Full Body Workout With Dumbbells

By Yuri Elkaim, BPHE, CK, RHN

In just 3 workouts per week, you can maximize your muscle growth while torching fat by performing full body workouts with dumbbells. Full body dumbbell routines target every major muscle group in as little as 45 minutes. You don’t need to belong to a large gym overstuffed with equipment to build your best body. All you need is a few sets of dumbbells at various weights, and some determination.

Benefits of a full body workout
One of the greatest fitness myths is that in order to build quality lean mass, you need to spend hours a week slaving away on machines in the gym. This philosophy couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, the less time you spend pounding iron, the stronger and leaner you become.

Muscle growth doesn’t occur while you workout; it occurs during rest. Your body needs adequate time to recover in order to rebuild muscle. During your full body dumbbell workouts, you put heavy amounts of stress on all of your muscle groups, tearing down muscle fibers and depleting energy stores. During rest, your body over compensates this loss by creating more muscles fibers.

Stress on the muscles during a workout cause tiny tears in the muscles fibers. Upon rest, your body repairs muscles by regrowing the torn fiber, and growing new muscle on top of the regrowth. This process is called hypertrophy.

Hypertrophy occurs in two phases. The first is sarcomere hypertrophy when the muscle diameter increases slightly, but the muscle density changes. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is where both the muscle diameter and the muscle density increase.

Guidelines for full body workouts with dumbbells

1. Train every 2 to 3 days: your body needs adequate rest between workouts. In order to reap the benefits of your full body workouts, your muscles need at least 36 hours of recovery time. If you work every major muscle group at once, then you should have a full day and a half of rest between workouts.

A good full body workout schedule is:

Monday- workout
Tuesday- rest
Wednesday- workout
Thursday- rest
Friday- workout
Saturday and Sunday- rest

Lift heavy with every muscle group: as stated above, muscle growth happens due to increased stress on your muscle fibers.  This means you need to lift heavy during your workouts.  How you measure your lifts is through a rep maximum.

A rep maximum, or RM, is measured by the amount of weight you can lift one time to failure. You can go by this theoretically if you don’t have a large amount of weights from which to select. Essentially, during your full body routine, you want to lift between a 5 and 8 RM. If your RM is 5, this means that you cannot get up a 6th rep during your lift.

Peri-workout nutrition: full body workouts deplete your glycogen stores and break down protein. It is imperative that you adequately fuel your body before your workouts and refuel after. Because your body is depleted, you will maximize your nutrient uptake immediately after your workout. Think of your muscles as empty containers waiting to be filled with nutrient dense foods.

START BURNING FAT LIKE AN ATHLETE TODAY!