Just Finished First 5-day, Full-body Training. Here are some thoughts and the routine I followed

burning___bush

New member
Like some of you, I recently became interested in changing my routine to a full-body workout, 5 days per week. I was worried that I couldn’t handle 5 days of lifting in a row, but I watched the videos and read some posts in this sub and decided to give it a shot. As requested by at least one person, I’ve decided to make the workout routine I came up with available for review and (constructive) critique. As you might imagine, this is rather personal, so I want to include some other personal details.

I’m 44 years old and have been working out seriously for just over 2 years. Although I worked out and studied weightlifting from an early age, I spent all of my 20’s and most of my 30’s drinking and eating like a pig and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I was overweight and out of shape and developed pain in my wrists and elbows when just doing ordinary things around the house. The doctor prescribed some wrist and forearm exercises, and that rekindled my enjoyment of weightlifting.

I also took the opportunity to change my diet and lost about 40 pounds. I haven’t had a drink in 5 years and quit smoking 3 years ago.

I have no access to a gym. My equipment includes adjustable dumbbells, a bench and some elastic tubes. With work and 3 small kids at home, my schedule is pretty tight, and I workout while I work from home. I’m fortunate to be able to work from home almost 100% of the time. Up until last week, I was doing a PPL split with push on Monday, Legs on Tuesday and Pull in Wednesday. On Thursdays I stretched and rolled and did extended LISS cardio. On Fridays, I did some sort of full-body challenge routine, like Jeff Cavaliere’s 12-Minute Workout. It’s hard to carve out time on the weekends to exercise, and I normally take those days completely off. I started the 5-day routine early in the week because of the holidays and because I was motivated.

I didn’t feel like I was progressing from week to week and always felt tired and worn out (all day, every day). The only times I didn’t feel physically exhausted were during the workouts. This probably has something to do with the aforementioned 3 small children and the inherent uneven sleep, but I was still concerned about my lifting routine.

For food, I eat pretty well now, but there is still room for improvement. After months-long experiments with keto and IF, I’ve realized two things: I need to eat before working out in order to get anything productive done, and I need at least 1g protein per 1 pound of body weight. For me, if I eat less than about 200g of protein a day I feel even more lethargic and wasted. By biggest nutritional challenges currently are eating too much (I'm always hungry) and having protein bars make up too much of my diet. I consume about 3500 calories and 2-3 bars each day.

Here is the workout I came up with.

Feel free to look at the workout I made up to fulfill the 5-day lifting routine. I didn’t get it from anywhere; I just made it up. On the other end of it now, I can say that I’m pleasantly surprised at how good I feel. I was ready to work hard every day, with minimal soreness and almost no joint pain. And I feel much better during the rest of the day too. I might even sneak in an extra arm day tomorrow to finish out the week. I’ll definitely be doing this again, M-F, as my new weekly routine.
 
@burning___bush You are overtraining to the max with that program man. I counted 40+ sets of Chest per week and the average range for natural optimal growth is 15-18 sets in the 6-12 rep range per muscle group per week. I didn't bother including the circuit exercises.

I understand you are limited for time, and you are limiting yourself even more by having such a high volume routine.

If you're going to do 5 full body days per week, drop the volume of your sets to 4 sets per muscle group. That will probably cut your workout time in half, keeping the circuits and baby shark routine (I love that this is in the routine!).
 
@dawn16 I was more just clarifying your point for others that lots of sets doesn't always equal overtraining. I'd argue though it's hard to assume he's training properly when looking at his programing.
 
@dawn16 Thank you for considering.

I've always been worried about over-training (I used to do 20-30 sets per muscle group per day on a push/pull/leg split), but almost immediately write it off as an excuse to not train even harder. I'm motivated to train hard and feel like I should totally exhaust a muscle group with each session. That was the most challenging part of this routine - limiting the number of sets per day.

I was trying to limit myself to 4 working sets per muscle group per day. For chest, the 50 pound weights are for warming up. Right? Often, though, the line between warming up and working out becomes blurred.

If one is concerned about over-training, how do you know when you're training enough?

Thanks again
 
@burning___bush Technically if you’re recovering then it’s not overtraining, it’s just very very very high rate of diminishing returns for the extra volume. Could cut the volume in half and see 98% of the same results.
 
@burning___bush as the other guy said, you are supposed to lower the volume when doing 5 days a week. that's kinda the point. you are splitting up your volume across 5 days. you did 28 sets a week.
 
@burning___bush I thought warm ups may have been included but I wanted that to be clarified, It looks fine after another look with warm up sets in mind.

You know you’re training enough when staying in that average number for volume (15-18) +- a few sets as we’re all individual. If you’re looking to train harder, then you aren’t training hard enough in those 4 sets per muscle group. It’s proven that training til failure isn’t an ideal way to build muscle. It works, but only when it’s new or unexpected. Best bet is to cycle through programs and training styles rather than including them all the time as our body adapts and they become less effective.

An almost linear increase of strength is another indicator that you are training “enough”.
 
@burning___bush You may want to check out Jeff Nippard's videos on wasted sets. Anything more than 20 sets a week or 5 sets in a single workout are wasted sets. Work out harder and do fewer sets.

On a 5 day full body routine, don't work out to failure. You need to leave a few reps left in your tank.

Jeff Nippard just did a video on a full body workout and I switched as well. Feels like I'm making more progress since I switched.
 
@dawn16 Lot of “science” proving what you said and a lot of new “science” proving trained men doing over 30 sets were benefiting more. Food for thought before throwing out popular advice.

Also, given this man’s little training history.. he may actually benefit from the massive volume and he is very unlikely to get anywhere close to overtraining.

The most likely thing to occur is connective tissue damage.
 
@burning___bush If your enjoying the program and recovering keep at it but, to me it just looks like overkill. I'd reduce the volume in half. This will still leave you with plenty of sets and save you a lot of time.
 
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