been answered by 1,000,000 different trainers in 1,000,000 different ways. It’s been a podcast topic in the fitness space, on my show as well as many others, 100,000 times. It’s been a tweet topic, Facebook status, Instagram post… the list goes on.

What’s my point with this introduction? Simple.

It’s a highly debated conversation that has been around for decades, likely since the era that first started split based training (most likely the golden bodybuilding era – 1960’s).

So I figured today, I’d not jump on the bandwagon – rather, I’ll just give you the exact blueprint to setting up the most effective full body program possible. 

Why not split training? Well, because split training can go 20 different ways, really. Which is actually one of the biggest benefits of split training – it can be highly manipulated to fit your specific needs, something I discussed in my article ‘How Should I Split My Workouts?’.

Push/Pull Full Body, Push/Pull/Legs, Upper/Lower, U/L + P/P/L, U/L + Full Body….

The combinations you can create are endless, literally. 

But that’s not what we’re here to discuss today. We’re here to talk about the most effective full body training program and how YOU can create them, yourself.

Before we do, let’s dive into the contents of this article:

The Pro’s of Full Body Training

Full body training can be very enjoyable for most people, because it’s dynamic. If you have an athletic background, like to sweat, have dabbled in CrossFit, or enjoy intensity in the intuitive sense of the word (not scientific term [load], but as in your personal effort of work) – you’ll probably love full body training because it pushes you more than most styles of training, which makes sense. When doing a fully body training split, you’re hitting literally every muscle in your body and every movement pattern your body can functionally perform (well, if you’re programming the right way). You HAVE to stay engaged and constantly put forth a hard effort towards the work being done, which relates to…

Pro #1: Work Capacity

It’s more work, within a smaller time frame. Meaning your work capacity can improve and you will be forced to push yourself just a bit harder. 

No legitimate science to back this one up, purely anecdote and experience. I’ve tried every training split known to man (I’m pretty sure) and I can honestly say nothing pushes my ability to get more work done in a short time frame, then full body strength training does. You work more muscles, more movements, and more energy systems within the time of your session than any other style of training.

This is a big benefit to athletes and anyone looking to achieve a higher level of overall fitness, because work capacity can be related to muscle mass, endurance, strength, power, and aerobic abilities. And the definition of fit, for most people, means to be fit across multiple scopes of physical expression and capabilities.

Pro #2: Caloric Expenditure

With a full body training program, you’re burning more calories per session. This one will get debated by many who will say, “It doesn’t matter how you train, it’s all about how you diet.”

But science calls bullshit on that, with multiple studies. For example, let’s look at a couple:

“Heke (2010) compared a 3x per week full-body program with a body part split where each muscle was trained only once per week. The full-body group saw a 0.8% increase in fat-free mass and a 3.8% decrease in body fat percentage, whereas the body part split group saw only a 0.4% increase in fat free mass and a 2.2% decrease in BF%.”

Not a massive difference or what they would call in science, “a statistically significant difference”, but it was also done in advanced individuals in a 4 week setting. So for only 4 weeks, I’d say that’s a lot – especially since these are advanced trainee’s.

“Crewther et al. (2016) performed a study on rugby players doing 3 workouts per week, as either full-body or upper/lower fashion, so the weekly training frequency was 3x vs. 1.5x. The full-body group lost more fat and gained a small amount more of muscle mass (1.1% vs. 0.4% FFM).”

Again, not crazy – but it’s there and that’s what matters. Because what happens when we compound this effect over the course of 8+ weeks? Or even better, along with the individualized nature of being able to increase training frequency of 4x per week, to increase volume even more? I’m sure we’d see a significant difference at that point.

The point with this pro is simple, full body training programs are great for shredding body fat and in the scenario where you’re either a.) looking for body recomposition (lose fat, build muscle) or b.) are stepping into your fat loss phase to get lean; you may want to opt for a full body program.

Pro #3: Higher Training Frequency

This is another reason why full body training may actually be great for fat loss, well more so muscle maintenance during fat loss. The reason I say this is simple; the more often we train a muscle, the more often we send it the muscle protein synthetic response for it to grow. Well if we’re in a deficit and not growing, what good is that signal? Maintenance, that’s what good!

The key to maintaining muscle mass during a cut, which we ALL want to do – whether we care about being a muscle monster or not, is to send muscle growth signals to our body while we’re dieting to get leaner. That’s how we maintain muscle more effective, while also preserving metabolic, health and hormonal processes during a cut, as well.

Higher frequency isn’t just good for fat loss, though. It’s also good for strength and overall muscle hypertrophy – for one reason, that benefits both outcomes.

The more frequent you train a muscle, the heavier you can train it – most likely.

Think about a bro split or a half body (U/L) split, which are great if volume is equated… you hit the bench press, then some over head presses, then some flies… the list goes on, as it should – because you need the volume to grow.

Problem here is simple; as volume increases, so does muscular fatigue. As muscular fatigue increases, your ability to keep heavy loads in your lifts decreases. So even though your volume from a reps and sets perspective may stay elevated, your volume from a total tonnage (sets x reps x load) decreases throughout the session. This has a great effect on progressive overload and overall muscle growth – as well as strength gains, obviously.

With a full body training program, the frequency is high enough to where you work each muscle group less per session but equally as often per week. This leads to an equal volume from the reps and sets perspective, but often times a greater volume from the intensity (load) perspective.

This is a great way to ensure more strength, which often leads to more muscle growth.

Pro #4: Flexible Training

At Boom Boom Performance, we’re big fans of Flexible Dieting (using macros to measure, track and predict progress – shown in this free guide).

But we’re also fans of flexible training, which tends to be more easily accomplished with full body training programs. Not by a landslide, or a statistically significant difference ⚗, but enough to make it a pro, for sure.

With a full body program, we’re hitting all muscle groups and we’re focusing more on fundamental movement patterns. This means that if you’re at a hotel, a new gym, don’t have a gym, or any other scenario where you’re S.O.L. when it comes to gym equipment… you can just mimic movements and you’ll be fine.

As effective? No.

Progressive overload accomplished? No.

Able to accurately record metrics? No.

Minimal effective dose? Yes.

Still building skills of the movements? Yes.

Does that apply to your overall progress? Enough.

At the end of the day, something is better than nothing and with a full body program this is easier to do than most split training programs.

Another scenario that’s actually even more common and frequently occurring with clients we see, is simply missing the gym. Stuff comes up, things happen, plans change, work takes over… whatever it ends up being, you miss a session. 

Well, no biggie. You still hit your fundamental movements, you still trained all your muscles, and you likely got a good variety of intensities and energy systems trained as well.

With an upper/lower or body part split, you end up missing a full half body of training – such as your entire lower body, upper body, chest/shoulders/tris, etc.

This is one of the biggest reasons why, from a flexibility and stress perspective, training full body can be awesome.

Pro #5: Skill Acquisition

Last one… but a big one, especially for beginners or anyone who skipped the phase of their training career where they simply get good at lifting – because yes, it is a skill.

Let’s frame it this way… do you think a pitcher gets great at pitching, by pitching once a week? Or do you think he practices pretty often?

What about a professional skateboarder, think they just practice kickflips on Tuesdays?

NO! If you’ve ever skated or played sports you know this. In fact even if you haven’t, I’m sure you know the answer is that they practice many times per week!

Now, that doesn’t mean overkill. If you pitch 100mph everyday year round, I’m sure you’ll throw out a shoulder – actually I know it, the percentage of pitchers with shoulder injuries is astronomical. But I’m veering off the path, now.

The point here is simple. Frequency builds skill acquisition; i.e. the ability to be proficient at a specific movement pattern and before you can build muscle inside a range of motion, you need to create success within that range of motion.

Not only will training that movement more frequently help you build your skill in the movement, but it will also allow less fatigue while practicing that movement – again aiding in your ability to perform and build strength within it.

Beginners often run to bro splits because that’s what they first get introduced to, I know I did. But I quickly got shifted to a full body training program in my career, within the first 2 years of training – still well in my newbie gains phase, and it allowed me to build more muscle, get stronger, and get WAY better at simply moving with load.

Dramatically underrated, skipped completely, and forgotten about within education.

The Hormonal Effect of Full Body Training

There are specific hormones that come into play and elevate during training. These specific hormones are testosterone, growth hormone (GH), insulin like growth factor (IGF), and cortisol.

The problem with this, is that people grabbed this research, mainly because of the buzz word attached [hormones], and ran with it to get people into their programming. Saying things like, “This program optimizes your hormones by using compound lifts to enhance growth hormone production!!”

I fell for it. Shit, what 19 year old kid wouldn’t?! It sounded amazing to me. But the honest truth about this comes back to that statistically significant differences in these hormones from training and the reality is, it’s just not there.

Does training benefit your hormones? Yes.

Does muscle tissue benefit your hormones? Yes.

So should you train to build muscle, in order to enhance hormones? Yes.

But that doesn’t mean there are specific tricks and tactics within a single session that are going to significantly increase growth hormone production, at least not enough for you to see staggering changes in your physique.

So what’s the verdict here? Am I for or against this idea for better hormonal optimization?

100% for. It’s a great thing, it has validity in it, and it will help overall health and body composition changes long term, as well.

But to say this only occurs with full body training or only with compound lifts, are both false statements. But that’s what you’ll often hear and read; this is why many people think you need to barbell squat, you need to train more big muscles per session [full body], or that you need to lift heavy in all your sessions.

But what research actually shows, according to Kraemer WJ, is that in general it is just high intensity, high volume, maximal effort, resistance training that leads to increases in these hormones – which will contribute to muscle growth. The study does inform us that this is factual, however it says nothing about squats or full body training being the key and although this article is to get you considering full body programs, I won’t create lies to sell you on any one theory. It’s hard training with higher volume and general resistance training movement patterns, that have these hormonal effects.

Movements > Body Parts/Muscle Groups

When I was in school for personal training, the thing that stood out to me most was that all smart training programming (from a functional perspective) came down to 5 key movement patterns:

→ Push

→ Pull

→ Hip Hinge

→ Knee Flexion (squat)

→ Spinal Movement (Rotation or Flexion)

If you do this, you accomplish everything needed, really…

Which is why if we’re programming a full body program, we build it off the fundamental movement patterns first. After we accomplish all the movement patterns, we can isolate. It starts with function and finishes with isolation.

Isolation would be things like your lateral raises, curls, calf raises, etc… Because yes, your body functionally should be able to laterally abduct it’s shoulders, flex it’s elbows, and plantar flex it’s ankles, but those muscle groups are still being targeted directly and/or indirectly with the fundamental movement patterns. So doing more of it is simply adding more isolation to either a.) improve imbalances that may be occuring or b.) increase overall volume to hypertrophy a muscle.

Again, very valid and both have merit. Which is why I program isolation work in, still. But the point here is that it starts with an understanding of the fundamental movement patterns and inside a training program – these come first on the checklist.

This is also key to understand for anyone who can only train 2-3x a week. Since these fundamental patterns take priority, it’s those that will fill up your programming and NOT the isolation exercises we all love staring in the mirror and performing, oh so much (I’m guilty).

Exercise Selection and Variation of Movements

This is where I tend to differ from most individuals in the scientific or muscle building space, because I put much more merit into exercise selection than most do. Most simply look at the research on volume and intensity and classify those two things as the standalone keys to physique development. But in my mind, most individuals aren’t even capable of progressing or utilizing either of those tools (intensity / volume) effectively if exercise selection isn’t on point.

The reason my thought process is this way is because how can you create effective volume if you can’t execute a movement or exercise properly? How can you create muscular tension, without understanding how to perform the exercise correctly or without knowing where you should be feeling it?

You can’t. That’s called junk volume. Without knowing what movements work best for you, you can’t effectively build volume up. It’s like building a house on a poor foundation – it’ll crumble.

Which is point #1 within the topic of exercise selection, you have to pick movements that work well for you.

We know the fundamental movement patterns, but now you have to choose what variation of that movement pattern works well with your structure, biomechanics, muscular activation, etc…

Example: Back squats vs. front squats. Which feels better for you? Which creates discomfort? Which allows a better range of motion? THAT determines what you perform, not what your favorite IG influencer says is the best quad builder.

Next we have to cover variation within those exercise selections.

There’s 3 things to focus on, here – compound lifts, activation exercises for those compound lifts, and accessory exercises. 

Compound lifts will consist of your squat, bench, deadlift, and overhead press. Not strictly stuck to the barbell versions of these, but more so the movement patterns in general. However, if you can – I would highly suggest working on the barbell lifts as they are the most effective for progressing strength over time.

Inside the most effective full body training program, you’ll have a compound lift in each session (4 total weekly sessions). That means you have a squat day, bench day, deadlift day, and an OHP day.

These movement patterns, rarely – if ever – change at all. You will periodize volume in a linear fashion, but the movement itself stays because they are your metric based movements. They will not progress quickly and they take a lot of skill, which means we need to be patient and work on them week after week, month after month.

I would suggest sticking to these within the 5-10 rep range, while dropping volume and increasing intensity over the course of 6-8 weeks (linear periodization). This would look as such:

As you can see, we’re increasing load on the bar while decreasing total volume (reps). This allows you to get stronger over time and by the time you finish a 6 week cycle, like shown above, you can return to the original rep/set count at a higher weight. This slow process of progressive overload, is what allows patient lifters to get bigger and stronger over the course of months and years. The lifters who are too impatient to follow a strict progression model like this, fail to see success with their body.

Now, that’s strictly covering the metric based lifts (compounds) within your program. These lifts come in towards the very beginning of your daily training sessions because they take more energy, create more fatigue, and require more mental focus.

The activation exercises that you would pair with these movements can be pretty simple, as seen in this Instagram post:

The idea here is simple; perform exercises that activate musculature which will help you execute the compound lift of the day, while stimulating your nervous system to recruit more motor units and muscle fibers to help strength and hypertrophy during the flit.

Well, that sounds kind of complex… but it’s simple. Follow the guidance in the infographic above and you will be golden (you’ll also see an example with the free program below).

Next, we have your accessory and isolation work. Which I will show you how to program here shortly.

With your accessory and isolation exercises, I suggest sticking to them for at least 2 weeks and no longer than 4 weeks. The reason for this is because:

1. It can get boring to be too repetitive and if you’re not motivated to train hard, you won’t see progress, either.
2. These movements see far less progression week to week, therefore you don’t need to spend as long working on them as you would a compound lift.
3. There are endless variations you can use within each movement pattern, which gives us more creativity within the programming of them. For example, when performing a unilateral knee flexion movement, you can perform: walking lunges, reverse lunges, forward lunges, split squats, elevated split squats, pistol squats, step ups, etc.

Lastly, the rep range you’ll fall into here can stay static across the weeks and vary every 3-4 block OR you can change it block to block. My advice is to stick to the rep range that applies most to your personal outcome at hand.

Now, we know that there is no “hypertrophy range” – meaning if your goal is aesthetics, you’re not going to see huge differences by always sticking to the 8-12 rep range – because if volume is equated it doesn’t matter.

But what we also know is that achieving more volume in a timely manner without a ton of joint or neurological fatigue, can be much more effective and easy to accomplish by sticking in the 8+ rep range. So for that reason, I do suggest most people keep accessory and isolation work just constantly in the 8+ rep range. It promotes more muscle growth, more caloric expenditure, and keeps your joints healthy.

My favorite way to program this for clients is in an escalating fashion. Meaning you may start with a lower rep range for the compound, then creep up a few reps for the starting accessory movements, and creep up a few more for the finishing isolation work. This often looks like 6-8 reps, then 8-12 rep, then 12-15 reps to finish. As fatigue settles in, you’ll be less likely to lift heavy loads and the heavy loads you do lift will create more risk of injury. Therefore this method works well with energy levels, mental focus and fatigue levels inside your training sessions.

Now, lastly, we need to determine what accessory exercises to select in your programming.

This is highly individual, so I’ll simplify it and allow you to take the reins on actually picking specific exercises. Just remember what I told you prior… essentially, there are no perfect exercises. There aren’t any “must do” exercise variations; there are just movement patterns and after that, it’s about finding what works for YOUR biomechanics. So trust intuition and select movements that feel really good on your joints and muscles.

An accessory exercise is a supplemental movement, meaning it’s programmed to aid the compound lift improve. It’s the compound’s supplemental lift. So you have to choose exercises that a.) generally help improve the compound movement, b.) build the muscles that either build up the compound or build up the muscles that help achieve your aesthetic goals, and/or c.) that work on your imbalances and sticking points.

This table breaks it down, with the general public of lifters in mind:

If I’m being honest, there’s plenty more. But this article isn’t an exercise index for you (kind of is, now) – it’s about telling you how to program and in the next section, I will show you how to put these things together. So before I do that, I needed to explain the what behind it all, which we did. 

Now… we can get onto the good stuff! Putting it all together!

Bridging The Gap: Compound Lifts → Accessory Work

There’s two ways to program your compounds and accessory exercises, together. One way is very common, the other not so much.

And maybe to your surprise, I’m going to say that I prefer the not so common way more and have seen it carry over into my clients success much better.

The classic way of programming this – the way most people have seen – is to have a compound lift and then follow it up with it’s accessory movement. So we have a barbell squat, followed up with a bulgarian split squat – for example. Not super-setted, completely separated as stand alone movements in the program. This makes sense in the way that it’s working on your compound of the day, in the same session. It also makes sense because you’re keeping the tension in the muscle group you’ve just worked. Both valid points and actually aren’t wrong, by any means.

The other way, the way that I will be teaching you today, is to place an accessory exercise of another compound movement, from another day in your training week, after the compound of today. So for example, you’d do a barbell squat and follow that up with an RDL and an Incline DB Bench Press – these ARE super-setted, because we want to get more work done (work capacity), burn more calories (more muscles per session), and have a higher training frequency (hitting each muscle, more often throughout the week).

So rather than have a full body, quad focused day. Then a full body chest focuses, glute/ham focused, back focused, etc… we’re focusing on EVERYTHING, every session. This is how we truly accomplish all the pro’s we went over at the top, while still allowing the compound lift of the day to be the primary progressive overload focused lift.

Now we have a programming method to build a full body program that builds strength in a functionally focused manner, while burning as many calories as possible and if in a surplus, also achieving enough volume and frequency to build more muscle mass. 

There’s only 1 thing left to add before we move on and that’s the proper programming of supersets. Supersets are 2 exercises performed back to back (can be 3, as well), that are working opposite movement patterns and antagonist muscle groups (you can perform these in a giant set fashion too, which would be exercises using the same muscle groups back to back – but not in a full body program). The easiest way to program or think about this is in a push pull fashion – always working anterior and posterior chains, in sequence. Because if you’re doing a squat and a press, that’s a lot of anterior load, flexion, and stress on the joints. But if you follow a squat with a pull or a deadlift with a press, we’re working in opposing fashion and that’s going to actually improve performance, while keeping joints healthy.

So… We know that we have the Bench, OHP, Squat and Deadlift for our compounds.

We know the list of accessory work we can do to aid those.

We know that we should follow each compound lift with an accessory exercise that aids a compound from another day.

We know that besides the compound lift, we should use supersets in an anterior/posterior fashion.

What’s left?

Isolation and Metabolic Finishers

Isolation Exercise: An exercise that isolates a single muscle group, often used for aesthetic purposes to enhance muscle growth. Examples are curls, lateral raises, leg extensions, sit ups, chest flies, shrugs, etc.

Metabolic Finishers: An exercise, or sequence of exercises, used as a “finale” to the workout. When fat loss is the goal, HIIT Cardio is usually placed here – it’s taxing, burns calories, and takes minimal mental focus, which is why we do not perform it prior to more important lifts of the day. When muscle growth is the goal, metabolite training is usually placed here – high rep isolation exercises that create massive pumps, high lactic acid accumulation, blood flow, and cell swelling.

This is the most simple part of programming, because the most effective way to program isolation and metabolic work into your program is to simply throw it in after your main work is completely finished and use any time you have left in your schedule to “enhance” what you’re building.

So after the compound and the accessory exercises are all completed in your training session, but you still have some time to train… add some extra work that will build up to the end result you’re looking for. The volume for this is completely individual, because in some scenarios we’ll want a lot of isolation work thrown in (think bodybuilders who have plenty of time to train) and in other scenarios we’ll throw a time frame on it and just get what we can get done, in a high intensity fashion (think AMRAP, for a busy individual who wants to lose fat). 

Either way, it’s the final thing in the program and with that being said… let’s put it all together with a sample program:

Sample 2-Day Full Body Strength Program

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