Guide to Building a Training Plan - Part 1
What is the best programme for {insert fitness goal here}?
“Whatever you can do consistently, week in, week out, for 52 weeks a year.”
Someone following a 3 day per week training routine regularly throughout the year will see better results than someone who follows a complex 5-6 day per week programme for 12 weeks and then stops because it is unsustainable to maintain long-term.
When looking to start a new health and fitness regime, take the time to think about one that you can realistically see yourself doing in April, July, August and December - the times of the year that normally have the most social occasions/holidays and therefore the least amount of commitment to training.
A well-structured training programme should train all 5 health-related components of fitness. This includes:
Flexibility
Muscular Strength
Muscular Endurance
Cardiovascular Fitness
Body Composition.
Ironically, we can place focus on just one of these qualities to see immediate improvement in all others - Strength.
“Absolute strength is the glass, everything else in the liquid inside. The bigger the glass, the more of everything else you can do.” - Brett Jones
Strength training is the one form of exercise that has a measurable impact on all all other aspects of health and fitness, and therefore should be the foundation of every individual’s fitness routine.
Strength develops our flexibility because it allows us to cement new found ranges of motion. By progressively loading different movement patterns outside of their normal positions, our tendons and muscle tissues adapt to ranges we would otherwise not have been able to express previously.
All forms of endurance training benefit from increased strength because they involve multiple repetitions of the same action repeatedly. Being stronger gives you access to a higher energy reserve and ensures your body is more resilient to avoid injury from repeated bouts of longer duration exercise.
And finally, whilst body composition is largely dictated by dietary control and a calorie deficit, increasing your level of strength will develop lean muscle tissue. In fact, when losing body fat, we want to preserve as much muscle tissue as possible, and the only way to do that is through a structured, progressive strength training programme.
Stay tuned for Part 2 to find out how to build a complete strength training plan.
