It is my belief that in order for you to succeed in anything, physical fitness included, you need to have a plan. You need to have a plan, execute the plan and review the plan as needed. This plan must be sustainable with structure yet be flexible enough to allow for life to get in the way from time to time and allow you to hop right back on and not feel bad about it.
I am not convinced that there is any single correct answer for sustainable physical fitness, variety is required but it is good to have a skeleton to hang that those variations onto.
Here’s my plan
Basic Plan with Tracking
In order to be successful in a workout plan, you have to have a plan for your workouts. This is my Workout Plan and Tracker.
Warm Up
Increase your heart rate doing something simple
- Run in place
- Jump Rope
- Light jog
- Use a trampoline (or not) and jump at 50% or less effort
Rotations
There is a fluid in all your joints called synovial fluid of which it’s primary purpose is to reduce friction between the articular cartilage. Rotations promote the spreading around of this fluid before you start stressing your muscles, bones and joints. It’s like letting your car warm up before you punch the gas.
Stretching
I don’t stretch a cold muscle… ever. That is taking a fast track to a pulled muscle. If you must stretch before working out (not recommended) make sure you have adequately warmed up and completed your rotations routine.
Exercises
The meat of your workout. I highly recommend you have a plan in place and don’t just wing it. That plan should also have some sort off tracking mechanism so that you can look back at your progress because weight gain or loss and body measurements are secondary metrics to measure fitness.
My primary method of keeping me motivated and well planned is a Spreadsheet I developed over time and have used for tracking. More on how I use this Spreadsheet later.
I breakdown my workouts days into these
Chest and Triceps
Shoulders, Back and Biceps
Legs and Core
Cool-down and Stretching
I recommend to keep this pretty simple but listen to your body. Concentrate your stretching muscle groups that were just worked.
This is how I use it
What if I want to stray from the plan and do something completely different
How I track different things
– Will need some pictures here of my plan and my variations.
Alternate Plan
There are apps out there recommended apps
Bodybuilding.com has several apps to help you stay on track
Beachbody has many programs to fit a multitude of fitness goals and styles of workouts. I tend to use this to add variety to my workouts