3-Day Full-Body Workout Plan: A/B Routine, Exercise Selection and Progression

A full-body plan trains all the major muscle groups in every session. If you can get to the gym three days a week, it is one of the structures that gives you the most return per hour: a handful of big lifts, frequent technique practice and plenty of rest days. This guide gives you a ready-to-use A/B routine, from exercise selection right down to sets and reps.

Why full-body training works

In a classic body-part split, each muscle is usually trained once a week with a lot of sets in one go. A full-body plan spreads that same weekly volume over three sessions. That has three practical consequences:

• Better sets: With 3-4 sets per muscle per session, your last set looks much like your first. Cram 12 sets into one workout and the back half is mostly done under fatigue.
• More technique practice: Squatting or benching two or three times a week instead of once speeds up skill learning, especially in your first year.
• Flexibility: Miss a session and no muscle group goes untrained for the whole week. You simply push the workout back a day.

Who is it for?

A good fit if you are

• new to lifting or within your first year or two
• only able to train 2-3 days a week
• coming back after a long break
• combining lifting with running, swimming or a team sport
• dieting and want to hold on to muscle

Less suitable if

Advanced lifters who need 15-20 weekly sets per muscle group will find full-body sessions stretching past 90 minutes. And if you want to train 4-6 days a week, a split is simply easier to schedule.

Choosing exercises by movement pattern

A good full-body plan is built around movement patterns, not individual muscles. Cover most of the patterns below with one exercise each per session and no major muscle group gets left out.

When picking exercises, work through these in order:

1. Choose a variation you can do pain-free through a full range of motion. If the barbell squat bothers your shoulders or lower back, a goblet squat or leg press does the same job.
2. Favour exercises that are easy to load in small increments.
3. Stick with your choice for at least 8-12 weeks. You can only measure progress by repeating the same lift.

For technique on two of the lifts used below, see the guides to the barbell row and the overhead press.

Sample A/B full-body routine

The plan consists of two complementary workouts. Workout A is built around the squat and a horizontal push; workout B around the deadlift and a vertical push. That way every pattern gets trained heavy at least once a week and again as an accessory.

Workout A

Workout B

Each session comes to 16 working sets and takes 55-70 minutes including the warm-up. Over the week, chest, back and legs each collect roughly 9-12 sets, a volume that is productive in the early years and easy to recover from. If you want to understand where those numbers come from, read how many sets and reps you need.

Weekly layout

Alternate the workouts: A-B-A one week, B-A-B the next. After two weeks you have done each session the same number of times.

• Week 1: Mon A · Wed B · Fri A
• Week 2: Mon B · Wed A · Fri B

The actual days do not matter; Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday works just as well. What matters is leaving at least one rest day between sessions. Walking or easy cardio on the days off will not hurt your recovery. If you can only make it twice a week, do A and B once each. Progress will be slower, but it will not stop.

Intensity: how hard should your sets be?

Finish most working sets with 1-3 reps left in the tank. Going to failure on heavy compound lifts such as squats and deadlifts creates unnecessary fatigue and degrades technique, and remember that you will be training the same muscles again two days later. Taking the last set of an isolation exercise such as lateral raises or curls close to failure is not a problem. If you are unsure how to judge this, the guide to RPE and reps in reserve explains it step by step.

Do not try to speed up the session by cutting rest periods. Resting 2-3 minutes on compound lifts lets you get more reps on the next set, and the quality of the work is worth more than saving a few minutes.

Progression: double progression

A plan only works if it gets harder over time. The simplest reliable method is double progression:

1. Start with a weight you can lift for the bottom of the rep range on every set (for example 3 × 6).
2. Each session, try to add reps with the same weight: 6-6-6, then 7-7-6, then 8-8-7 and so on.
3. Once you hit the top of the range on all sets (3 × 10), add weight: 1-2.5 kg on upper-body lifts, 2.5-5 kg on lower-body lifts.
4. Start again at the bottom of the range with the new weight.

If a lift stalls for two or three sessions in a row, look at your sleep, food and rest periods first. If it still will not move, drop the weight by about 10% and build back up. Every 6-8 weeks, a lighter week with the number of sets cut in half clears accumulated fatigue.

Warm-up and session flow

• 5 minutes of easy cardio: treadmill, bike or rowing machine.
• 2-3 warm-up sets for the first compound lift: empty bar × 10, roughly 50% of your working weight × 5, roughly 75% × 3.
• For the following exercises, a single light warm-up set is usually enough.
• Short on time? Alternate the isolation exercises at the end (curls and pushdowns back to back with 45-60 seconds in between). Do not cut the rest on your compound lifts.

Common mistakes

• Adding too many exercises: 5-6 per session is enough. Add a second and third movement for every muscle and sessions drag on while quality drops.
• Taking every set to failure: This makes recovery hard when you train the same muscles three times a week.
• Constantly swapping exercises: It makes progress impossible to measure.
• Not keeping a log: If you do not know what weight and reps you did last time, you do not know what you need to beat today.
• Neglecting pulling work: Your pushing and pulling sets should be roughly equal in number.

When to move to upper/lower or push/pull/legs

The only good reason to leave full-body training is that it no longer meets your needs. Consider switching if two or more of these apply:

• Sessions regularly run past 75-90 minutes including the warm-up.
• As your working weights climb, performance on the exercises in the second half of the session drops off noticeably.
• Progress has stalled for several months despite good sleep and nutrition, and you need more volume.
• You can, and want to, train four or more days a week.

With four days available, the natural next step is an upper/lower split: each muscle is still trained twice a week, but the sessions get shorter. With five or six days, a push/pull/legs rotation becomes an option. When you switch, keep your main lifts and your progression method the same. The only thing that should change is how the sets are spread across the week.

Summary

• Full-body training is one of the most efficient set-ups for 2-3 sessions a week.
• Build the plan around movement patterns, not muscles: squat, hinge, push, pull.
• Alternate two workouts (A/B) and leave at least one rest day between sessions.
• 5-6 exercises, about 16 working sets and 55-70 minutes per session is enough.
• Stop sets 1-3 reps short of failure and rest 2-3 minutes on compound lifts.
• Add reps first, then weight, and log every session.
• Move to upper/lower or push/pull/legs once sessions get too long or you need more volume.