The Way to Workout
Total body workout. That’s the key to getting it done the way you want.
- You want to burn a lot of calories during your workout? Total body.
- You want to build some muscle as a result of your efforts? Total body.
- Trying to shed belly fat, tone your arms, reshape your legs? Total body.
Your body responds to training efforts based on repetition. Not necessarily the repetitions that you do during your workout, but more importantly how often you repeat training activity for the body parts you hit. Doing exercise for a specific body part just once per week is not going to be enough to provide you any significant gains. There is just too much rest time between the day you do your “leg day” and the next week when it is “leg day” again.
This whole thing is covered in pretty clear detail in this book - The Path to Progress.
To give you a visual, think of it this way:
Your body is a foreman on a construction site. On Monday (leg day) there is a ton of work that needs to be done. The foreman doesn’t have quite enough workers (muscle) to get the job done (meaning you need more muscle to move the weights you are lifting), so the foreman calls up more help to the site to get the job done. So the foreman (your body) recruits more workers (muscle) to get the big job done on this day.
Great! So now you have a lot of workers ready to do more work on this part of the job site. There is no work on this site today though (no longer “leg” day) so the workers kinda loiter around for the day. No problem.
Wednesday is here. The foreman is still not needing work done at this work site and still has workers he/she recruited hanging around. Non working workers is a waste of money (much like your body views non use of muscle as a waste of resources). The foreman decides to keep the workers around just a little bit longer in case more work pops up soon.
Thursday rolls around and still no work. The money conscious foreman decides to send some of those workers home to cut down on costs (just like your body will start to get rid of some of the muscle that is not being used).
Friday gets here and nothing is going on. No extra workers needed for no work happening so more are sent home.
Saturday and Sunday. Definitely nothing going on during these days so the foreman sends home all the additional workers he/she recruited leaving only the original crew on standby. (Yes, all the muscle you gained on your workout day slowly goes away during those non activity days until you are back at square one.)
It’s Monday! HUGE workload on schedule for today. The foreman doesn’t have enough workers to get it done so recruitment starts all over again. Hello roller coaster progress.
If this makes sense so far then there are more analogies to help make sense of how to make real gains in your health and physique here: