Since the beginning of time, this knowledge has long eluded mere mortals. There are very few resources that give practical advice and current scientific evidence to assist with the construction of a workout schedule, despite its importance. There are resources that teach how to use periodized templates, immutable percentages, and prescribed “rules and principles of workout programming,” but very few that teach practical problem-solving skills that can be reapplied in new situations. However, the ideas discussed in this chapter do not just represent a new perspective on how to arrange a workout schedule. They represent a new way of thinking about strength training.
The main function of a workout schedule might be to facilitate recovery, but the vast majority of trainees value intensity for its effects on muscle growth or skill practice. This chapter is for those who have the goal of training with high intensity and presents a unique perspective on workout scheduling: that exercise scheduling is by far the most important part of training. A favorable exercise schedule provides more intensity in workout quality, thus allowing faster progression, which produces more development. We can see this in the short term by comparing the high intensity of a fresh workout quality with that of a fatigued workout quality. A fresh workout with 90% intensity creates more load and therefore more need for adaptation and growth than a fatigued workout. We can also see this in the long term by aggregating all these highest workout intensities from month to month.
Setting Fitness Goals
Creating an effective workout schedule can be a tough task. It comes down to setting fitness goals and creating a schedule that gives you the best chance of reaching them. Whether you are trying to put on more muscle, lose weight, improve your cardiovascular system, or do all three, more effective and efficient pathways can be undertaken.
Goal Setting: The starting point of an effective workout schedule starts with goal-setting. Setting goals should bring a lot of excitement for what’s to come. Write your objectives down to make it real. Consider what would be possible to achieve over a couple of months or years with a realistic possibility of failure. There are many different possibilities in terms of the goals that you want to write down. Perhaps you want to lose some body fat and get pretty shredded. Or maybe you want to lift heavier weights on the bench press or squat. It’s all good. Just make sure that it’s something that counts for you. Next, consider how long it would take to reach that goal. If you had a large goal in mind, you will need at least a year to work out realistically.
Understanding Different Types of Workouts
A strong and effective workout regimen balances various components of exercise, such as cardiovascular work (often referred to as “cardio”), strength training, and flexibility and mobility work. These components are sometimes broken down into isolated categories such as agility, balance, and core strength, but generally any workout performed will balance some of these components. At times, such as when an individual is in the early phases of developing a workout plan, separated and isolated exercises are employed to increase brain and body awareness and to prevent over-exertion. This type of exercise often leads to a plateau in weight loss and a significant decrease in lean muscle tone, which negatively affects health and decreases metabolism. Balancing strength workouts with flexibility and mobility workouts prevents muscle memory patterns and overuse injury types, such as strains and sprains.
There is no mandatory order to completing workouts, but regularly rotating which exercises are completed first can increase agility and improve body and brain function. Cardiovascular workouts generally get the most prominent spot in the workout schedule; however, strength and flexibility workouts can also be scheduled first. Customizing exercise time lengths for each workout can prevent overuse injuries, provide for an individual’s movement pattern and brain exercise, and increase weight loss, strength, and general health. Balancing an exercise schedule is a complex topic and is explored further throughout the manual.
Cardiovascular Exercises
Cardiovascular (cardio) exercise is a form of exercise that targets your heart and circulatory system, which is also known as the cardiovascular system. The primary purpose of cardio exercises is to keep your ticker healthy. Of course, there’s much more to it than that—here are some benefits to doing regular cardio:
1. Calorie burning: Cardio is one of the higher calorie-burning activities.
2. Mental health: Many reports indicate that doing regular cardio can help reduce the risks of developing anxiety and depression. A quick run or jog gives your body a quick endorphin rush.
3. Heart strengthening: Regular cardio exercises keep the blood vessels and arteries flexible, reducing the risks of high blood pressure.
4. Blood sugar: Doing cardio ensures that the amount of glucose in the bloodstream is taken to the muscles to be used as energy, reducing the risk of diabetes.
5. Metabolism: Boosts metabolism to burn more calories at rest.
Before adding any type of cardio to your schedule, you should determine a few things. To start, think about your current health and fitness levels. What do you want? Your personal trainer can consider these questions when handing you a cardio exercise guide:
1. What is your goal?
2. Do you need a low-impact or high-impact exercise?
3. When should you jump into cardio?
4. How often should you include cardio?
5. How should you warm up and cool down?
6. Best cardio exercises.
Strength Training
Incorporate exercises utilizing our muscles to help us move and have balance into our schedule. These exercises will lift our potential to get enough power and stamina. Training could take two main forms – resistance training and body resistance exercises. The aim of both methods is to improve and reinforce muscle stamina, thereby improving muscle mass.
Exercises that call for you to perform a seated knee lift or knee extension can tighten the muscles in any area. These core balance exercises would help level your heart using legs, abdominal, stomach, and back muscles. Incorporating muscle-strengthening habits three or more times a week will boost the advantages of general fitness. There are tons of positives that come from workout and building muscle strength. This will allow bone density to rise and guard against osteoporosis, help in burning calories, boost muscle strength and stamina, and help to increase mental health. Numerous techniques and methodologies inform strength training. You can change settings, size, repetitions, sets, and speed. You can also use spinning, lifting dumbbells, barbells, and resistance bands, or perform push-ups sitting on the floor.
Flexibility and Mobility Work
Keeping a long-term focus on health, fitness, and performance should include flexibility and mobility work. Specifically, a focus on developing “apt” body maintenance personalization and following some key direct work and warm-up techniques can make a great difference. Movement is often neglected when designing workout programs. However, maintaining our range of motion and mobility can improve our performance and decrease our chance of injury. Using a mixture of strength in different ranges of motion, we can cover many areas to make sure we are hitting all ways that the hips come into play in physical training. Conditioning involves being awesome at long, slow, low-energy practice, short, burning, whole-body practice, and everything in between. Rounding out the three musketeers of conditioning is flexibility.
Flexibility/mobility training is commonly seen as the redheaded stepchild of human performance training. As an athlete progresses in any training program, particular points of emphasis that compete for valuable training space time are: overall athleticism, weight lifting, and performance. However, humans are animals, and we need to move like animals. Just being mobile and out of pain is a tremendous benefit that takes little time investment. I urge you to play around with it, especially if pain is something you deal with on a semi-regular basis. Exercises for flexibility/mobility. While controlled flexibility was documented to be less effective in the short term compared to a no-stretch warm-up in increasing maximal force production in local muscle groups, stretching should be considered in favor of the con for its “benefits from stretching if combined with a sport-specific warm-up and a reassurance of the no significant decrease of battlefield coping during fence when pre-exercise utilized.”
Factors to Consider When Designing a Schedule
Creating an effective workout schedule depends on numerous factors, and one of the most important is the time that is available. At certain points in your life, you may have an abundance of free time, while other points are jam-packed with work, family obligations, and more. Due to these time constraints, you may not be able to have the exact schedule you want. This is okay.
Another crucial factor to be considered when creating a workout schedule is your current fitness level. For those who are beginners, it is suggested to start with two to three workouts each week. However, pregnant women or those with low endurance may benefit from starting with a shorter workout routine three times per week.
It’s also important to note that rest and recovery are crucial factors to reach the highest level of peak performance. Doing too much work without enough rest can cause overuse, overtraining syndrome, among many other chronic conditions. Recovery varies individually and depends on the individual’s use of proper nutrition, hydration, along with age, gender, amount of sleep, stress management, genetic makeup, exercise intensity, and total volume of exercise (frequency, intensity, and time).
Generally, workouts to target different muscles should be done either as an upper body/lower body or push/pull workout. Push workouts generally train the muscles in the chest, shoulders, and the back of the forearm. Pull workouts generally work on the muscles in the back and top of the forearm. Rest your muscles for at least 48 hours before working on that muscle group again.
Time Availability
The starting point for designing a workout schedule is your daily schedule to estimate how much time you can spare for workouts. Although this step may sound pedestrian, it is paramount in creating an effective workout plan ensuring maximum feasibility coupled with sustainability. Given a shortage of time, many people turn to the advice of specialists, including personal trainers. Nevertheless, such specialists do not have access to exact and detailed information about our schedules. We have to hear their recommendations taking into account the specifics of our daily rhythms, habits, and a sequence of daily activities within all 24 hours.
Because time is a substantial factor that will largely influence our workout schedules, devoting attention to it is crucial. Understanding one’s own schedule remarkably influences when a new exercise regimen can be integrated into a pattern of everyday activities, priorities and habits. Thus, we are able to ascertain the times at which one is both free and perceptive to take on a conscious decision to engage in WF. Furthermore, we can predict the frequency of WF during these periods to evaluate the significance of a usual workout plan.
Fitness Level
There are so many resources available to you online to help you decide what kind of workouts or exercise routines to take part in, as well as classes at local gyms and fitness centers. But, have you considered your individual fitness level when choosing these types of resources? For example, if your current workout routine is an advanced type of yoga class when your body has maybe never taken a yoga class before, this can cause injury, damage, and sprains. Initially, starting with a beginner yoga class or yoga introduction course would be so much more efficient as the workout or exercise routine has been tailored around your individuality.
One way to determine how to accomplish this is to start with a variety of basic foundational moves or exercises. You could subtract the amount of reps available or you could supplement a few reps for extra work. Maybe you can start by only doing fewer repetitions every minute for the workouts in 10-20 minutes, and as you get stronger and more confident, that can increase to more repetitions. Prior to choosing an exercise or workout, it is important to first determine where you currently sit on the fitness spectrum and then base all decisions off of that knowledge. By doing this, you are given more power than you think. It is crucial that all workouts or exercises modify into tailor fit personal workouts for you specifically and this will create the best results in the fastest amount of time.
Rest and Recovery
It is impossible to talk about programming without addressing the importance of rest and recovery. When it comes to the biological processes behind adaptation, the actual work portion of a workout is only a part of the puzzle. Muscles grow and heal during rest, and the body does not differentiate between stress from strength training, conditioning, poor nutrition, and other outside stressors such as work or relationships. If the body does not have adequate time to recover, whether from an individual workout or from a period of workouts, the physical adaptations that result in increased strength, muscle mass, or overall fitness simply will not occur. Lack of recovery can lead to symptoms such as fatigue, overall mental and physical excess stress, sickness, overtraining, reduced exercise performance, as well as increased soreness, pain, and injury risk. A marker of overreaching (a milder form of overtraining) that strikes many individuals that play sports is sleep disturbances or feeling tired despite what should be adequate rest.
Though research on the topic is limited and difficult to conduct, the primary danger of overtraining is substantial and potentially permanent injury. Overtraining has been shown to cause changes in brain biochemistry, cortisol dysregulation, overall hormonal imbalance, and muscle atrophy. In 2009, a consensus statement was released by scientists who had convened in a conference line to consider the topic of overtraining. They concluded that, though it is difficult to test for overtraining definitively through one specific indicator, all available data from a variety of sources points to the fact that overtraining is a real, dangerous, and unfortunately common risk for athletes.
Building a Balanced Workout Schedule
The key to creating a workout schedule that will help you achieve your fitness goals starts with understanding the general principles and main points that make a workout effective. This is why the first three sections of this four-part guide walked the reader through the relevant aspects: the critical components of fitness, how they express themselves and can be trained, exercise selection, and periodization. With this background, you should now be equipped to create a workout schedule that will help you build muscle and strength, improve your cardiovascular fitness, and reduce your body fat.
In general, every exercise schedule should contain: flexibility exercises, designed to increase the range of motion and range of motion of the major joints; endurance exercises, beneficial for the cardiorespiratory system; and resistance-based exercises, designed to improve the strength, endurance, and range of motion of the major joints of the body. Flexibility exercises are best done at the end of a workout when the body is warmed up. A good schedule includes at least 30-40 minutes of daily exposure to aerobic exercises (walking, cycling, jogging, etc.) three times a week. In addition to their own community exercises, two resistance (strength) exercises should be performed that target the muscles behind the thighs, thighs, buttocks, arms, chest, abdomen, back, and shoulders. The participant should do 8-10 exercises for the major muscle groups, performing 1-3 sets to power. In terms of endurance, three types of resistance should be used: low, medium, and high resistance exercises.
Staying Consistent and Adapting the Schedule
Continuity is key.
There’s no magic behind setting an effective workout schedule. A workout schedule only works with consistent application. It doesn’t matter your workout schedule or your diet plan. Everything you do only matters if you keep doing it day in and day out. Pick a schedule that works for you and stick to it. Now you should know plenty about building effective workout schedule plans, let us wrap up the article by looking a few tips for staying consistent. Over time, your schedule will need to change if your goals or lifestyle change, as well. This can be especially true when it comes to changes in your workout schedule due to injury, a new job, or a change in school schedules or home life. Just remember: it’s better to do something than to do nothing at all. Even if you only get in 2 workouts per week, that’s better than doing nothing at all. As you get used to your new schedule, see if you can up it to 3 or 4 days.
You can adapt your schedule to work out correctly if you learn how to identify problems before they become full-blown roadblocks to weight loss, and avoid potential diet disasters, you will have a better chance of sticking to your schedule. Bundling slow outerwear, tying the kick from your favorite spin class, or looking for any built-in workout window is the only way to make the weekly plan work. If you follow a travel schedule for the holidays or are actively relaxing at an alluring speed, using your work would be out of place. This is so valid and important to ask for support if you need it. Asking someone who can help you support you in a therapy session on how to keep up with your activities increases the likelihood of calculating how to fit your workouts better. Going out of 29 studies demonstrates that combining exercise and nutrition will make it harder for you to hold onto those who will conduct an experiment that will help you achieve established goals. A post-exercise protein carbohydrate reduces the protein that corresponds to the total muscle calories.