The Perfect Workout
Does a perfect workout exist, or is it just a myth? Of course, there is an ideal workout plan out there; otherwise, you wouldn’t be seeing people with ripped and toned bodies on your social media feeds. Be it you want to burn fat, build muscles, improve your health or athleticism, a perfect workout plan should help you achieve your targets. A great workout contains the necessary elements to deliver quick and effective results safely.
Perfect workout plan
Choosing the right workout plan will allow you to maintain your motivation throughout your exercise journey.
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 involves your resting heart rate and how long your heart rate takes to recover. A standard resting heart rate is usually between 60 and 100 beats per 60 seconds for adults, and a lower heart rate at rest signifies efficient heart condition and better cardio fitness.
Your mobility–mobility means your ability to put your legs or arms through a sweeping range motion. It is different from flexibility, which involves lengthening or stretching your muscles. If you have excellent mobility, it means that your arms or legs can make different types of controlled movements. To test your mobility range, try to touch your toes, stand on one leg, or squat. If you feel any pain when performing mobility movement, it means you will not be able to do specific workouts effectively.
Your physique – your physique includes your body-fat percentage and overall body weight.
Your strength – can you do pushups and how many? Can you do power lifts?
Assessing the above factors, you will have a clear picture of where you are physically and the types of workouts to include in your plan. For instance, if you have lousy mobility, it means you will not be able to do HIIT (High-intensity interval training); and if your conditioning is not ideal, maybe focus on that first before you engage in high-intensity programs.
Set your goal
This should be easy. What causes you to think you need to work out? Maybe it is to lose weight, improve your overall health, or get a six-pack, but whatever it is, it should guide you on the type of exercises you should include in your workout plan.
For instance, if your goal is to add muscle, consider including workouts like overhead press, chin-up, and incline dumbbell biceps. On the other hand, if you want to burn some fat, there is no need to include the workouts mentioned above in your plan because they will not drive enough metabolic rate for fat burn like HIIT training.
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, ad crawls
Balance single-leg movements such as split squats, walking lunges, lateral squats, and reverse lunges.
When you include these multi-joint exercises into your workout plans, you will be able to achieve your goals faster since they help burn lots of calories.
Include warm-up
Warm-up is vital in the workout. It prepares you both mentally and physically for your exercises; thus, your body will not function optimally during training sessions and could even cause injuries without a proper warm-up.
When you warm up, you allow blood to flow all around the body, which increases the blood in the muscles. This, in turn, allows the muscles to be elasticated, enabling them to deliver oxygen to all parts of the body and prevent soreness and injury.
Warm-up also controls body temperature and helps produce sweat, which subsequently helps cool down the body during the exercise. It can also boost nerve impulses conductivity, which allows muscles to move effortlessly and help sustain balance.
Provide structure
A perfect workout should have a structure to deliver the desired results. For example, heavier and complex exercises should come first right after the warm-up. If you put heavier workouts last when you are tired, you will not work your muscles properly, and you risk getting an injury.
So do certain exercises like deadlifts, bench presses, and squats prioritized in your workout plan. Once you finish these workouts, you can then move on to lighter exercises such as planks and bicep 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.
Generally, a single workout usually requires 3 to 5 sets. It is rare to find an exercise that requires 6 or 8 sets. While most trainers will recommend you do 3 or 5 sets of 10 reps, I would advise that you do until exhaustion.
A rep is simply repetition, and it refers to one complete motion of a movement.
Rest
Just like a warm-up, rest is also an essential component of training. Ret refers to the amount of downtime you need between sets to catch your breath or regain strength to move to the next set.
The amount of time you need depends on your goals. For example, if your aim is building strength, consider resting for at least one minute or more between your sets. For calories burning, rest for 30 seconds or less, and muscle building rest for around 30 seconds and one minute.
Tweak constantly your workout plan
If your body gets used to specific exercises, they will not yield meaningful results, which is why you need to refine your workout plan depending on how you are progressing. For instance, if you started with 30kgs of weightlift and now feel more muscular, increase the weight or sets and reps so that your body can progressively adapt.
Amazon Affiliate Disclaimer
As an affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases. We get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.