The evolution? You could say Full-Body !!

Edited by: Francesco Currò

One of the "fashions" of recent times, has been to derive the work protocols of bodybuilding training ... more or less demonstrated (personally I would say, anything but proven ...) evolutionary theories ...

Some authors, without a doubt, have extrapolated sensible concepts, but others have drawn such bizarre conclusions that we would have to write a book of jokes ...

However, the topic of this article, as you can guess from the title, are the so-called full-body1, that is the training tables that are opposed to the most common split-routines2.

Full-body models, although currently a little undervalued, were widespread a few decades ago and their choice can be justified by several reasons. Here are some:

Internal organs (heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, etc.) work independently of the individual trained muscle group. So every workout can be considered as overwork for these organs. Full-bodies allow you to perform fewer weekly workouts, thus subjecting those organs to less work.

Another good reason to train the whole body at each session is that, even if you jump (with the commitments of modern life can always happen ...) a training session, for that week all the muscles have been trained anyway.

Exercises for "neighboring" muscle groups often "overlap" and weigh on certain joints. For example, if on a given day we train the pectorals and on another day we train the deltoids; on both days we urged the shoulder girdle. If we use a full-body, we urge the various joints at once ... and then - since we will do fewer weekly workouts - let them rest properly ...

The body works in unison and not only the legs or the trunk are used during the day.

I refer to this last point, to express my personal consideration (and without going into controversy with those who have drawn different conclusions, as "vague" theories like evolutionary ones - in my opinion - they leave extreme freedom of interpretation ...) that could link full-bodies to "evolutionary concepts".

Let me explain myself better: from what I understood by reading various writings of some authors, the heavy, short, intense and infrequent training derives from the hunts of our ancestors and the consequent bloody fights with the animals. Nothing to object in all this, if it were not for the fact that often the "translation", in terms of training, of these fights results in split-routines.

In my opinion, a combat action is not sectorial! We don't fight on Mondays with bibs, on Wednesdays with the ridges and on Fridays with legs! I think if we were in front of a tiger with saber teeth (regardless of the day of the week), we would use all our muscles ... even the most hidden and unused ...

So, in my view, in a training resulting from "ancestral theories" there can be no space for full-body training!

Ok, after having "motivated" this type of table, let's try to propose one (extracted from my technical dispensation) one, in the version that I personally define "rapid".

The full-body that I call "rapids" are those that some authors recommend to perform by performing all the exercises in sequence, without (if you are out of breath, but stop for a moment) or almost rest between them: just enough to go from one exercise to another. Obviously we need to go step by step: we start by observing a rest between the series of 90 seconds for a couple of weeks and then week after week we try to scale the rest time by 30 seconds at a time.

With this method, in general, only one series is performed (rarely two) per exercise and one warms up with some series of the first exercise before moving on to the actual series.

Obviously there are:

1. many other versions of full-body tables, each with different procedures based on various needs;
2. many ways to arrange these tables in time;
3. many ways to vary training parameters.

But this is an article and not a treatise on full-body, so I prefer -also not to monopolize the magazine- not to go into the topic much. If you want more information on the subject you can always consult one of my technical lecture notes.

Francesco Currò Francesco Currò, teacher of ASI / CONI, teacher of the Accademia del Fitness, athletic trainer and personal trainer, is the author of the new book " Full Body ", of the e-book " The Training " and of the book on "Multiple Frequency Systems" . For more information, write to the email address, visit the websites //web.infinito.it/utenti/x/x_shadow/ or //digilander.libero.it/francescocurro/ or call the following number: 349 /23.333.23.