Can you get Ripped from a Full-Body Workout?

If you want to get ripped from a full-body workout or any type of workout you would need to make sure you are in a calorie deficit. For any kind of natural weightlifter, you will want to make sure that you are incorporating compound movements for your best results. 

The reason why it’s best to focus on compound movements is you are working more than one muscle group at a time.

You will see far greater in quicker results by doing compound movements and making sure you are eating clean healthy organic food 80% of the time.

While the type of workout that you do can greatly affect your overall results, your nutrition will always be more important than your workouts when trying to lower your body fat percentage. You can never outwork a bad diet, especially if you are naturally trying to build muscle and lose fat.

Here are some compound exercises that should be the staple of your workouts.

  • Bench press
  • Barbell squat
  • Pull-ups
  • Deadlift
  • Barbell row
  • Standing barbell press

You can see a majority of your results from these types of exercises because you are training multiple muscle groups at once. I love these because they are proven to work and you don’t have to spend as much time with the bro splits.

Getting ripped from full-body workouts

As I like to say full-body workouts get the best bang for your buck. Meaning that you don’t have to spend every day in the gym while still getting great results.

Full-body workouts will definitely help you lose body fat and get cut “IF” you are also in a calorie deficit also. While there is no exact amount of calories you need to cut, it’s recommended to start in a deficit of 250-500 calories.

You will have to massage these numbers to find out what works best for you. TDEE is a great free tool to help you figure out your calorie count. While it’s not realistic to constantly track all of the food you eat, however, I do believe in arming yourself with knowledge.

What I mean by that is teaching yourself how many calories are in the food you are eating. For years, I ate healthy foods and worked out a lot but still didn’t lose weight and was frustrated.

It wasn’t until I started tracking calories is when I realized how much I’ve overeaten calories. My fitness pal is another app that is great to use to help track calories and to teach you the calorie amount in your food.

I don’t track my calories much anymore because I’ve spent the time to teach myself what most foods calorie counts are.

Type of Exercises

As mentioned above, no matter what type of exercise program you are doing, your nutrition will always be king. Now that we know most of our focus needs to be on what and how much we are eating, let’s look at getting ripped from a full-body workout.

It’s best to use barbells because we want our exercises to be focused on are compound movements. These will mainly be barbell type exercises but if you are a beginner and do not feel comfortable you can you machines or dumbells.

Your main focus should be on your form. Don’t try to look cool or impress others because you need to be focused on the muscle group that is being trained.

If you try to lift too much wait there is a chance for a setback because of the high risk of injury.

These exercises need to be the staple of your workouts

  • Bench press
  • Barbell squat
  • Pull-ups
  • Deadlift
  • Barbell row
  • Standing barbell press

Another huge benefit of also training at the right amount of intensity with compound lifts is more muscle recruitment is needed because of multiple muscle groups are being worked.

This leads to an improved hormonal response. Which is what we need if we want to lose body fat.

How many Reps should I do?

There are many different thoughts when it comes to how many reps you should do for adding mass or cutting. I personally have found good studies that back up the best rep range to build muscle is between 6-10.

Low Reps

The common rep range for low rep exercises is between 1-5. It’s commonly thought that low rep ranges will activate the fast-twitch muscle and that high rep ranges will activate slow-twitch muscle fibers. The fact is that it will stimulate low rep ranges will activate and stimulate all muscle fibers.

Moderate Reps

You can mix up your training programs from low to moderate to some high reps but moderate is where I tend to hang out the most. Moderate rep range is good for still building muscle because of the time under tension and the progressive overload that occurs.

High Rep Range

The high rep range is up to 15 reps or more. Most believe this is the rep range you will need to help you get cut or to lose body fat. The water is pretty murky as to whether this type of training is needed.

Most believe that moderate rep range along with progressive overload is the optimal type of training.

And it does work, but there are studies out there that show that high rep training may be useful.

The study was based around 15 men and was done using the leg extension. Researchers compared the response of protein synthesis from 4 sets with 90% RM to failure and with 4 sets with 30% RM yo failure.

The high rep training resulted in higher protein synthesis increase. This throws a wrench in the idea that high reps are just for losing fat. The only caveat is that high rep training will likely only work in a short amount of time.

The reason being is with the lack of progressive overload resulting in a stalled attempt to get stronger. The point here is that all rep ranges have their place.

I personally train with progressive overload in the moderate rep range by adding sets. Exercises, where l like to incorporate high reps, would be on isometric exercises and not compound ones.

Take away from rep training

All of the rep ranges have their place and can help increase muscle growth. All of the rep types should be experimented with if you are trying to add muscle or burn fat.

It’s not necessary to use high rep training to stimulate weight loss because all types of rep training will increase your metabolism causing you to burn more calories.

No matter the rep range, not one will have a greater effect than the other. I believe that your nutrition is 70-80% of your success when trying to cut weight. The old saying is true that you can’t out-exercise a bad diet.

Exercise is important and for a multitude of other factors but the main driver when it comes to losing weight is your nutrition. You should rely on your nutrition and cardio to burn fat and your weight training to add muscle.

How many times a week should I do full-body exercises

Ideally, you want to try to do 2-3 times per week for full-body workouts. There is a lot of factors that come into play when trying to figure out how often to train.

Even things such as life stressors can come into play. If you have crazy stress, ye working out can help but your intensity at which you workout should be managed. Trying to find that sweet spot of not over or under training.

With that being said you need to make sure you are dong enough volume as it is king. It will make sure you are doing enough to achieve your goals. You should focus on volume/frequency/intensity which can be easier said than done as they are moving targets.

There really isn’t a one size fits all attack for training. Unfortunately, it’s not black and white because of the many factors and variability form one person to another.

It’s not all doom and gloom because there is some evidence to prove the optimal workout for most. There are some studies from scientists out of Goteborg University that researched weight lifting studies.

As far as to what their research found was that while training at 60-85% of 1RM range, is optimal and the best volume looks to be the between 30-60 reps per major muscle group workout when done 2-3 times each week. Trying to aim for 60-180 reps on each muscle group.

If you are busy like most of us guys who have families and careers full-body workouts are awesome and should be the staple or building block of any type of program. If you are looking to maintain you can workout only 2x’s a week.

How many exercises should I do for a full-body workout?

As far as full-body workouts there is really only so much your body can handle. If you are doing a traditional full-body workout you shouldn’t do it more then 3x’s per week for recovery purposes.

You can do compound lifts consistently but if the intensity is not there you won’t see as good of results. By lifting with 65-80% of your one-rep max is important when trying to build a lean and muscular body. Ideally, with the rep range around 6-8 reps per set.

If you are a natural weight lifter like I am if you are doing low weight and high reps you are basically doing just a warm-up or doing it for a pump. I’ve made the mistake of doing this type of training because that’s what I read in the magazines back in the day.

You might run across people working out or see them all online doing high reps with a lower weight. And it’s not because of creatine and cable pullovers, it’s usually from someone who is on steroids.

If you are on some type of synthetic hormone your ability to recover, lift, eat more without gaining fat will be much higher. High rep training “only” is not for someone who is natural.

If you are a “natty” or natural weight lifter we can’t follow those steps to get where we need to be. We’re gonna have to focus on those heavier lifts with compound exercises.

Recovery is very important and not talked bout enough

Heavy compound weight lifting can put a lot of stress on your body. Things like heavy deadlifts and squats are the hardest to recover from. Thing slike HRV heart rate variability is one of the best ways to test out how you are recovering from your workouts.

As for us guys, age, recovery becomes just as important as working out. There is also a fine line of not training hard enough as well and this will help you track that.

Basically, measuring your HRV is one of the better ways to know if your body is stressed or not. when you’re HRV score is the highest that is generally the best in what you are looking for.

on the flip side though if your HRV is low this could mean that you are overtrained and your body is too stressed.  You will begin to see things like not being that well-rested, sleep-deprived, and healthy heart rhythms begin to lessen. 

 if your HRV scores are jumping around, for example, one day at 68th and the next day is 90 the day after it’s 70, that’s what means that your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system is not working well that’s all.

what’s the importance of stress on your body? they can actually read a lot of having such as raising cortisol which is a stress hormone that says released when there is too much stress there for making you become weight loss resistance.

Also, it can affect your testosterone which is important for sexual function and increasing muscle. Other things that can cause a bad HRV score would be things such as poor breathing,  work and relationship stress, bad diet in too much EMF exposure.

I currently use a device frog heart math that works great in track in your stress levels in HRV scores. I’ll also be looking into other devices and will be back and let you guys know what I find.

Final Thoughts

As we can see, full-body workouts are one of the only ways for us naturals who want to get cut or build muscle. Not only that but how important things like recovery and nutrition are too.


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