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How To Create Supercharged Total Body Workouts

sandbag fitness equipment

We sincerely hope that everyone had an amazing holiday this past week! Hopefully you had tons of great moments with family and friends and the last thing you should do is feel bad for any enjoyment you had over the holiday. It is so important not to fall into the trap of using exercise as punishment for enjoying some good times. I remember having a chiropractor friend of mine once say…

“If you can’t go to a baseball game and have a hot dog and not get sick you aren’t healthy.” Of course he wasn’t saying that a baseball hot dog is something we should live off of, but there is a balance in life and I hope you found some. That doesn’t mean we can’t get right back to or continue or training. There is a difference between punishing ourselves versus just gaining our focus back.

Highly respected nutritionist, Leslie Schilling says it well

The holidays do give us time to talk about creating smarter workout programs because this IS the time of year I remember my clients had the hardest time staying consistent. Whether it was more demands being placed upon them through work and home, or just the mindset we are taught to get into during the holidays, keeping people motivated during the holidays is key.

One of the best ways of accomplishing this goal is to create highly effective total body workouts and with DVRT we can do so without getting stale, we can keep great purpose, we don’t need a lot of equipment or space either. Sure, there will be those that down play total body workouts, but most times it is such workouts that are ideal for most of us.

Will I gain muscle? Um, yeah, you train the entire body meaning you focus on lifts that integrate more muscles at once. Will you lose body fat? Yup! Because we are using total body workouts that means focusing on those compound lifts that due to the fact they use so many muscles burn a lot of calories and stimulate positive hormones that help us with weight loss. Will you get stronger? Many of the strongest athletes use total body workout programs for most of their training. Bodybuilding tends to be highly inefficient for most people and their goals, total body workouts aren’t easy, but they are highly effective.

Does this mean we don’t put any thought behind them? Of course we have to be thoughtful and there are some keys we will show with three great DVRT total body workouts.

Focus On Movement Patterns & You Will Train Muscles

There are more than 600 muscles in the body and I know that people generally care about 15 of them at most, but an issue with how any part of our body functions can have a domino effect and keep us from reaching our fitness goals. Using total body workouts that focus on movement patterns allow us to ensure we are training just about every muscle in the body and combining elements of stability, strength, and conditioning at the same time. This means focusing on movement patterns like those below.

functional strength

Can you do this simply, does this require some specialized exercises? Not at all, just simply looking at total body workouts through better glasses lets us see how easy it can be!

 

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A post shared by Cari Satre (@coachcariii)

With DVRT total body workouts like Coach Cari Satre shows above, we can achieve so much. There is the obvious squatting, hip hinging, lunging, pushing, and pulling, but because of the stance she takes during her bent row we also get resisting rotational forces and shoveling has rotational forces so check right there! Where is the locomotion though? Often we can train the qualities of a movement pattern as well as actually doing the more obvious version of a pattern. Her use of the sprinter stance on the rows, the lunging, and the frontal plane stability she needs to decelerate the Ultimate Sandbag during shoveling all reflect aspects that make up locomotion. All 7 patterns trained in a not overly complex version of our total body workouts that used one Ultimate Sandbag and minimal space, pretty cool huh?

Use All Planes Of Motion

In fitness we know that we use all 3 planes of motion when we move in life and sport, but in our training we still struggle to see how this important bit of information can impact our training. Just like adding weight or reps, changing planes of motion can increase the intensity of a workout/exercise and often far more dramatically than just adding weight or reps. Doing so often places greater demands on using more muscles and those muscles functioning correctly with the rest of the body. Such total body workouts with focus on using planes of motion lead to greater strength/stability at the same time. Coach Robin Paget shows a great version below.

 

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A post shared by Robin Paget (@rdpaget)

Such total body workouts show that we can be thoughtful and have variety at the same time in our training. Being smart doesn’t mean doing crazy exercises, but knowing why you are doing what you are in your training.

Use Methods That Make Your Training More Efficient

I’ll admit, in DVRT we have A LOT of different exercises you can build up to or use in your total body workouts. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming and when you feel this way the best thing is to simplify. Now, that doesn’t mean your total body workouts become easy or less effective, they can help you just refocus and refine technique or reduce the noise in your head. One great way that Greg Perlaki shows below is by using flows that allow us to combine movement patterns and achieve a lot in a little bit of time.

Greg is using a rather foundational flow consisting of a row, clean, and fist loaded squat, but because of the dimension and weight of his Burly Ultimate Sandbag this is FAR from an easy workout. He combines this with some vest and band resisted push-ups, once again getting in most of the movement patterns in this total body workout (he would just prioritize the movement patterns he didn’t get in the next workout). Using two movements, but using ladders is another way to build up volume of work to achieve a lot of fitness goals like building lean muscle and losing body fat, but keeping the quality of work very high!

Hopefully these 3 DVRT total body workouts show you that really effective and thoughtful training can be very accessible and not demanding on equipment, time, or space. If you were to follow these 3 ideas you would be so far ahead of most people in not only training well during the holidays, but any time of year!

Don’t miss saving 30% on our DVRT Workout Programs HERE as well as all throughout DVRT with code “july30” HERE