Good workout routines are difficult to find and, ideally, are individualized and structured based on your injury and medical history, your experience levels, and your goals for training. There is never a “one size fits all” approach, and for good reason. As a society, we love fads. Clothing, haircuts, music and…exercise.
Over the years, we’ve seen many transitions in the fitness worlds: from calisthenics to weightlifting to crossfit to soulcycle to barry’s to orangetheory. Some may call it an “evolution” of fitness. But in reality, they are really just making a corporate structure for what people want out of exercise. They are a place to socialize, to create a community environment around getting healthier and a place to hold you accountable. This communal training helps many people to stay structured, to stay consistent, and to stay goal driven.
But what they don’t do well is cater to you as an individual. And there’s nothing wrong with that if you’re just looking to get healthy and you want to find a group of like minded individuals to support you on your journey. The instructors are intentionally going to design programs that incorporate a generalist approach. A bell curve strategy. Appeal to the middle of the pack where 60-70% of people will get what they need. But that leaves a big percent of the training groups either training above or below the necessary training stimulus for results. The ones at the bottom are at risk for injury from training above their current level, and the ones above are probably investing more time and energy into a system that isn’t going to yield much in the ways of progress.
We’ve established that ideally, a good workout routine should be individualized. But in general, there are certain factors that should be fundamental for nearly all workout routines. Exceptions to this might be injury limitations or a specialist athlete training for a very specific goal. Strength is mandatory. The approach by which strength is gained can vary, but strength is paramount to any good program. Tissues need to be strong for performance, injury prevention, and durability. Endurance should also be included. Being able to handle activity for longer durations and to reduce fatigue is an important thing to incorporate into any good training program. Mobility is also very important. We should be incorporating movements that are large ranges of motions and spend extra attention on deficits and limiting factors. We should also have elements of speed work, power work, control work and some cross-training.
Because a good workout routine should at least touch on most of these factors, you can see why an individualized program is so important. Having trouble building a workout routine for you? Let us build a program for you to help improve or begin your fitness journey (link)
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