Steps to designing an effective workout routine

If you have found yourself reading this article, I’ll assume that you are looking or at least interested in designing your own workout routines.

So am going to give you all the information that you require to design the most effective and efficient workouts possible for you, your body type, experience level, your work and life schedule and of course the most important what your actual goals are be it strength endurance, flexibility or weight loss.

To do this I will outline what I consider to be the 7 key components of designing the most effective workout possible.

• Your goals – this like I said above is the most important thing when it comes to designing your workout. To put this simply you need to decide why you’re working out, what you are looking to achieve from your sessions, be it increasing your strength, weight loss, build more lean muscle, improve muscle tone or improve muscular endurance. Whatever your goals me be this has to be the foundation for designing your workout.

• Your level – by this I mean what is your actual weight training experience be it beginner, intermediate or advanced. The reason you need to know this is there are many differences between the 3 levels in what you would be capable of and what will work best for you.

Beginners

As the name suggests are people who are completely new to weight training. By that I mean consistent weight training for less than 6 months, which is intelligent weight training from a set workout plan. If you had previously being doing 1 or 2 weight training sessions here or there that doesn’t count.

Intermediates

Obviously the next level up from beginners. These are people who have being training for the last 6 months or more again I mean training intelligently. If you are a true intermediate you should have couple years training under your belt and most certainly have mastered good form on all the exercises you’ve done. Also you should have progressed from simple beginner workouts to more advanced routines. The majority of people would fit into this category.

Advanced

Again advanced is the next level up from intermediate. These are people who have already trained for many years effectively, and who have achieved their goals and gains.

• Weight training frequency – this means how often you will actually be going to the gym and how many times you will work out each individual muscle group or body part in the space of a week.
• Workout split that suits your schedule – now that you know how many times you will be working out. You can easily split your routines up to suit your needs. Example if you are training a three day split you might choose to do chest and back on day 1, shoulders and arms day 2 and legs and core on day 3. Again it’s up to you that is just the most basic 3 day split.
• Your training intensity – this simply means how hard you are going to be working, what weight you will be lifting for each exercise relative to your 1 rep max, basically are you going heavy or light.
• Your volume – this means what will your rep range be high endurance 12 – 14 reps or low hypertrophy sets of 4 reps and your sets how many times you’re going to work each muscle group.
• Exercise choice – the meat and bones of your routine, you know what your rep range is you know what your goal is so now you got to pick exercise’s suited to that goal.

So, now with all these things in mind, sit down and put together your own routine.