What Should I Do? Picking a New Workout Program
A new year has arrived and you’ve decided to make a change. You want to change your health for the better. Now what? Do you go get a gym membership, do you go for a run, do you buy home workout DVDs. With the ever expanding market of fitness, it can become increasingly difficult to decide how and what should be done. We are going to take a look at how you should decide what you should be spending your effort and money on.
The first thing to know is that training should be focused on one or two of the 9 physiological principles of exercise. The 9 principles are skill, speed, power, strength, hypertrophy (growing bigger muscles), muscular endurance, physiological endurance, VO2 max, and long duration endurance. Any other adaptation you are trying to achieve is governed more by diet and nutrition and not exercise. The next thing to know is that application of an exercise determines the outcome, and not the exercise. In other words, there is not a specific exercise that will make a certain result. There is no specific exercise that will grow big arms. Training with specific repetitions, sets, rest times and weight will grow big arms, but not Joe Schmo’s magic arm exercise. Knowing those facts will help you avoid spending unnecessary money, time and effort on programs and “hacks” that often leave consumers feeling disappointed and discouraged when they don’t pan out.
So now that you know the physiological things we can change with exercise, we will circle back to your goals. When you start a workout program, you should know what you want to get out of it. Let's say you want to lose weight. Well, that is largely based on nutrition and being in a calorie deficit (more on that later this month). But what helps us lose weight is having more metabolically active tissue (muscle). So pairing your diet with some muscle building exercises (hypertrophy) will help speed up results. Many individuals want to get stronger but don’t want to look “bulky or manly” or want to “tone.” If we go back to our 9 principles and look, they want to do strength training and not hypertrophy training. This means staying with heavier weights with repetition ranges around 3-5 and avoiding repetition ranges 8-30. This is actually quite the opposite of what many of these individuals do as they associate heavy weights with big muscles. Yes, they will put on some muscle mass, as any weight training does stimulate some muscle growth, but they will avoid the “bulky” look they so despise. Maybe you want to be a better pitcher, these require skill, speed, power and a touch of muscular endurance. So should you be doing curls for sets of 10 to grow bigger arms? No! That is targeting hypertrophy, not one of the principles that will actually help you become a better pitcher.
By understanding what your training is actually targeting, you will be able to not waste time in the gym and focus on what you really want.
