Time for a review.

When it comes to your program, today is a rest day. So rest! No “have to make up the workout I missed”. No “I can sneak in an extra day ’cause I’m trying to lose that extra pound this week”. So, while you’re enjoying your day off from the gym, read through this little blurb about long term exercise success. When it comes to achieving long-term success for your exercise goals, three words come to mind: Planning, Planning, and Review. Why plan your activities By planning your upcoming week of exercises, you can add it to your weekly calendar. Adding your exercise appointment to your calendar for the week, because you know know approximately how long the workout will take, lets you avoid overlapping meetings, or other “entanglements”. Not only does planning help you schedule your appointments and avoid conflicts, it also helps you know exactly what to do when you get to your gym. Maybe the routine requires that you grab some dumb bells, a mat and a medicine ball. Knowing that before you start means you can collect the equipment right away. Staying with the planned rhythm and cadence of the workout (rest time/work time) is important to get the most out of it. Planning also gives you an opportunity to review the results of your last workout. What kind of resistance did you use? How much/how heavy was it? How did you feel afterwards? Was it too light? Too heavy? Were you able to maintain good form throughout each exercise, for every set? These are all important questions to know the answers to, before your next iteration through the routine. Get a notebook Reviewing an exercise isn’t just understanding how to perform it. It’s also tracking the results of the exercise. How you felt when you were done with it. How much resistance (weight, typically) you used and whether using that weight was appropriate for your fitness and strength level, considering the number of repetitions and sets you had to do. Get a trusty notebook, bring it with you. Make notes about how you feel after each exercise. Notice how we’ve included some tracking fields beneath each exercise in the descriptions? There is one field for each of the sets of exercises the routine expects/requests that you do. The weight field may be a numeric weight, or it could be a text description (i.e. “Blue resistance band”). The reps field, well that’s the number of times you actually did the exercise in that set. Make sure you use these fields! The best time is during your exercise routine. That’s when the info is the most fresh. If you’ve planned your routine in advance, by reviewing your previous results, you may find you’re unable to complete (for instance) 10 repetitions with the blue resistance band. That’s OK. We never expected you to be a ready-made workout machine. We expect you to progress. Progression when it comes to working out can be a lot of things. It be adding another repetition. It can be changing the amount of resistance to something more heavy for you. It can also be doing a variation of an exercise that’s more complex at the same number of repetitions and resistance. Or, it could be a combination of any of these. The point is, if you don’t plan, don’t record, and don’t review your workouts, having progression becomes near impossible. After all how will you know if you progress if you haven’t recorded what you did and how well you did it? Lastly, how will your coach know what you’ve done in the gym that week? You have to tell us. And the easiest way to tell your coach is by using the tracking fields on the routine description. (PS: This is why the workout routine is only available electronically; so you can more easily keep yourself and your coach informed of your progress in the gym.) Why is progression important? Your body adapts to the workout. That may sound like a good thing, but it’s not. In this case, your body adapting to a workout means the benefits of the workout, even though performed at the same intensity, number of repetitions and resistance, diminish. You’ll burn fewer calories because your body has learned how to optimize it’s energy consumption during this workout. Your body will also stop adapting by decreasing the growth of lean body mass (i.e. non-fatty tissue). Neither of which we would suspect is a goal of yours… Now what? Since it’s a Sunday, swing on over to the Workout Archives page and take a look at what’s coming up next week. Compare the upcoming week to your progress so far. Then develop a plan. A plan that includes what you’re going to be doing in the gym, what equipment you’ll need and when you’re planning on being there. It doesn’t have to be the equivalent of the battle plan for the invasion of Normandie. But you should have thought through things like equipment, progression and resistance (based on experience so far). And maybe even have written it down in your (new) trusty old workout notebook. Allright? Ok, now take a few minutes and let us know how you’re doing in the Daily Assignment form below. … This content is for Online Personal Training members only.Log In or Sign Up...