For many people who want to get stronger and into better shape, the question usually arises – “What is the best workout plan to follow?” There are literally hundreds of plans and programs to choose from. The average person seldom understands what makes one program better or worse than another and often ends up frustrated trying to make sense of things. Add into the mix the frustration of not knowing if what you’ve been investing your time and effort into will even work, and many people get so frustrated they consider just throwing in the towel on trying to figure it all out. After more than 25 years of training experience, I have tried a little of everything. Let me use my experience to help you understand what is the right plan for you.
Over the years, I have trained in virtually every manner you could imagine. As a boy, I began Olympic weightlifting and am thankful to this day for the early coaching I had access to. As I got older, I experimented with bodybuilding for several years, German volume training, a method called “Power Factor”, triathlon training, long-distance running, Navy seal-style training, bodyweight-only exercises, CrossFit, yoga, cycling, powerlifting, and the list could go on. Always looking for the best progress possible, I tried virtually everything that claimed it would work – even buying into the hairbrained idea for a while that it if was simply “hard”, it must be awesome, so the harder the better! I don’t endorse this, by the way. But here’s the secret … They all worked. Yep, every last one of the programs I tried all worked!
Fitness Training Routines
The reason why is simple – they worked because I made them work. I poured myself wholly into each new program. I learned about them and committed to doing them to a “T”. I stuck to a strict regimen of training, I seldom ever missed workouts, and I applied consistent and sincere effort every time I trained, and they all produced results for me. Over time, I learned that no matter what you are training for, if you stick to it long enough and get serious about it, all training is eventually hard work that requires grit and determination to adhere to over the long term. That’s true no matter if it’s running, bodybuilding, Olympic weightlifting, or CrossFit. And if you ever intend to make meaningful progress in your training, you will in fact need to stick to it over the long haul. So you may be asking, “If all programs work, then isn’t one just as good as another”? The short answer is no.
Yes, all the programs worked for me and not just me, but they would work for the majority of other people as well. I’m not a particularly gifted athlete, but I am disciplined, and anyone can learn to be disciplined if they so choose. There are, however, some legitimate reasons why some programs are better than others. There are, of course, simple biological principles that apply to the human organism with regard to training. Some programs seem to account for such things better than others. It would be a deeper dive to get into some of those things than I intend to do here. Suffice it to say for now that the right program for you will need to be aligned with the rules of biology in order to produce favorable results over the long-term. After that, it simply needs to be something that you can adhere to. I eventually left so many of the programs I had done when they became too grueling to stick to long-term. I later learned many things I was doing were too extreme to do long term – but no one tells you that up front. You find it out the hard way, which is unnecessarily exhausting at best and injurious at worst. I hope to save you from making these mistakes yourself. A program may be touted as “perfect”, but if you can’t adhere to it consistently, it simply will not work for you. Bear in mind that everything will work at first – simply because it is a novel stress you are not adapted to. But I’m talking about finding programs that will work not just for weeks or a couple of months, but rather for many months and even years.
Finding a Fitness Training Routine
The name of the game then is finding the program that will deliver the most optimal results and tailoring it as needed to make it doable for you so that you will stick to it. As a coach, I am always helping my clients find the right fit for them. It’s a matter of understanding their goals and weighing them against their limitations in order to fit them to the right program. Perhaps their limitations are time constraints, physical disability and/or deconditioning, and sometimes psychological limitations. Finding the right fit usually involves some trial and error. In large part, it comes down to understanding the biology behind what causes progress to occur and then finding a program that is sustainable for each client. To keep my clients progressing, I am constantly charting their progress and studying it regularly to determine if they are starting to slow down and need to make an adjustment to the program. I’m also constantly observing my clients’ emotional and psychological state to make programming decisions. You can do these things for yourself by keeping a training log for every workout and recording all weights, sets, and reps for each exercise and making brief notes as to how you feel each session. Are you always fatigued or constantly struggling with feeling unmotivated or overly anxious about the workouts? These are all things to make note of, as they may be signs you are beginning to enter into a state of being over-trained. If your program is simply beating you down, it doesn’t matter how well it is “supposed” to work. It evidently is not working well for you, and scaling it back, if not changing it altogether, is likely in order.
Developing Your Personal Fitness Training Routine
If you are in the pursuit of finding what works for you, I recommend looking to strike a balance between what it is you need to be doing plus what it is you like to do or at least find most tolerable. That being said, sometimes we all need to do a gut-check. Legitimate training is in fact difficult. It is meant to be, and it needs to be. Be honest with yourself if you need to toughen up and develop a little grit. Training is a discipline, and it’s not all fun and games, but progress is what makes it worth it, and there is no substitute for how good being healthy and strong feels! Everyone needs to improve and/or maintain their strength, and I have clear benchmarks established to direct those decisions. Everyone also needs to maintain a certain level of what we call GPP (general physical preparedness) or work capacity. Some might also refer to this as “conditioning”.
In closing, try to find the right mix of what you need to do with enough of what you like to do so that you will stick to it over the long-term. Sticking to it is the real secret to success. If you stick to the program, you will eventually realize your goals. It may not be the optimal plan, and your success may take longer than it could have, but if you won’t stick to the optimal plan, you won’t have success at all, and that is unacceptable. In the end, it’s not as important that you find the perfect, most optimal training plan that ever existed. It’s most important you find the most optimal one that you will enjoy doing and that will be the most optimal one for you. The best success in physical training comes to those who do it the most consistently over the longest period of time. Train with that mindset, and you will realize your goals.