The 3-day full-body workout plan

The plan

Train three days a week, with at least one day off between sessions. Monday, Wednesday and Friday is the classic, but any three days work.

Every session is the same six exercises: two for your legs, two where you push and two where you pull. Together they train every major muscle group. Do three sets of 8 to 12 reps of each exercise (a set is one run of reps without putting the weight down), and rest about a minute and a half between sets. Plan on about an hour.

At the gym

If your gym doesn’t have one of these machines, take the nearest thing to it. An exercise that moves the same way trains the same muscles, whether it’s on a machine, on a cable or with dumbbells.

At home, with a pair of dumbbells and a bench

A pair of dumbbells and a bench with an adjustable back is the home kit we recommend. Body weight alone sounds simpler, but for many people it’s too hard, and it limits which exercises you can do.

For your first two weeks, do two sets of each exercise instead of three. The first sessions are the ones that make you sore, and two sets are plenty while you learn the exercises. From week three, do all three.

How to do each exercise

Every rep in this plan follows the same two rules: lift and lower the weight through the whole movement, and lower it under control instead of dropping it. Many gym machines also carry a small diagram that shows the starting position. Use it.

• Leg press. Feet flat on the plate, about shoulder width apart. Lower the plate until your knees are bent a little past a right angle, then push it back up.

• Chest press machine. Set the seat so the handles are level with the middle of your chest. Push until your arms are almost straight, then bring the handles back slowly until you feel a stretch across your chest.

• Seated cable row. Sit tall and pull the handle to your stomach, squeezing your shoulder blades together. Then let your arms reach all the way forward again without rounding your back.

• Romanian deadlift. Stand with a dumbbell in each hand in front of your thighs. Push your hips straight back, as if you were closing a car door with your butt, and let the dumbbells slide down your legs with your back flat and your knees slightly bent. When you feel a strong stretch in the back of your thighs, usually with the dumbbells around knee height, stand back up. If it feels awkward at first, use the leg curl machine for a few weeks and come back to it.

• Lat pulldown. Grip the bar a little wider than your shoulders, lean back slightly and pull the bar down to the top of your chest. Let it rise until your arms are straight.

• Shoulder press. Start with the handles or dumbbells at shoulder height, press straight up until your arms are almost straight, and lower them back to your shoulders. At home, sit on the bench with its back set upright.

• Goblet squat. Hold one dumbbell upright against your chest with both hands. Sit down between your heels as deep as you comfortably can while your heels stay on the floor, then stand up.

• Dumbbell bench press. Lie on the bench with a dumbbell in each hand above your chest. Lower them to the sides of your chest with your elbows a little below shoulder level, and press back up.

• One-arm dumbbell row. Put one hand and the knee on the same side on the bench and keep your back flat. Pull the dumbbell up towards your hip, then lower it until your arm is straight. Do all the reps on one side, then switch.

• Chest-supported dumbbell row. Set the bench to a low incline and lie face down on it with a dumbbell in each hand. Pull both dumbbells up towards your hips, squeeze your shoulder blades together, and lower them until your arms are straight.

How to pick your weights

I can’t tell you what weight to start with, because I haven’t met you. What I can give you is a way to find it, and it takes one session.

On each exercise, start with a weight that looks too light and do 12 reps. If you could have done 15 or more, go one step heavier and try again after a rest. You’re looking for the weight where 12 reps takes some work, but you could still have done two or three more with good form. When you find it, write it down.

Finding that weight for all six exercises is the whole job of your first session. If you guess too light on a couple of them, nothing is lost. You’ll go heavier on Wednesday.

That feeling of two or three reps left is also how hard every set should be from now on. You don’t have to push until the weight stops moving. The American College of Sports Medicine’s advice is to stop with two or three reps in hand, because in the studies behind that advice, pushing sets all the way to failure added nothing consistent.

One catch: when people are asked how many reps they have left and are then tested, most have about one more than they thought. So if you’re not sure whether you had two reps left or three, you probably had three.

Rest, warm-ups and your log

Rest about a minute and a half between sets, or two minutes on the leg exercises if you’re still out of breath. In the studies that compared rest times in people new to lifting, one to two minutes looked like enough to get the full strength gains. Use the timer on your phone, because without one a minute and a half has a way of turning into five.

Your warm-up is one easy set of each exercise at about half the weight, right before its real sets. You don’t need ten minutes on a treadmill first, though it does no harm if you enjoy it, and you don’t need to stretch.

Then write down the weight and the reps of every set, on paper or in your phone’s notes. It takes ten seconds a set, and the next part of the plan depends on it.

How to keep getting stronger

The exercises in this plan don’t change from week to week. The numbers in your log do, and that is what makes it a plan and not just a workout.

The rule is simple. When you get 12 reps on all three sets of an exercise, add weight the next time you do it. Add the smallest step available: one more plate on the machine’s stack, or the next pair of dumbbells up the rack. Your reps will drop back to 8 or 9. Build them back up to 12, then add again.

Adding reps counts as progress just as much as adding weight. In a ten-week study of 39 people new to lifting, each person progressed one leg by adding weight and the other by adding reps. Both legs gained the same strength and the same muscle.

Some sessions the numbers won’t move, and some sessions they’ll go backwards. That’s normal. Look at the month, not the day.

At home, when the dumbbells get light

At a gym there’s always a heavier weight. At home you have the pair you bought, and sooner or later 12 reps with that pair gets easy, first on the squat and the Romanian deadlift, because your legs are the strongest thing you own.

So at home the rep range stretches. Let your sets climb to 15 reps, then 20. In 21 studies that compared lighter and heavier weights, with every set pushed to the point where another rep wasn’t possible, muscle grew about as much with either. That’s the price of a light pair: finish those long sets with one rep left, or none.

When 20 reps gets easy, make the same dumbbells harder to lift. Lower the weight slowly, over about three seconds. Then switch to the one-leg version: the goblet squat becomes a split squat, with one foot a big step behind you.

And at some point, buy heavier dumbbells. In those same studies, heavier weights were still better for getting as strong as possible, and no trick with a light pair fully replaces them.

Why six exercises are enough

Six exercises, three sets each, the same session every time. If that looks too small to work, here is what the research says a plan needs. You can check each point against the table.

• Every major muscle group, at least twice a week. That is the American College of Sports Medicine’s main recommendation, and the World Health Organization’s guideline for adults says the same: all major muscle groups, on two or more days a week. This plan does it three times.

• A push and a pull for your upper body, and a push and a pull for your legs. The authors of the ACSM’s report consider those four enough to cover the major muscle groups. The plan has all four, plus a second push and a second pull from a different angle.

• At least two sets of each exercise. One set beats none and two sets beat one. After that, every extra set adds a little less than the one before. For muscle growth the report found an advantage for plans with ten or more sets a week for each muscle group. Three sets, three times a week, is nine sets of each exercise, and most muscles are trained by two of the six.

• Real effort, through the whole movement. Sets that end with two or three reps in hand count as real effort. And strength gains were better when people lifted through the full range of the movement, which is why half reps aren’t in the plan.

• A little more over time. You’ll benefit from lifting even if you never add a kilo. But to keep getting stronger, the weight or the reps have to keep going up, and that is what your log is for.

And here is what made no consistent difference: machines or free weights, slow reps or fast ones, programmes that cycle through planned phases of heavier and lighter weeks, and training to failure. That’s why this plan doesn’t ask you to care about any of them.

If it still looks like too little, consider how little has been shown to work. One study looked at the training records of 14,690 customers of a fitness company, average age 48, who trained once a week: a single all-out set of six exercises. They got roughly 30 to 50 percent stronger in their first year. This plan asks you for nine times as many sets.

That’s how we coach it, too. At the start, the exact sets and reps matter much less than turning up for the sessions.

Full body or a split?

A split divides your body across the week: chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, legs on Thursday, or upper body one day and lower body the next. Splits work. When researchers pooled 14 studies that compared splits with full-body training, strength and muscle growth came out the same, as long as the total work for the week was the same.

So full body doesn’t win on results. It wins on what happens in a normal week. Miss one of three full-body sessions and every muscle still got trained twice. Miss chest day on a split and your chest waits a week.

It also gives you more practice. When you’re new, most of your early strength comes from your nervous system learning the movement, and practice is what it learns from. In an analysis of 67 studies, people who trained more often in the week gained more strength, while how often they trained made little or no difference to muscle growth.

A split starts to make sense later, when you want to do more work than fits comfortably into three sessions, or when you simply like training four or five days a week. In our coaching, people with some experience train three or four times a week, either as full-body sessions or as a two-way split.

If you only have two days

Do the same session twice, with two or three days between, like Monday and Thursday. Two sessions a week still trains every muscle group twice, which is the line both guidelines draw. You give up some progress, not most of it, because each extra set adds less than the one before. For someone new to lifting, we think two to three sessions a week is the right range, and three is the sweet spot for most people.

And on a day when you have no energy at all, do the short version: the first four exercises, two sets each. It takes about 25 minutes, it still covers your whole body, and it keeps the habit alive on a day that would otherwise be a zero.

What the first weeks feel like

You’ll be sore after the first session or two, mostly a day or two later. That’s normal, and it fades fast. Muscle damage is at its highest after your very first sessions, is lower by the third week and is close to nothing by the tenth, because the muscle learns to protect itself. Soreness isn’t proof that a session worked, and no soreness isn’t proof that it didn’t.

Sore muscles are fine to train. Pain in a joint during an exercise is different: stop that exercise for the day, and swap it for a similar one that doesn’t hurt.

Your numbers will climb quickly at first. Most of that early strength is your nervous system getting better at the movement, not new muscle yet. Muscle you can see takes longer. In the ten-week study from earlier, the beginners’ leg strength went up by about 30 percent, and their thigh muscle grew by about 10 percent.

So for the first couple of months, don’t judge the plan by the mirror. Judge it by your log, and by how you feel after a session. We tell clients to think of a workout as a buff in a game, a temporary boost that wears off: you walk out happier and with more energy, it lasts one to three days, and then it’s time to renew it. That’s one more reason the next session is two days away and not seven.

When to change the plan

Not soon. As long as the numbers in your log are still going up, the plan is working, and swapping exercises every couple of weeks only means you keep starting over. A review of eight studies came to a similar conclusion: some planned variety can help, but frequent, random changes may hold your gains back.

In our coaching we refresh a programme at around twelve weeks: some new exercises, new sets and reps, sometimes a day added or taken away, depending on how the three months went. Twelve weeks is a good first target for this plan too. If you’d rather have a coach build the next plan around your life, that is what we do at Gains For Gamers.