The Importance of Planning your Training
Although it may not seem so, planning your training sessions can help to keep you focused on your goals. It will also help maintain a good exercise rhythm. We just need to take a look at the training sessions of great athletes to see that they are carefully planned.
When it comes to doing physical activity, it’s necessary to make a commitment. It’s not just about “wishing” for something. You need to work constantly, little by little, to achieve the desired benefits. But, in order to achieve these benefits, it’s necessary to be organized. Then, planning is an important factor in performance, progress, and achieving goals.
Watch out, planning does not mean following a single, rigid workout. It means a well structured, flexible routine that can adapt to different circumstances.
Order and vision
Order and vision are the two main pillars on which good planning is built upon. Both contribute significantly to keeping your motivation, without losing sight of reality. What holds both pillars together is discipline, in other words, the method itself.
Whether you are looking to lose weight, have larger muscles or live a healthier lifestyle. What’s most important is focussing on how to move closer to achieving your goal. Every step counts!
Why plan?
It’s possible that the thought of just going with the flow has crossed your mind. However, frequently, this leads to everything quickly losing structure and taking you away from achieving your goals.
Therefore, the lack of a good plan will make your workouts less important. This, in turn, will make you lack commitment, lose motivation and perseverance. On the other hand, planning will help you focus on your objectives and stay on the path to your goals.
What are the important aspects?
Planning does not mean a strict time for each activity. It’s more about being organized in order to achieve your goals as easily as possible. Therefore it’s important to keep in mind the following:
- Training Schedule: training once in a while or sporadically has no effect at all. Not being consistent with your exercise will prevent you from making progress. Therefore you must establish hours and days during your week that do not interfere with the rest of your activities.
- Clear Goals: undefined goals usually lead to instability. If an objective is not clear, it will not contribute to reaching your goals and will undermine your commitment.
- Training: this is one of the most important aspects of your objective. Training is at the core of your goals, therefore, it should be planned in a balanced way to always benefit your needs.
How to plan your training sessions?
Before any planning is implemented, you must have clear goals and decided on which schedule is convenient. Once you have decided on this you can begin planning your training sessions.
Part of what you need to achieve with planning your workouts is to keep a balance of the muscles you train. If your sessions aren’t planned adequately you may end up training some muscles more than others.
There are several ways to plan your training sessions. What’s most important is to maintain harmony and stability in your workouts. This way for example, you will avoid working out your arms more than your legs. Now we’ll show you how to plan your training sessions:
Divide the body parts you want to train
No part of the body should be left out. This has to be taken into consideration when organizing your routine. Below, we have listed the body parts and how to train them:
- Shoulders: exercise with dumbbells, press sitting down, military press, and pushups.
- Chest: pushups, bench press, incline press and pull-ups.
- Back: rowing, deadlift, one arm row, and weight lifting.
- Arms: lateral arm elevations, push-ups, and tricep extensions.
- Abdominal muscles: planks, leg elevations, and ab crunches.
- Legs: squats, lunge, sumo squats, and skipping.
You must always warm up properly before every training session. You must also stretch at the end of every workout. The way in which you distribute your exercises will depend on how many days a week you workout. For example, if you train three days a week you can train arms and shoulders one day, back, legs and chest exercises the next, and on the last day, you can do cardio training.
Whether you plan your sessions starting with legs, ending with abs or you work two zones twice a week, it’s important that you plan in order to maintain good performance and well-being.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Bompa, T. O., & Haff, G. (2009). Training Cycles. In Periodization : theory and methodology of training (5th ed.). Chicago: Human Kinetics.
