Designing your own workout routine

The first thing you need to do is to stop and think of your reason for starting an exercise routine. Everyone has something they might want to improve with the help of a good workout routine, but that’s the problem they don’t know where to start. That’s where I come in.

Determining your goals

One could have a variety of goals from simple weight loss to advanced routines designed for improved athletic performance. To start off just write a couple goals you would like to achieve by following this routine. Then you need to decide reasonable short and long term goals you would like to achieve along the way.

Keep it simple

The vast majority of individuals in the fitness industry get caught up on fad workouts, and are always looking for that easy exercise that gets results. Let me be the first to tell you there is no such thing Exercise should always be a challenge. If exercise becomes easy you are wasting your time, unless you are incorporating rest weeks into your training. The best exercises out there are actually the oldest and best known exercises. Squats, deadlifts, rows, bench press, shoulder presses ………… are all exercises that achieve the greatest results in the shortest amount of time. To sum it up for you; your best bet is to keep workouts relatively short and chose compound or closed chained exercises. If you are a beginner start out on machines and learn the technique for as many compound movements as you can. Nothing can beat the physiological demands free weights put on your body especially squats.

Training splits

What I mean by this is what is your break down of muscles trained or exercises trained in the span of a week. Many bodybuilders will train only one muscle group for an entire workout. I don’t recommend doing this if you want strength, power, or speed. I don’t want to go into to much on program design, because it is beyond the scope of this article, but the best splits for most people will be a 2-4 day split of either upper body/lower body split or a total body routine.

Sets and reps

Your sets and reps will vary depending on your goals but the most common would be a pyramid of 3-4 working sets of a descending reps range. For example set one will be 12 reps, set two would be 10 reps, set three would be 8 reps, and the final set would be 6 reps. The desired rep ranges for a certain goal will change depending on who you ask, but here are my beliefs. For power 1-3, for strength 3-6, hypertrophy 6-12, endurance 12 and up. Of course they blend and intertwine and even might not be exact ranges for everyone due to neurological of physiological differences.

Don’t forget the most important muscle

Make sure to incorporate cardiovascular exercise as well resistance exercise into your program. Depending on your goals you should be doing at least 20 min. of high intensity exercise 3 days a week if cleared to do so by a doctor. Now don’t go out and run until you die of a myocardial infarction (heart attack), but you should be working at about 60 to 85 percent of your heart rate reserve. This is simple to calculate by knowing your age predicted max heart rate which is 220-your age in years. To find your heart rate reserve take your age predicted heart rate max-resting heart rate* percent desired to train at+ resting heart rate. You can also just train at 60 to 85 percent of your age predicted max heart rate which is not as accurate but easier to calculate.

Want more let me know this was a very brief and over simplified article on the basics of designing your own workout routine if you would like me to go into more depth let me know what you would like to cover. Thanks for reading.