Why Do A Full Body Workout 3 Times A Week With Squats

Why do a full body workout 3 times a week with squats

When we workout we want to get the most out of our time spent training. I recently designed a new program that is about a year long. Where we do full body resistance training, 3 times a week. Now as with all of my training programs they can be broken down into different stages or phases.

Today we will be focusing on one of these phases where I have programmed squats first in each of my workouts. During this time I have an “A” and “B” workout that alternate each training session.

Now there are some pretty obvious reasons why we should do squats first and we will go over those. But there are also quite a few reasons you might not of thought of and if your one of those who really only cares about building your upper body, we’ll look at a couple of studies that have shown how we can use our lower body training to increase the rate of upper body hypertrophy and over all muscle growth.

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I’m using two different types of squats at the beginning of each workout, because I train primarily with dumbbells I do suitcase squats in workout “A” and front squats in workout “B”, alternatively you could do a back squat in workout “A” and a goblet squat in workout “B”

The front squat has some unique advantages. As it can help to improve your whole body posture, by putting you in thoracic extension. Counteracting the slouching that happens when we sit at our desk all day or when we are looking down at are phones. This more up right body posture also takes some pressure off our lower back and knees. Putting the load right on our quads where we want it as this is a more quad dominant exercise than back or suitcase squats.

Squats are a functional movement that strengthens the muscles we use when we sit down, stand up, pick an object up off the floor or go for a walk or a run.

Squats work a large amount of muscles including the quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves, and core. If your doing suitcase squats you can add in delts, traps and grip strength. Because of this it does a number of things in our body. One is it gives us a higher calorie burn during our workout and because squats works more muscles, it builds more muscle, and the new muscle burns calories. Extra calories even when we are at rest. Increasing our basal metabolic rate.

The other thing leg training does and in particular squats is it boosts our testosterone and growth hormone levels. Now a lot of people feel this temporary spike in growth hormone or testosterone doesn’t do anything for our bodies. But they did a fun study, where they had nine men perform arm exercises training their left arm 2 days a week by itself and then they would train their right arm on 2 different days of the week right after training legs.

After 11 weeks the right arm was substantially bigger and stronger than the left arm. Because the researchers found significantly higher levels of growth hormone and testosterone during the leg plus arm training sessions they concluded this is what caused the superior growth and strength in the right arm.

But testosterone and growth hormone aren’t the only hormones leg training effects. I’m sure you have heard of myostatin and follistatin. Myostatin limits muscle growth in humans and really all animals. Now There are animals with a myostatin deficiency.

Now follistatin inhibits myostatin. So, when follistatin is high myostatin is low putting us in a much better state to build muscle. They did a study on middle aged men between the ages of 40 and 53. Because as you know, you can get fit and build muscle at any age.

What they did is they took these men and split them into 3 groups. One group only trained their upper bodies. The second group only trained their lower bodies. With the third and final group doing full body training.

What they found was while all three groups built muscle and there was some improvement of the ratio of follistatin to myostatin in the upper body and lower body groups. The full body training group saw almost twice the endocrine response of follistatin with a reduction of myostatin. Which the researchers concluded was a result of the overall amount of muscle mass being activated during training. And no better way to activate a large amount of muscle mass than squats.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21327794

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334026764_Effects_of_upper-body_lower-body_or_combined_resistance_training_on_the_ratio_of_follistatin_and_myostatin_in_middle-aged_men