Full Body Exercises Split Due to Time

Question

I just purchased a book called Jim Stoppani's Encyclopedia of Muscle and Strength. I have learned quite a bit from it. With that being said, I do have a question that I thought I would ask the nice group of folks you all are.

Jim says as a beginner to do one exercise per muscle group with 3 sets with about 2.5-3 min rests three times a week. So far so good. However, I like to work out during my lunch hour since I work from home and my gym is about a minute drive. I have family life and blah blah. However, mathematically, this takes over an hour.

Is there a problem with breaking up the full body exercises? Ideas in my head were something like half the exercises during my lunch and the rest of the muscle groups after work? As a beginner, is there a way to break up the full body exercises to a 5 day week to train all groups? I could incorporate weekends too but I was just following the suggestions in the book before I built my plan.

I would do all after work, but I like the feeling of working out during lunch to help me during my day. Before work isn't an option due to daycare and I'm the one that takes the kiddo to daycare. Any helpful suggestions would be SUPER!

Answer 1

Changing the order of exercises that fit your schedule should not cause any problems. In fact, as you progress you should find yourself constantly ‘tweaking’ your routine for various reasons. Once you’ve established your training goals, changing exercises, the order of exercises, training days, reps, and sets will assist you in combating boredom and training plateaus. A natural progression would be to split your exercises per the type of work/goal(s). For example, Push/Pull. As a beginner, it’s more important to be consistent and build a good foundation before moving on to more advanced training methodologies. That also means giving yourself enough time to rest. So, keeping weekends free is not a bad thing.