Full Body Workouts for Women

[aprildawn]

Does anyone do a full body workout? What are your thoughts on FBW vs. 3 day split for women? My primary goal is to lose fat and maintain muscle. Thanks. :D

[freaker]

I just see it very being very hard for anyone but a beginning lifter to complete a full body workout in a reasonable amount of time. Also, if you workout hard, it generally will take more than 2-3 days to fully recover. Spliting the bodyparts up, one can do more exercises and get better development from different angles for a more complete look. If you do a full body workout, the latter bodyparts may suffer because you're burned out by the time you get to them. It may work decently as far as burning fat, but I think you can burn just as much fat by focusing on specific muscle groups and hitting them hard. You can probably save more time this way also.

[Hibiscus09]

I love Charles Swindoll, April. :)

I just couldn't see making it through full body workouts at the level I lift now. It was fine during the first year, but after that I lifted too much weight & don't feel like I would be doing enough to fatigue a particular bodypart by doing a full body workout. I'm so old I'd have to wait a week between workouts if I tried that anyway!

[ilnola1]

I workout 4-5 days a week and I do both upper and lower body workouts. I also do cardio for 60 minutes. I can see a change from when I first started

[aprildawn]

Originally posted by ilnola1
I workout 4-5 days a week and I do both upper and lower body workouts. I also do cardio for 60 minutes. I can see a change from when I first started

Do you alternate upper and lower?

[Genie]

I usually do a 3-day split but for the past month I've been doing a full-body workout because I was scamming-out on some of my cardio and it was starting to show. I'm going to stick with the full-body workout for another 2 weeks while I put a little more emphasis on cardio to get my body fat back on track. I lift heavy and don't want to lose any muscle I worked hard to get on my 3-day split so what I try to do is 3 sets of 1 exercise for each body part but I lift heavy to fatigue on each set so I really work the muscle because I'm not doing my usual 2-3 exercises for each body part like on my 3-day split. I also superset with my full-body workout alternating upper and lower body exercises (eg. bis then straight to a quad then straight to a tri) so I can fit more into a shorter time - it also helps to superset to sneak some cardio into your lifting. If you are lifting heavy on a full-body workout, I would suggest a day off in between to rest and your muscles to recover for sure - you could do just cardio in between lifting days. I love my 3-day split though and recommend that the most and can hardly wait to get back to it!!