Designing an exercise regimen in year 2014

Designing an exercise regimen

1. Design your workouts around your schedule

• An exercise regimen should be a life-long process. Hence, it is crucial to develop your workouts to suit your schedule and not the other way round
  

• For e.g., supposed an office worker with long irregular hours, it would be difficult to train everyday. Although it’s said that anything is possible if you have the passion, this belief unfortunately may hold true for some extraordinary people but for regular people (who represent the majority); they cannot keep up with this kind of training. The main obstacle towards persistent exercising is that people give up after a while as they cannot balance between work-life schedule and their workouts.
  
• A workout regimen for a professional athlete, student or worker would tend to be different due to our daily priorities.
  
• Therefore, how to plan your workouts is an utmost importance. Ask yourself this question and reply truthfully. “How much time can I give to my workouts in order for it to be sustainable?” Let’s say you would want to workout during your lunch hour on weekdays only and you have only 45 minutes to workout. Then you design a 45 minutes workout, 5 days a week
  
• Having adequate rest and recovery are crucial to sustain your passion and achieve your goals.
  
  2. Prioritize your goals and objectives
• Let’s use the same example again. Your frequency is 5 times/week and duration is 45 minutes. Now ask yourself: “what do you hope to achieve within these constraints?” “Are you a recreational sports athlete or you merely to improve your fitness and physique?”
  
• Train towards your goals and not away from it. The problem faced by people is that they want to achieve everything in their workout. They want to train on their muscular strength, endurance, stamina, speed, power all at the same time and also look like a bodybuilder. This would not be realistic.
  
• Therefore, prioritizing your goals is very important. What do you hope to achieve in a particular workout? If you want to improve your stamina, the emphasis should be on cardiovascular exercises. You won’t want to lift weights for 40 minutes and go for a 5 min run.
  
• Know what you want to achieve and work towards that.
  
  3. Specifically and functionality

1. Train specifically to your goals. If you want to be good at basketball, do what basketball players do. Do not train like a bodybuilder. Likewise, a bodybuilder doesn't care how fast he runs or how high he jumps. As long as he looks good, then he had fulfilled his goals.
   
2. Having said that, I believe that for personal health and fitness reasons, you should include functional training to your workouts. A good cardiovascular endurance has many health benefits. Imagine a bodybuilder who would struggle up a flight of stairs. His body is not functional to serve his lifestyle needs. Learn to use good posture to walk or sit and good techniques to pick up objects from the floor etc. A strong and stable core, joints and muscles is useful for all sports and also reduce risks of injuries and other health risks such as osteoarthritis etc.