How To Create A Full Body Workout | How To Come Up With A Full Body Workout
In this video Eric Roberts explains what he means by a true full‑body strength training workout and distinguishes it from HIIT, circuit‑style classes, and simple combination movements. He identifies the biggest mistake people make—doing full‑body sessions more than once or twice a week—explaining the physiological and mental reasons why such frequency leads to systemic fatigue, poor recovery, and stalled progress. Roberts then outlines optimal training frequencies, recommending most people stick to one full‑body session per week, with occasional two‑session weeks only when there is ample recovery time, and suggests split structures (lower‑body day, upper‑body day, full‑body day) for three‑day programs. He walks through a detailed sample full‑body workout built around supersets that pair a lower‑body compound pull with an upper‑body compound push, then a lower‑body push with an upper‑body pull, followed by accessory supersets and optional isolation work. For each superset he provides example exercises (e.g., sumo deadlift, push‑up, Bulgarian split squat, chin‑up, hip thrust, wide‑grip row) and typical set/rep schemes. Throughout, he emphasizes progressive overload, adequate rest (at least 48 hours between full‑body days), and balancing training with life responsibilities. The video concludes with invitations to join his Clubhouse coaching community or pursue one‑on‑one coaching.
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YouTube, what's going on? In this video, you and I are going to cover everything that you need to know about full body workouts. I'm first going to cover exactly what I mean when I say a full body workout, because there's some confusion out there these days. Number 2, I'm going to tell you exactly what not to do, because this is a big mistake that people make that honestly ends up having them see not much progress or very, very minimal progress. So I don't want you to make that mistake. And then I'm going to exactly tell you what to do. I'm going to give you the mistake, give you the corrections, let you know what's going on. This is a lot of like information about full body workouts. And then I'm going to wipe this entire board clean and I'm going to give you an exact sample full body workout day with exact exercises, exact reps, exact sets. I'll also kind of just show you like how to program and You know, not just the exercises. I'll give you the exercises, but I'm also going to tell you why those exercises are there, because then you could potentially maybe make your own in the future as well. So just make sure you stay around for the whole video because there is going to be a bunch of information you can use to see great progress. All right, so first and foremost, when I talk about full body workouts, what I mean is I mean a full body strength training workout. This is where you're essentially combining lower body and upper body, and you're doing a real strength training program. And you might be like, Eric, what the hell is a real strength training program? Well, I'm not talking about things like HIIT boot camps. I'm not talking about things like some of the famous, uh, you know, circuit style classes out there. I'm not going to say the names cause I just don't want to. I don't want to bash them cause they're not bad. It's just, that's not what I'm talking about and that's not my preferred style. Style of training just because I don't think that is what is going to get you the most results in the long term. So I'm not talking about those kind of classes. I'm not talking about things like P90X or like, you know, group classes, that kind of stuff. I'm talking about strength training, real strength training, getting stronger, progressive overload, the whole nine, uh, you know, changing your body, building muscle. Those other styles of training, again, nothing inherently wrong with it. It's just more of a cardio and endurance workout. Then it is a real strength training workout. And you might be like, well, Eric, I use weights. I understand. But nonetheless, it's more of a cardio endurance class program than it is a real strength training program. And if you want to like know the difference between why I, you know, why I say those classes are more endurance, I've done an entire podcast that I'll link here in the description of this video where I talk all about the difference between a real strength training program versus like those classes, boot camps, all of that kind of stuff. So check that out after this video if you want to. We got a lot to cover in this video, so I'm not gonna cover it right now, but you can go listen to that if you want to. Now, I'm also not talking about full-body workouts. Like, let's say you have 2 dumbbells in your hand and you're doing like a squat, a curl, and a press. That's called like a combination movement, but sometimes people refer to them as like full-body workouts. That's not what I'm referring to either, and I also don't recommend you doing those kind of workouts either for various different reasons as well. But the main one being, if you're doing it like you're holding 2 dumbbells by your side and you're squatting, curling, curling and pressing. When you're doing a squat, your legs are much stronger than your biceps are, so you're inherently limiting the amount of weight you can use for your legs because you have to curl the weight up and then press the weight up as well. You're doing 3 movements in 1. This is going back to, again, that's more like endurance or cardio, which I wouldn't even recommend you do it for endurance or cardio either because the risk of injury is just too high. But that's endurance or cardio. That's not what I'm referring to, and I don't— I really wouldn't recommend you doing that. I'm referring to a proper strength training program. Okay? So now that we've got that out of the way, what is the biggest mistake that most people make with full body workouts? Well, the biggest mistake people make and what I don't want you to do is doing full body workouts more than 1 to 2 times a week max. And the 2 times a week is going to be a special, like a little asterisk next to it, which I'm going to get into later here in the video. I would probably not do it more than 1 time per week max. And there's a few different reasons for this. The first and foremost reason is when you do a properly designed full body program, which again, I'm going to show you what an example looks like at the end of this video. When you are doing a proper full body program, it is incredibly taxing on your body, on your muscles, on your central nervous system, on your brain. Because like when you're doing a full body movement, I'll talk about the physical side of it first. You're working your entire body. So think about like The biggest muscles in your body, your quads, your glutes, your hamstrings, your back, your shoulder. Like those are the biggest muscle groups in your body and you're doing all of those, your entire body on one day. That is a lot of something called systemic fatigue. And really all this means is just like it's a lot of stress on your entire body. It's a lot of stress built up inside of the muscles. It's a lot of stress put on your central nervous system. It's just a lot of stress and fatigue your body is going to have to recover from. And here's the thing, if you follow me at all, you probably know what I might say here, but it's not the workouts that changes your body. When you work out, you break your body down, you tear your body down. Outside of the workouts, you recover from that tearing down, which then leads you to make adaptations, get stronger, build muscle, the whole nine. Then those adaptations, that's where you change. That's the point you're trying to get to. You're not just trying to do the workouts and add stress to your body because if you add stress but then don't recover, you're going to skip the adaptation stage, which is the change, which is the result you want to get to. You're going to skip that change and go right back to adding more stress and then not recovering and then not changing, but then adding more stress and you get stuck in this cycle of just like showing up to the gym, not seeing any progress, not building muscle, not getting stronger, not losing weight. Feeling burnt out, feeling exhausted, feeling tired. I know I've coached people for a lot of years now. I understand what the cycle is and that might be you right now, but I want to make sure you avoid that, right? So full body workouts are very taxing on your entire body, which again, if you can't recover from your workouts, I don't want to say there's no point in working out because that would be dumb, but you're not going to optimize your workouts, which if you're still watching the video, you probably want to optimize your workouts and make the time you spend in the gym actually worth it because you only have so much time. You're probably very busy, right? So why go to the gym and not do things the right way so you can see the most progress? Like that just doesn't even make any sense, right? So that would be the first reason. The second reason is going to be because mentally it's very fatiguing. You like, if anybody knows, like for example, there might be some people who watch this who are inside of my Clubhouse. My Clubhouse is more or less like my group coaching program. I write new programs every single month. You know, we have new challenges. You know, new workouts, all that good stuff. I'll put a link here in the description if you want to check it out. But I write a full body workout in my monthly programs, which if anybody is watching this right now who has done those or any of my one-on-one clients, they know like it's a hard day. It's a very mentally taxing, mentally challenging day. Remember I just said you're working your biggest muscle groups, which also means you're doing your biggest movements like squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, chin-ups. You're doing all of that stuff on one day. Mentally, that is a lot to prepare for. It's a lot to actually go through and do. It can be very like some days it can probably feel very daunting and very like, oh my God, this is a lot to do on one day because it is, it is a lot to do in one day. You can do it if you program it properly, you can do it, but it is a lot to do on one day. And so people trying to do 3, 4, or 5 days of that, it's just, it's out of the realm of my comprehension. Um, it just makes no sense to me. You're not going to be able to mentally show up for those workouts, which 2 things there. If you can't mentally show up, at the very least you're going to decrease your performance and decrease your intensity, which means you won't see as much progress because you need that intensity to push yourself and lift heavier and do all that good stuff. But also number 2, like I said earlier, you're probably going to get burnt out. You're probably going to be under-recovered. You're probably going to like dread the workout and it's going to be so daunting on you. You won't be consistent. If you're not consistent going week after week, month after month, year after year, Even if you do see progress, it'll be very short-lived. You won't sustain that progress. You see where I'm getting at here? So for those 2 main reasons, mentally, I do not recommend having you do more than honestly 1 to 2 full body workouts per week. And again, probably it's only going to be 1 time per week. And let's talk about why. So instead of doing multiple full body workouts per week, what I would encourage you to do is either 2 times a week is going to be for somebody who is only going to the gym and lifting weights 2 times per week, which to be quite frank with you, I don't recommend you doing. I would recommend you going at least 3 times per week, which I will show you here in a second. But in some rare scenarios when I've worked with clients, whether it's like maybe somebody's on the last month of their marathon training and they still want to get some weights in, but they got to run 70 miles a week, like that person might be doing 2 times a week. I still think they could maybe do 3 times a week, but Let's just say that person might do 2 times a week, or let's say you're a brand new mom and you know you have very little time on your hands. Maybe you are a busy CEO and you know you can only work out 2 times a week. Like again, I've coached thousands of people in the past 7 years now, and like I could count on one hand how many times I've programmed a 2 times a week workout. But it does happen sometimes. So if you're gonna do 2 times a week, I would do a 2 times a week full body workout. I would also make sure, and this is going to go for the next point as well. You need to make sure you're having at least 48 hours in between of your workout days. And so if you do lower body, if you do full body on Monday, you are not doing full body till at least Wednesday, if not preferably Thursday. So let's say you're doing a Monday-Thursday workout split where you're doing both those full body days. That could potentially work because you do not want to hit the same muscle back-to-back days, right? For 2 reasons. Number one, it increases your risk of injury. So if you're doing legs on Monday, You need to wait until at least Wednesday, if not Thursday, to do legs again, because if not, it's again going to increase your risk of injury because you're not fully recovered. Your joints, your tendons, your ligaments, your connective tissue aren't fully recovered yet. And then number 2, talking about what we talked about earlier with recovery, if you are not recovering when you hit the same muscle group on back-to-back days, you are blunting muscle protein synthesis, which that's just a fancy saying for recovering your workouts and building muscle and getting stronger, right? Like you are blunting that. So then again, you're not going to recover, which then means you're not going to see progress because you won't make any change and adapt to it. On top of the fact, again, you're probably going to get injured. So you need to make sure you're having at least 48 hours in between your workout sessions when you do a full body workout. And this also counts for the next point we're going to touch on here is you can do a 3 times a week workout where you do lower body, upper body, and then full body. This is how I program all of my 3 times a week workouts, whether it's for my clients, whether it's for our members in the clubhouse. I program lower, upper, full body. And again, I tell people, do not do lower, upper, full body all 3 days back to back. That would not be a smart thing to do. I would not recommend you doing that. What you can do is something like, let's say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Lower, upper, full body, or Monday, Tuesday, Friday, lower, upper, full body. Again, because with the full body day you can't do a workout before and you can't do a workout after because you're hitting your entire body on that full body day. So the 3 times a week does allow for some flexibility there. But again, when we talk about— we'll talk about 2 things. Doing 3 times a week full body workouts, again, incredibly systemically fatiguing and taxing on your body. Muscles, central nervous system, tendons, ligaments, joints, mental effort into it. I've never personally programmed a 3 times a week workout. I'm not going to say there aren't people out here, out there who do that, but I personally don't believe that is the most optimal way to go about it for all of the reasons I just listed. And I didn't really mention like risk of injury. When you start to do 3, 4, or 5 times a week workouts, not only are your muscles not recovering, but again, talking about your tendons, joints, ligaments, connective tissue, you're just like beating your joints to the ground. So again, increasing your risk of injury if you're doing 3 times a week workouts. I would much rather you do lower, upper, full body because here's the other part too. You want to make sure you hit your muscle groups 2 times per week, right? So lower, upper, full body, lower body, your muscle groups 1 time, upper body muscle groups 1 time, full body, all your muscle groups 1 time. So that's 1, 1, and 2, right? So you're hitting your muscle groups 2 times per week with this split. While allowing for proper recovery, while allowing for proper rest and, you know, recovery, all those good things, right? So that's the thing I would recommend. And I also wouldn't recommend doing 3 times a week because the flexibility, like I just talked about, when you are doing a 3 times a week workout, if it's full body, remember you can't do a workout before and you can't do a workout after. So it's going to have to be like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, which would— again, I would not recommend you doing full body, full body, full full body. But if let's say you're going to do it, or let's say you do Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, but then again you only really have Sunday to recover. So let's say something happens because you're a normal human being and you have a life and you have kids and you have a job and you have a spouse and you have things going on. If something happens where you can't work out on Monday, well cool, if you're doing lower, upper, full body, you can work out Tuesday, Wednesday and still be able to work out on Friday or Saturday. That's not going to kill you, right? But if let's say something happens or you're going away for the weekend or whatever it is, it's like, You don't have much flexibility to mix up that routine because you can't work out before and you can't work out after. So that makes it very difficult for you to be able to fit all 3 of those workouts in. Again, if you're going at it from a smart program design standpoint. So for those couple of reasons, that's what I'd recommend. And it probably goes without saying, but I wouldn't recommend you doing like 4 or 5 times a week full body workouts. I really wouldn't recommend you going above 4 times per week workouts. begin with. I have coached, again, literally thousands of people in my days, and I have programmed 5 times a week workouts for— maybe I can count on 2 hands the amount of people I've programmed 5 times a week workouts for. I typically recommend you doing 3 to 4 times a week workouts. That's going to be the sweet spot for you. Again, that's what I do in our clubhouse. That's what I do for all of my clients as well. But this, again, it allows you to have proper volume so you can have, you know, again, hitting your muscle groups 2 times per week, all that good stuff. Allows for proper volume, allows for proper rest, and also allows you to have a life outside of fitness and lifting weights. Because me personally, I'm trying to fit fitness like into your everyday life, not fitting your entire life around fitness. I don't think that's a sustainable way to go about it. And inherently, when you're doing 5 or 6 times a week workouts, your like outside life is not going to be very much. And so I just think 3 to 4 times a week, and again, not even on top of that, it's just I don't think I don't think 5 or 6 times a week training is the most optimal, to be quite frank with you. There are some scenarios, but for the majority of people, I think 3 to 4 times a week is a really good place to be. So, with all this being said now, let's— now I'm going to wipe the board clean. Let's dive into a sample full body workout. All right? So, let's now talk about how to set up a sample full body workout. And if you don't know what this stuff means, That is okay. I'm going to explain it to you. Now, let's talk about how to set up a sample full-body workout. And so, if you don't know what these things mean, don't worry. That's why I'm here to explain them to you. So essentially, with the full-body workout, you're more than likely going to be doing supersets because as we talked about earlier, you're going to have to fit a lot of exercises into one particular workout. Now, what is a superset? A superset is just you doing 2 exercises back to back, right? So again, we're going to talk about a lower compound pull and an upper compound push, right? So a lower compound pull movement, this is just something like— we'll use the deadlift for example. So your first exercise of the day is going to be a deadlift. That is a lower body compound movement, a big strong multi-joint movement. That's what you're going to use as the first movement for the day. The second movement, so 1B, is an upper body compound push. So think something like a push-up or a shoulder press or a bench press. That is going to be your second movement for the day. So you will do one set of deadlifts for however many reps, and we can talk about reps and stuff here in a second as well, but you'll do one set of deadlifts with one set of push-ups, and then Rest after you complete those 2 exercises back to back. And that is what a superset is going to look like. So the way I typically like to program full body days— and again, there can be, and there probably will be, some variance between here, but this is just a really good marker to get set up, get you going, and know how to program a full body workout. So let's just say, for example, you chose the sumo deadlift, which is an upper Lower body compound pull movement. And again, pull just means like you're pulling, right? So a deadlift is you're pulling the weight off the ground. So you do a lower body there, sumo deadlift, 3 sets of 5. And you do— let's just say you do a push-up for 3 sets of 4 to 6 reps. Again, you could pick a push-up, you could pick a dumbbell chest press, whatever you want to do. I just put push-up right there. But you have a lower rep range because you have more bigger compound movements. If you don't know the difference between what a compound, an accessory, and an isolation-based movement is, I wrote an entire article I will link here in the description of this video that can help you out a ton. But because you're doing the bigger compound movements, sticking in a little bit of the lower rep ranges and working with the higher weights— so now let's go into the second superset of how you might set this up. So once again, you are doing a lower body compound pushing movement supersetted with an upper body compound pulling movement. So a lower body compound push movement might be something like a squat, might be something like a Bulgarian split squat, might even be something like a step-up, for example. But you are like pushing, you are— think something like a squat, right? So that would be your first movement supersetted with an upper body pull. So think something like A chin-up. Think something like even, uh, you know, heavier, like dumbbell bent-over rows or something like that. You can do an upper body pulling movement because you already did an upper body push and you already did an upper body— I'm sorry, lower body pull. So you're just like flip-flopping essentially. First one is lower body pull, upper body push. Second one, lower body push, upper body pull. So again, let's say you picked a Bulgarian split squat, which if you want to know, by the way, if you want to know how to perform a Bulgarian split squat correctly, you can check out this video I did right here. It's super in-depth. But let's say you pick a Bulgarian split squat and then you pick a chin-up, for example. Again, we talked earlier about how like a full-body workout is no joke. I mean, you're doing 4 big major compound movements that are physically and mentally taxing from you, to be quite frank with you. Like this right here, these 4 exercises, I mean, that's really— you're hitting almost every major muscle group in your body with these 4 exercises, which is why again full body is a very taxing day if you do it correctly, bring the proper intensity. You will not be able to do, in my opinion, more than 1 full body day per week. But nonetheless, let's say you do that for that, and then our next superset is going to be a lower body accessory movement with an upper body accessory movement. And again, if you don't know what an accessory movement— it's just think— so lower body Right? We've already done a deadlift, we've already done a squat variation, Bulgarian split squat. Let's say you now pick something here like a hip thrust, for example, right? You could throw in a hip thrust, you could throw in some sort of step-up variation, you could throw in some sort of leg press variation. Like, there's many things you could throw in here, but they're— an accessory movement is still a multi-joint bigger movement, but it's just a little bit less than what, like, you know, a sumo deadlift would be, for example. And then again, you have an upper body accessory movement. I personally like putting a pulling movement here because I like to have more pulling than pushing in my workouts for overall shoulder health. But let's just say you're a guy watching this and I don't know, you want to get a jacked chest, like maybe you could throw in like a chest movement right here with, you know, I don't know, some sort of incline chest fly variation or something like that. But I like doing a upper body accessory pulling. So whether it's like a lat pulldown, whether it's even like some dumbbell bent-over rear delt flies, something like that to help you, uh, get some extra pulling in. So again, let's say you picked a hip thrust for 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps, and then you picked an elbow-wide row. This is for like hitting your upper back. So you picked an elbow-wide row for again 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps. Now going into the last superset over here, or Potentially last. For the 4th superset, you know, this is where you can kind of start to play around with either whatever the goal of the program is or whatever goal you have. So like, for example, for 4A, I put lower body or upper body because to be quite frank with you, lower body, you've done sumo deadlifts, Bulgarian split squats, and hip thrust. That is quite enough for any workout, but that is quite enough for a full body workout. So maybe you just call it there, or I don't know, maybe you're somebody who really wants To improve your quads. So over there in the 4A, you put like leg extension, for example. Or if you really want to improve your glutes, let's say you put like a glute kickback, for example, something maybe like that right there. Or because there's more muscles in your upper body that you have to hit, let's say you do something like up there, you do a face pull for like rear delt work. And let's say you do a side lateral raise. For the side of your shoulders, right? If you're somebody who wants to improve the look of your shoulders, let's say you do something like that right there. So again, you have a face pull for like 2 sets of 10 to 12 reps and a side lateral raise for 2 sets of 10 to 12 reps. And honestly, right there, like, that could be your entire full body day. You could like— so I have over here 5A and 5B. I might program that sometimes, but like, let's say you wanted to get some like extra tricep work in or some extra bicep work in or some extra hamstring work in. Maybe you add in some like extra isolation-based movements for like 2 sets for, you know, each, whatever exercise you choose, whatever exercise you're trying to focus on, but nothing crazy and definitely nothing super taxing because by the time you get done this right here, you're going to be absolutely gassed. So you don't need to put like, oh, I'm doing more lunges over there. Like, no, like, Maybe a leg curl, maybe a bicep curl, maybe a tricep extension, maybe a leg extension, maybe a glute kick. Like something like simple isolation-based movement, but nothing super taxing because you're already going to be absolutely gassed. So I know there was a lot of information, like I said it was going to be earlier in the video. I hope you enjoyed. If you have some specific questions, please feel free to drop them down below. I'll be happy to We get to as many as I can. You can also shoot me a DM on Instagram. It's just @ericrobertsfitness. You can shoot me a DM over there. And last but not least, if you are interested, I mentioned a few times, but if you just watch this video and you're like, holy shit, this is a lot of information. We basically, myself and my team, have 2 options for you in terms of coaching and working with us and things of that nature. Like I said earlier, you're going to join my Clubhouse. That's where I write new workout programs every single month. You just follow them and you'll be 2 thumbs up good to go. So I'll link that here below in the description of this video. Or if you want more like personalized, in-depth, one-on-one coaching, I will also link our application form here for myself and my team below for that. Earn that. Thank you so much for watching, and we will chat soon. Okay.
