What a Good Training Program Should Look Like
WHEN you first start working out, you go to the gym and start exercising, doing what you know. However, when you go to a personal trainer, they always start you off with an assessment. Why is that?
This is because an assessment gives you a baseline of your starting point in terms of movement. It allows us trainers to see how we can modify an exercise to fit your current movement patterns, and how to progress those modified exercises to improve your movement patterns while also increasing your strength and improving your look. So even though you asked for just one thing: to look good; the rest is necessary so you can exercise properly to look good. You limit your results if you avoid the technical part of training.
The Assessment
The first step is the assessment which is based on:
What your posture is like: Are your joints aligned? They should be stacked in a neutral position to avoid injury.
What your stability is like: Are you able to maintain posture against opposing forces?
What your mobility is like: how are you moving against gravity?
What your movement is like: It should be smooth, controlled, and coordinated based on a point of stability.
Are you able to dissociate movements between different parts of your body?
Are you able to create a mind-muscle connection?
Even though your goal is to look great, your movement precedes your goal. If you’re unable to move properly, you’re not going to perform the exercise properly, leading to injury, hopelessness, wasted time and money. Improving your movement patterns will also get you to your results faster. For example if you’re finally able to squat to depth, that means you’re able to control your upper body, your core, your glutes and your legs. This means you can use your whole body to perform this movement, and if you’re using your whole body, you will be able to use more weight. This also means you will be building a lot more muscle than when you were using lighter weights with less than ideal form.
Your Program
Your program must address your main goal: Your main goal may be to lose fat, gain muscle, get strong, look like a bikini or fitness model or even compete in a show. All of these goals have different variables such as sets, reps, volume, intensity. These variables are affected by external factors such as how many days a week you can train, how long you can train for, what your recovery is like, what your nutrition is like, and what equipment you have available.
Your program must have built-in progression. Doing the same thing over and over again is no good, but neither is doing completely different things week to week. A good program must have a logical progression for your goal.
Your program must have a warm up sequence which should be based on what exercises you will be doing in your training session that day. For example, running before a bench workout does not make logical sense. Running before any workout makes no sense actually as you’re using up energy that you' need for training. Think of all the exercises you’re going to do, and think of how you can warm up each muscle and movement that is going to be involved in those exercises. For example, for squats it’s ideal to warm up the muscles like your abs, glutes, legs, upper and mid back, and after that it’s recommended to warm up the movement itself by doing a few bodyweight squats.
Your program should also have a post-workout mobility or yoga sequence. Think of all the exercises you did. What muscles did you overuse? What areas are tight?
Make sure your program is actually created for the result you want. You should not have to eat 1200 calories or less on a good program. If a program is doing its job, you don’t have to starve yourself to get results.
Includes a way to measure your progress, which are better mobility, stability, movement, strength, endurance, physical body changes, and internal organ health overtime.
What all of this means is that no matter how much or how hard you train, you’re likely missing some important components of training. This can be very disheartening to someone who is working hard but not seeing results, and can’t figure out why. Most times the smallest thing needs to be corrected to get major results.
I hope this helped you, and as always, get in touch with me for your custom program or coaching!
