Your Ultimate Workout: Creating Your Own Personalized Workout

Author: Alex Borja B.S. SPT, HFS

So you want to create your own workout plan, huh? There are many different types, variations, and limitless kinds of workouts that can be created. The sky is the limit and only your imagination can hold you back from creating the perfect workout plan for you. This guide was created to provide a framework of devising your own workout routine based on:

1. Principles and backgrounds
2. Setting fitness goals
3. Setting time frames
4. Getting educated
5. Workout routine examples

FITT: Key Principles to live by

To get started I would like to take a few moments to describe what all workout plans should include. I don’t care if you are creating a plan with fat burning, muscle building, toning, it doesn’t matter—they should all follow the FITT principle.

The FITT principle is an acronym for Frequency, Intensity, Type, and Time. You will need all four if you want a solid foundation for a killer workout plan. Here is a quick overview of each and will be mentioned in throughout the rest of the guide. For this reason you should take at least a quick look.

Frequency: This will be how often you do something in your ultimate plan. This includes how often you will work out, how often you will perform sets, how often you will take breaks, and so on. It is very important to not break this principle by doing too much too fast.

Intensity: This principle explains how intense your workouts will be. Will you create a circuit based training session with few breaks? How about workout routine with big rest periods and heavy sets? The intensity sets the stage for what you want your goal and outcomes to be.

Type: Workout plans can be created in a variety of ways and the type should be completely subjective. Your own taste in what you like to do for physical activity will shape this. What do you like to do? Some examples might be: power lifting, strength training, fat burning, balance training, swimming, biking, etc. Find you passion and choose that activity as your success rate (and results) will become very high with an activity you enjoy.

Time: How long will your workout be? How about the rest intervals and working sets? Time explains exactly what the name implies. This in turn is inadvertently connected with intensity because, for example, lower rest times increases intensity. You might also hold a job in which you don’t have a lot of free time. Your workout routine may be shorter with quicker rest periods than someone with a lot of time on their hands.

Beginning to Form your Routine

By now you should start having an idea of where you want to take your workout plan. Most people have an image in their mind about what they want to look like in the mirror. Perhaps you don’t even care so much about this, maybe only your health. Outlined below I will cover a few principles for the two most common goals people often want answer to. This will be done in conjunction with the FITT principle as outlined above.

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Goal: Muscle Building.

If you want to build muscle you will benefit most from incorporating these principles into your plan:

Frequency: Most have found that exercising at least 3 days a week will bring about muscle mass. I would even challenge you to try for 5 days a week. Every day is not recommended as this can quickly lead to overtraining. Remember – you don’t actually grow in the gym, you grow during recovery!

Intensity: This can actually vary but the most effective way will be keeping an intensity of mod-max levels. How can you measure this? An easy to remember way that is actually quite effective is to rate your current level of intensity (while working out) from 1-10, with 1 doings absolutely nothing and 10 being the most intense/hard workout you’ve experienced. Try to keep it at 6 or above.

Type: Weight lifting will be your best bet here but there are other activities you could do. Rowing, biking, or even rock climbing are also great ways to build muscle. Rather than performing “sets” for these you could do timed intervals with heavy resistance (although resistance may require exercise equipment). Your weightlifting workout should consist of using only 2-3 body parts a day (split routine- examples at end), 3-4 sets a body part, with a rep range of 8-12.

Time: Workouts should last for approximately 45-1 hr. although some will do less and some more with great results. Try to shoot for 45sec-75 sec rest periods.

Goal: Fat Burning.

If you want to lose the most weight and increase your fat burning capabilities you will benefit most from incorporating these principles into your ultimate plan:

Frequency: Shoot for workouts occurring as much as possible depending on your activity. For instance, try to workout at least 3 days a week, 5 or more would be optimal, and try to alternate workouts. So weight lifting can be a few days a week while cardio or another activity can be placed in between lifting sessions. In this way, overtraining can be heavily avoided while you burn calories.

Intensity: You might have heard that low intensity cardio exercise is great and is the most effective. But you will burn much more calories in the end if you do interval cardio training. Try doing low intensity resistance (on a stationary bike for example) for 2 minutes followed by a 30 second high intensity bout. This will keep your metabolism higher for several hours after your workout. On the scale of 1-10 try a 3-4/10 for the low intensity interval and 8-10/10 for the high intensity interval. Repeat for up to 30-45 minutes.

Type: Many various types of exercise are encouraged to be performed for maximal fat burning capabilities. Weight lifting, high intensity cardio, and other sports/activities show the greatest results when combined to keep your workouts fresh and your body guessing.

Time: Workouts should last for approximately 45-1 hr for weight lifting/other activities, and 15-45 minutes for high intensity cardio (trust me—if you’re doing it right you should not be getting near that). Try to shoot for 15sec-30 sec rest periods for weight lifting. Cardio should be two minutes low intensity followed by 30 seconds high intensity. Repeat.

Workout Routine Example

Here is a nice example of a workout that incorporates weight lifting and optional cardio days which can be suitable for both a muscle building and fat burning workout plan. Notice reps and sets are set for muscle building in this example and not fat burning.

Monday:

Exercise Areas: Chest and Triceps
Exercises: Bench Press, Dumbbell Bench Press, Chest Dumbbell fly’s, Triceps Dips, Triceps Press-downs
Repetition/Set Range: 8-12 reps, 3-4 sets per exercise
Rest Period: 30-45sec (between sets)

Tuesday:

Exercise Areas: Legs
Exercises: Squats, dumbbell lunges, Leg press, seated calf raises, standing calf raises
Repetition/Set Range: 8-12 reps, 3-4 sets per exercise
Rest Period: 30-45sec (between sets)

Wednesday:

Exercise Areas: OFF DAY (Optional Cardio day/Core Work—depending on muscle soreness)

Thursday:

Exercise Areas: Shoulders, Trapezius, Abdominals, Lower back
Exercises: Lateral shoulder raises, Front shoulder raises, Dumbbell shrugs, Planks, Lower back extensions, Other abdominal exercises
Repetition/Set Range: 8-12 reps, 3-4 sets per exercise
Rest Period: 30-45sec (between sets)

Friday:

Exercise Areas: OFF DAY (Optional Cardio day/Core Work—depending on muscle soreness)

Saturday:

Exercise Areas: Back and Biceps
Exercises: Lat pull-downs, Lat Rows Wide, Lat Rows Narrow, Barbell Bicep Curls, Preacher Curls
Repetition/Set Range: 8-12 reps, 3-4 sets per exercise
Rest Period: 1-2 Minutes (between sets)

Sunday:

Exercise Areas: OFF DAY (Optional Cardio day/Core Work—depending on muscle soreness)

In Conclusion

There you have it! To wrap this up here is a step by step guide to creating your workout plan.

Steps to Creating your Ultimate Workout Plan

1. Look over the FITT principles above.
2. Decide what your ultimate goal is. Build muscle, burn fat, etc.
3. Figure out how much time a day and week you can devote to exercise.
4. Look over specific FITT principles for your goal listed above.
5. Choose your parameters from the principles (choose days, sets, reps, exercises, etc.)
6. Set specifics for each workout day with proper recovery (Ex. 3 days on 1 day off)
7. Write down your workout routine and follow it!

Author:

Alex Borja B.S., SPT, HFS

Directlyfitness Team

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