4-Week Full-Body Burn

Four different types of supersets systematically rotated in this 4-week program will help you maximize fat loss.

Written By Jim Stoppani, PhD

Updated April 16, 2024

Two fat-shredding concepts collide in this 4-week program specifically designed to get you as lean as possible in short order.

Those two concepts: Full-body training and supersets.

Full-Body for Full-Blown Fat Loss

Full-body training is what it sounds like: Hitting all major muscle groups in each workout, as opposed to doing a bodypart split of, say, upper body one day and lower body the next. The way I design my programs, every workout hits all muscle groups, big and small, with at least one exercise for each: chest, back, legs, shoulders, traps, triceps, biceps, forearms, abs, calves. And here’s why…

When you train all your major muscle groups in every workout, you turn your body into a fat-burning machine. That's a huge amount of muscle mass that needs to recover after each session, and of course, recovering from exercise is a calorie-requiring process. You'll be burning calories long after the workout is over.

Exercise also turns on numerous genes in your muscle cells. Some of these genes increase muscle protein synthesis, another calorie-requiring process. Genes can also increase the ability of muscle cells to burn fat for fuel. Increase fat burning and muscle protein synthesis in all major muscle groups of the body and there's no doubt you'll get leaner.

Science strongly supports full-body training for maximizing fat loss. A study published in a 2016 issue of the journal Biology of Sport compared full-body workouts to "split-body" workouts. Both full-body and split-body protocols were performed for four weeks with three weekly workouts and included the exact same exercises and the exact same training volume. (The exercises performed were basic by design and included back squats, leg curls, leg press, bench press, bent-over rows, lat pulldowns, shoulder press, biceps curls and calf raises.)

The results of the study showed that full-body workouts burned significantly more body fat than the split-body workouts while also increasing testosterone to a greater degree and improving testosterone-to-cortisol ratios in the subjects (testosterone being an anabolic hormone, of course, and cortisol being catabolic). The two protocols produced similar gains in strength, meaning you don't have to worry about losing ground on any of your big lifts by doing full-body training.

Before I get into explaining the fat-burning value of supersets, it’s worth mentioning one other training concept present in this program: high frequency. What I’m talking about here is minimizing rest days. You can certainly build both size and strength by training three days a week, but if you really want to maximize fat-burning and uncover your six-pack, I highly recommend training at least five days a week – that’s the frequency (five days a week) that you’ll be using in this program.

I mentioned genes above in regard to full-body training; it’s the same concept with frequency. I’ve personally done research in the lab, at the Yale School of Medicine, on how exercise (and nutrition) effects genes in the body. Every time you train, genes in your muscle tissues are “turned on” or activated. Likewise, those genes are shut off when you’re inactive. When these genes are turned on, your metabolism is revving and you’re

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