Full Body Workouts
Article by Stefan Burns - Updated November 2021. Join the Wild Free Organic email newsletter!
Welcome to part 1 of the 5 part Wild Free Organic workout series. If you’re a beginner to intermediate lifter, treat the advice given in these five write-ups as gospel and fully believe that you can achieve any physical transformation you set your mind to with consistency and discipline. If you follow the full five month routine, you’ll be blown away by how far you progress physically and you’ll have developed the right mindset for future gains with few setbacks.
Have a vision and focus! Leaping from one direction to the next might feel stimulating and you’ll know a lot, but to use a metaphor, you’ll still be stuck in the valley amongst trees when instead if you had stayed relentlessly focused on the one uphill path ahead, you could be standing on the mountain with far-reaching and clear vision!
Who am I to talk? Well I was once you. I started working out at the age of 19 and for 10 years I learned everything there is to know while simultaneously learning nothing. I made incredible progress and incredible setbacks. Learn from my experience and avoid the hardships I progressed through due to my ignorance and lack of patience. Trust the process! Learn when to seize the moment and also learn when to throttle down. Do what is best for your long-term development, not your ego.
WFO Workout Routines
Part 1 - Full Body Workouts ✅
If you want an exercise training program that enables you to make the progress you’ve been striving for without the setbacks, look no further. Clear your mind, go to the gym with a plan, don’t get distracted, and turn your vision into reality.
The following program is balanced in all respects that matter without adding complication and unneeded stress to the process. We’re not here to argue exercise theory, but rather put in the work and let the strength training show the results. With intelligent exercise selection, hard work, and consistency, there is no limit on the physical transformation you can achieve. Enough pep talk, lets go!
Laying the Foundation
Arnold Schwarzenegger was a brick layer while he was training for his first Mr. Olympia. Arnold understood the importance of laying a strong foundation, and it was this wisdom that his built his body, fortune, and fame upon.
Just like Arnold, you need to lay a strong foundation for your physique transformation. Whether you’re starting this routine after just having finished another or after a period of detraining, we want to start off very slow. Use these full body workouts as a chance to lower your chronic stress level, rest the parasympathetic nervous system, and focus on learning how to recovery. Muscle grows when muscle protein synthesis is elevated greater than muscle degradation. Fat melts off when there is a calorie deficit and little stress. Recovery reduces both muscle degradation and lowers stress, and learning how to recover before starting a new training program in which intensity will ramp up over time will pay tremendous dividends. If stress is low and recovery is in balance, you can work out less and make more progress. More on recovery throughout the rest of the series, but to start read the articles below as many times as it takes to understand the importance of each and execute on them:
Establish a productive morning routine.
Address adrenal fatigue issues you might have.
Develop a mindfulness routine, meditate everyday.
Skip this small time investment and you’ll end up wasting much much MUCH more time down the road.
Full Body Workout Routine
Full body workouts are best programmed on a weekly time frame. Three full body workouts every week will sufficiently stimulate the body to adapt and become stronger, faster, and better conditioned.
Don’t worry, any muscle you’ve built won’t melt off while you take an easy month of lifting to build the foundation for your physical transformation. Repeat this weekly routine for 4 weeks in a row. As you progress through this workout series, you’ll learn how you can modify these workouts to best pursue your specific physique transformation goals, but we need to learn the basics first. Use this first month of lifting to reconfigure your lifestyle while still hitting the main compound lifts and stimulating your body from all angles.
Monday - Full Body (A)
5x5 Squats
4x8 Pull-Ups
5x10 Pec Deck
3x15 Hanging Leg Raises
Wednesday - Full Body (B)
5x5 Incline Press
4x8 Front Squats
5x10 Barbell Rows
3x20 Cable Woodchops
Friday - Full Body (C)
5x5 Deadlifts
4x8 DB Press
5x10 Leg Press
3x30 Reverse Crunches
If you want exercise 1RM percentages, do all exercises at 40% of your current 1RM. Don’t test your 1RM to determine what it is, use a little intuition and then shave off a bit to account for your ego. Got your numbers? Good, shave off some more to account for your ego again. If you don’t know what 1RM is, find weights that are so light they almost seem comical to use. Know this to be true, weight doesn’t matter! Watch any interview with an IFBB pro, they’ll say the same. Connectivity and how much tension you generate matters! Do this right or don’t do it at all.
Spend this first month really honing in on exercise form and technique. Contract every muscle fiber and connect to every nerve ending! Even with comically light weights, if you apply that intensity to your form and body awareness you’ll still leave the gym sweating. The less connected you are to your body the greater your likelihood of injury, and being injured sucks! Being injured is a huge setback and can cause long-term problems.
The order of importance for weight lifting for natural trainees is as follows:
A progressive overload increase of 10% is acceptable. Increase weight by 5% at week 3 and another 5% at the beginning of week 4. Since the weight for these exercises will be so light to begin with, you should be able to maintain the same form and connectivity for all the exercises even with the 10% bump in weight at the end of month 1. Congratulations, you just made the easiest 10% improvement of your lifting career!
We want to stack as many of those as possible together unbroken. In part two we add push and pull workouts to the routine and discuss some advanced recovery methods.