How To Do A Perfect Workout For Beginners And Pro

A Beginner Workout Plan for Your First Week in the Gym | Planet Fitness

The Perfect Workout

Does a perfect workout exist, or is it just a myth? There is no single perfect plan for everyone, but there is a best plan for your goals and fitness level.

Whether you want to burn fat, build muscle or improve your health, a good plan includes the right exercises, a warm-up, sensible sets and reps, rest, and steady progression.

Perfect workout plan

Choosing a plan that fits your goals and schedule makes it easier to stay motivated.

How do you prepare a perfect workout plan? Here is how:

Start by assessing yourself.

Any plan starts with an assessment, and that is true with workout plans. Before you begin with any workout program, consider things like:

Your conditioning: this includes your resting heart rate and how quickly your heart rate recovers after effort. According to MedlinePlus, a normal resting heart rate for adults is 60 to 100 beats per minute. Well-trained athletes may be as low as 40 to 60.

Your mobility: mobility is your ability to move your joints through their full range of motion with control. It is related to, but different from, flexibility, which is how far a muscle can stretch.

Simple checks include touching your toes, standing on one leg and doing a bodyweight squat. If any of these cause pain, get it checked before adding load or intensity.

Your physique: this includes your body weight and, if you can measure it, your body-fat percentage.

Your strength: how many pushups can you do? Can you squat or deadlift with good form?

These checks give you a picture of where you are starting. If your mobility or conditioning is poor, build those up before jumping into high-intensity interval training (HIIT).

Set your goal

Start with why you want to work out. Maybe it is to lose weight, improve your health or build muscle. Your goal should guide which exercises you include.

For general health, the CDC recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week plus muscle-strengthening on 2 days.

For instance, if your goal is to add muscle, include exercises like the overhead press, chin-up and incline dumbbell curl. If you want to lose fat, keep strength training in your plan too, because it helps you hold on to muscle while you diet. Add cardio such as HIIT or steady-state work to burn extra calories.

Learn good movement patterns

Your fitness exercises should consist of mainly multi-joint workouts based on specific movement patterns, such as:

Lower-body push including lunge and squat

Lower-body pull including deadlift, hip-hinge, single-leg deadlift, and Romanian deadlift, among others

Upper-body push including military press, pushup, bench press

Upper-body pull including pullups, lat pulldowns, and chin-ups

Core exercises such as chops, weighted carries, planks, Turkish get-ups and crawls

Balance single-leg movements such as split squats, walking lunges, lateral squats, and reverse lunges.

Multi-joint exercises work several muscle groups at once, so they give you more training in less time.

Include warm-up

A warm-up prepares you mentally and physically for training. Five to ten minutes of light cardio and lighter sets of your first exercise is enough for most people.

Warming up raises your heart rate and increases blood flow to your muscles. Warm muscles move more freely, which may help lower injury risk.

It also lets you rehearse the movements before the heavy sets, so your form is sharper when it counts.

Provide structure

A good workout has a sensible order. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends doing large-muscle exercises before small ones, multi-joint exercises before single-joint ones, and higher-intensity work before lower-intensity work.

If you leave the heaviest lifts until you are tired, your form suffers and injury risk goes up.

So put exercises like deadlifts, bench presses and squats first. Then move on to lighter exercises such as planks and biceps curls.

Decide suitable sets and reps.

The number of sets and repetition depends on your fitness goals. A set in training refers to a group or collective of repetitions done for a single exercise without stopping. For instance, if you do 15 pushups without resting, you have just done a single set of pushups containing 15 reps.

Most programs use about 3 to 5 sets per exercise. ACSM recommends that beginners use a weight they can lift about 8 to 12 times per set.

You don't need to train to complete exhaustion on every set. Stopping a rep or two short of failure is safer, especially for beginners and on heavy lifts.

A rep is simply repetition, and it refers to one complete motion of a movement.

Rest

Just like a warm-up, rest is an essential part of training. Rest is the downtime between sets that lets you catch your breath and recover strength.

The right amount depends on your goal. ACSM recommends 3 to 5 minutes between heavy strength sets, 1 to 2 minutes for muscle building, and under 90 seconds for muscular endurance with lighter weights.

Tweak constantly your workout plan

Once your body adapts to a workout, progress slows. That is why you should adjust your plan as you get stronger.

For instance, if you started with 30kgs of weightlift and can now do one or two reps more than your target, ACSM suggests increasing the load by about 2% to 10%.