By Dan Cantor, CPT
The length of your workout session varies based on your fitness level and goals. Everyone does different exercises based on their capabilities, but the basic concepts are the same for everyone. Your weekly fitness routine must include other activities that you conduct on your own and not depend entirely on the workouts you do with your trainer if you’re going to reach your goals.
I recommend total-body workout sessions. This means you work all your major muscle groups in every session. Begin with a dynamic warm-up to get your blood flowing and loosen you up. This normally consists of cardio, marching, “ballistic” stretching (with movement) and rotational movements.
After you complete the warm-up, you can begin to work out. After you finish, it’s important to cool down and stretch. The stretching you do at the end of the session is different from the stretching you do at the beginning of the session. Pre-workout ballistic stretching keeps tension in our muscles, which will help them to contract when we use them. When the workout is done, we perform “static” (without movement) stretches, which signal our muscles to relax. This releases the excess tension in our muscles and helps to increase the blood flow and begin the healing process. Stretching at the end of your workout will also help prevent DOMS, delayed-onset muscle soreness.
A specific exercise order promotes the “best performance” for resistance training. What this means is that in order to provide the highest intensity workout for your entire body, follow these rules:
Largest muscle groups first
Start with squats and lunges. The largest muscles in your body are found in your upper leg, so this is the logical place to start. These exercises engage multiple muscle groups on the front and back of your legs and utilize as many as a dozen muscles to complete each movement. Next is your torso, working the muscles of the chest and back (pushing and pulling movements), which also engages multiple primary and secondary muscles to perform each technique. Toward the end of our program you work the muscles in your extremities, abdomen and lower back. The exercise sequence and loading also take into account the different muscle types and work our Type II muscles, which are harder to activate and which fatigue quickly, at the beginning of the workout session.
Multi-joint movements before single-joint movements
Multi-joint movements work multiple muscle groups concurrently, which requires more energy and will burn more calories accordingly. When you perform a chest press, you’re not only using your chest and shoulder muscles, but your triceps in elbow extension, and your forearm muscles to grip and steady the bar. As you bring the weight back down to your chest, you’re working your bicep and back muscles “eccentrically” or to decelerate the resistance (weight). If the weight is sufficient, you will also utilize your core muscles to stabilize your body as it pushes the weight into the air.
Utilize full-body movements for many exercises Many exercise movements require you to use your lower and upper body. These movements maximize intensity. If your lower and upper body work concurrently, then the exercise is harder. These movements also activate your entire kinetic chain. This causes activates your stabilizing muscles, core muscles, and will help make you functionally stronger. Finally, when you use more muscles it takes more energy, which equals calories, so therefore you’re burning more calories and maximizing your efficiency for the time allotted to your workout.
Vary exercises from session to session in order to “confuse” the muscles and prolong adaptation
Our bodies have an amazing capacity to adapt to their environment. In order to prevent you from hitting a “plateau,” vary your workouts to stimulate your muscles to continue strengthening and to keep your caloric consumption high. Don’t change all the exercises all the time, especially if you’re a beginner still mastering techniques and are still very challenged by the exercises in your program. For better-conditioned clients, it’s important to keep things fresh and challenging. Just by utilizing different equipment, i.e. dumbbells vs. resistance bands, the same basic exercises will stimulate your muscles in different ways and promote new adaptations/improvements.
Alternate upper- and lower-body movements
In order to allow recovery and best effort you should alternate upper and lower body exercises. This allows you to recover more completely before you work those same muscles again. When you do a high-intensity, full-body movement, you should follow that with a lower-intensity “dynamic” movement that will help get air in your lungs and stretch your muscles in preparation for the next high-intensity movement.
Utilize various energy systems and modes of training in order to maximize results
Without being too technical here, your workouts should be primarily anaerobic, which means “without oxygen.” This is what is generally referred to as “resistance training.” You are utilizing this energy system when you’re out of breath at the end of your set. This provides a very high-intensity workout, and an anaerobic workout will burn five times as many calories over the next 24-hour period (during recovery) as a purely aerobic workout of the same duration.
You also should utilize various modes of training during your workouts. These include strength, stability, power, flexibility and endurance training. Again, not everyone can perform all modes of training due to their specific circumstances and fitness level; power training is primarily for more advanced clients, although most clients do some power movements in their routines.
When you work out, proper technique, good posture and proper tempo are important to getting the most out of your workout. A good understanding of these principles and their application to each movement will allow you to work out on your own and make them transferable to any workout environment. All the basic movements are directly relatable to weight stack machines, cable systems and free weights.
Any time you try a new piece of equipment, be sure to go a little lighter on the weight and test how it works. There can be a big difference in the actual vs. the marked weight on a piece of equipment and you need to be sure that you won’t strain yourself. Test the weight and the movement on the new machine and then once you get a feel, set up for your set at your normal workout effort level.
Be strong & live long!
Certified personal trainer Dan Cantor is owner of Dan Cantor Fitness At-Home Trainers (www.DanCantorFitness.com), serving Southern New Jersey and the Greater Philadelphia area.
