Have you ever found yourself in a training rut, constantly chasing the elusive “pump” and feeling perpetually sore, yet not quite seeing the progress you desire in strength, size, or overall athleticism? Perhaps you’ve spent years meticulously planning your “chest day,” “back day,” and “leg day,” only to miss a session and feel like your entire week’s progress is derailed. As Judd Lienhard, an experienced strength and performance coach, highlights in the video above, this conventional approach to body part splits might be holding you back. He makes a compelling case for why embracing total body workouts could be the transformative shift your training needs, regardless of your ultimate fitness goals.
Rethinking Your Training Split: Beyond the “Bro Split” Mentality
In the fitness world, the question “What’s your split?” is almost as common as “How much do you bench?” Many lifters meticulously divide their week into body part-specific days, a practice often called “bro splits.” While these splits can provide a satisfying pump and are certainly better than no training at all, they might not be the most effective strategy for natural athletes seeking optimal strength, size, and athletic development. Instead, approaches like Push-Pull-Legs or Upper-Lower splits offer more balanced muscle group frequency throughout the week. However, the most effective and often overlooked strategy, according to expert coaches and research, is surprisingly the total body training model.
The concept of intensely focusing on single body parts during a workout is a relatively modern invention, largely gaining popularity in the late 1960s. Interestingly, this period also coincided with the rise of anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding. Steroids fundamentally alter a body’s recovery and anabolic window, allowing athletes to handle significantly more volume and remain in a muscle-building state for longer periods. Consequently, a training split designed for an enhanced athlete is often suboptimal for a natural lifter. For most of us, mimicking the training styles of professional bodybuilders might be counterproductive without pharmaceutical assistance, making a re-evaluation of our split choices essential.
The Core Principles of Effective Training: Intensity, Volume, and Frequency
To truly understand why total body workouts excel, it is crucial to grasp the three pillars of effective strength training: intensity, volume, and frequency. Intensity, in a scientific context, refers to how close you are to your maximum effort at any given moment, not just how hard a set feels. For instance, lifting a heavy weight for three reps with a few reps “in the tank” is scientifically more intense than struggling through twenty reps with a lighter weight, as the former pushes you closer to your one-rep maximum.
Volume, on the other hand, quantifies the total amount of work performed over a period, encompassing factors like weight lifted, reps completed, and time under tension. It is a measure of the cumulative stress placed on your muscles. Frequency, the third and often underappreciated element, denotes how many times you tax a specific muscle group or system within a given timeframe. Optimizing the interplay of these three variables is key to unlocking consistent progress and achieving your fitness goals.
Understanding Training Frequency
Recent research consistently underscores the paramount importance of training frequency, especially for natural lifters aiming to build strength. While volume certainly contributes to muscle growth, spreading that volume across multiple sessions for a muscle group each week often yields superior results. Consider the example of performing 20 sets for your legs over the course of a week: you could complete all 20 sets in a single grueling session, or divide them into two sessions of 10 sets each. Alternatively, you might perform five sets on Monday, five on Wednesday, and ten on Friday, maximizing your training frequency.
Even with the same total weekly volume and similar intensity, the approach with higher frequency typically leads to better strength adaptations. This is because muscles receive more frequent stimuli, potentially staying in an anabolic state for longer and allowing for greater recovery between smaller bouts of work. For muscle size (hypertrophy), frequency might not be as overwhelmingly critical as for strength, but it still provides significant advantages, especially when considering the “freshness” factor we will explore next. This explains why early bodybuilders, even before widespread steroid use, often trained with total body workouts three times a week.
Maximizing Your Efforts: The Diminishing Returns of Volume
Many lifters believe that more is always better when it comes to workout volume, but this isn’t necessarily true. As Judd Lienhard explains, “Four sets of something isn’t four times better than one set; it might be 20% better.” Studies consistently demonstrate the principle of diminishing returns in training volume. You derive approximately 80% of the benefit for both strength and hypertrophy from the first two working sets of an exercise. While additional sets do provide some benefit, the increase becomes progressively smaller. Moreover, the extra fatigue accumulated from excessive volume can begin to outweigh these marginal gains.
This is precisely why the seemingly humble “three sets of 10” rep scheme has endured as a classic and effective approach. Ten reps strikes a sweet spot between strength and hypertrophy, and when performed with a controlled tempo (e.g., two seconds down, brief pause, one-two seconds up), your muscles are under tension for approximately 30 seconds. Research suggests this duration is optimal for stimulating hypertrophy. Three sets represent that sweet spot where you get a significant boost over two sets, without incurring the disproportionate fatigue of a fourth or fifth set. Focusing on quality over sheer quantity allows for better recovery and sustained progress, rather than overtraining and stagnation.
Unlocking Flexibility and Time Efficiency with Total Body Training
Life is unpredictable, and our training schedules often bear the brunt of unexpected events. This is where full body workouts truly shine, offering unparalleled flexibility and time efficiency compared to rigid body part splits.
Navigating Life’s Interruptions
Imagine you’ve planned a demanding leg day for Tuesday, but a sudden work emergency or family commitment forces you to miss it. If you’re only hitting legs once a week, that entire body part goes untrained for seven days, potentially impacting your progress. In contrast, with a total body training schedule, if you miss a Wednesday workout but hit a full body session on Monday, simply shifting your next session to Thursday is a minor adjustment. Your muscles are still being stimulated frequently, and the slight variation in rest days might even offer a novel stimulus. Total body splits integrate into busy lifestyles far more seamlessly, making it easier to maintain consistency even when life throws curveballs.
Expanding Your Exercise Arsenal
Another often-overlooked advantage of total body training is the freedom it provides in exercise selection. Many fantastic, multi-joint exercises like snatches, cleans, burpees, and even deadlifts don’t neatly fit into a single body part category. Do you put deadlifts on leg day, back day, or even trap day? Many people simply avoid these highly beneficial movements because they struggle to categorize them within their split. With a total body approach, these powerful, athletic movements are simply “power exercises” or “compound lifts” that can be integrated into any training session, fostering greater creativity and functional strength development in your routine.
Time-Saving Strategies: Circuits and Supersets
For those short on time but unwilling to compromise on training intensity, total body workouts combined with intelligent programming offer compelling solutions. While traditional heavy lifting requires significant rest periods (2-4 minutes) between sets for maximal strength gains, this downtime doesn’t have to be wasted. By incorporating supersets or circuit training, you can work different muscle groups while others are resting, enhancing both efficiency and conditioning.
For example, instead of sitting idle for three minutes after a heavy set of bench press, you could perform a set of pull-ups, rest briefly, then move to squats. This allows one muscle group to recover adequately while another is being worked, keeping your heart rate elevated and maximizing your gym time. Judd recounts using circuits of heavy bench press, weighted pull-ups, and squats, taking short breaks between exercises but allowing full recovery for each muscle group before repeating its exercise. This strategy not only maintains strength potential but also adds a conditioning element, making your workouts more productive and comprehensive.
Beyond Soreness: Training for Performance and Life
Many lifters equate post-workout soreness with a successful session, believing that if they aren’t painfully stiff, they haven’t trained hard enough. However, as the adage goes, “stimulate, don’t annihilate.” While an occasional muscle-trashing session can be invigorating, regularly pushing your body to extreme localized fatigue can hinder daily life and overall athletic performance. Imagine being too sore to run with your kids, help your spouse, or participate in a recreational sport because your hamstrings and quads are completely “smoked” from a single leg day.
Total body training, by distributing the weekly volume for each muscle group across multiple sessions, typically prevents this debilitating localized soreness. You might experience a general sense of systemic fatigue if you push hard, but not the kind of muscle-specific pain that limits movement. This approach allows you to stimulate muscles sufficiently for growth and strength while remaining fresh enough to live your life actively. High-level strength coaches often employ total body fitness for athletes precisely for this reason; athletes need to perform in their sport, not just in the weight room, and excessive soreness from isolated body part training is detrimental to their overall performance.
Embracing Natural Movement: Kinetic Chains and Functional Strength
Human beings are designed to move as integrated units, not as collections of isolated body parts. Our daily activities, from lifting groceries to climbing stairs or playing sports, involve complex patterns of movement and interconnected muscle groups known as “kinetic chains.” For example, throwing a ball isn’t just a shoulder exercise; it involves coordinated effort from your legs, core, back, and arms.
Training with full body training closely mimics these natural movement patterns, fostering more functional strength and athleticism. By engaging major movement patterns—squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling, and carrying—in every workout, you train your body to work synergistically. This holistic approach strengthens the neurological pathways that coordinate these movements, leading to improved balance, stability, and overall physical competence that transcends mere aesthetics. It makes sense to train the way we naturally live and move, preparing our bodies for the demands of the real world and various athletic pursuits.
Structuring Your Effective Total Body Workout
Transitioning to total body workouts doesn’t mean sacrificing the ability to focus on specific areas or achieve a satisfying pump. Judd Lienhard himself, despite advocating for total body training for his athletes, incorporates elements of bodybuilding for personal enjoyment. He outlines a highly effective strategy for structuring total body workouts, often on an eight-day microcycle, hitting every major movement pattern at least three times a week with varying focuses:
- Power Movement (1-2 working sets): Begin with a dynamic, total body power exercise after your warm-up. This could be single-arm dumbbell snatches, box jumps, hang high-pulls, or landmine cleans. These movements prime the nervous system and build explosive power, which is often neglected in traditional splits.
- Main Compound Lifts (2-3 heavy sets): Follow with your primary strength-focused compound movements, typically supersetted for efficiency. For example, a heavy lower body movement (like squats or deadlifts) paired with a heavy upper body push or pull (like bench press or weighted pull-ups).
- Secondary Compound/Accessory Lifts (supersetted): Incorporate another superset targeting different movement patterns not covered by the main lifts. This might involve a lunge variation paired with a rowing movement, ensuring all major muscle groups get adequate attention.
- Focus-Specific Auxiliary Work (2-3 sets, higher reps): Conclude the workout with 15-20 minutes of hypertrophy-focused accessory work tailored to your daily focus. If it’s a “push focus” day, you might add cable flies, overhead presses, and tricep pushdowns with shorter rest periods (30-60 seconds) to achieve that satisfying pump. On a “leg focus” day, this might involve extra hamstring curls, calf raises, or leg extensions.
This structured approach allows you to hit every body part frequently, incorporate athletic power movements, build strength with compound lifts, and still dedicate time to aesthetic-focused auxiliary work. The key is quality over quantity, stopping one or two reps shy of failure on heavy compound movements to ensure freshness for subsequent workouts.
If you’ve always defaulted to body part split training, consider giving total body workouts a genuine chance. You might discover that you not only get stronger and build just as much muscle, but you also feel better, move more athletically, and enjoy a training routine that is far more flexible and congruent with an active, vibrant life.
Total Body Training Q&A: Your Path to Strength, Size, and Athleticism
What is a total body workout?
A total body workout is a training session where you exercise all major muscle groups in your body. This approach differs from focusing on just one or two body parts per workout.
Why are total body workouts recommended for natural lifters?
Total body workouts are beneficial for natural lifters because they allow each muscle group to be trained more frequently throughout the week. This consistent stimulation helps to build strength and muscle more effectively.
What are the main benefits of doing total body workouts?
Total body workouts can help you build more strength, increase muscle size, and improve overall athleticism. They also offer greater flexibility in your training schedule and can lead to less debilitating muscle soreness.
What is a ‘bro split’ and why might it not be ideal for beginners?
A ‘bro split’ is a common workout plan where you dedicate each day to a single body part, like ‘chest day’ or ‘leg day.’ This method might not be ideal for natural lifters or beginners because it trains each muscle group less frequently, potentially hindering consistent progress.
What are the three core principles of effective strength training?
The three core principles of effective strength training are intensity (how close you are to your maximum effort), volume (the total amount of work performed), and frequency (how often you train a specific muscle group).