Workout Planner- April 2013

 

After pigging out over Easter and after my cousins wedding in Ireland last weekend I have to get back on track ASAP. I am going to be a good girl from today on.  The best way to get motivated and stay motivated is to create your own custom planner to suit your own individual needs and desires.

Building a custom fitness plan is critical to the success of your exercise program. Establishing a fitness plan eliminates the danger of falling into an “I’ll do it tomorrow” thought pattern and makes you accountable for following the plan every day.  Once you start putting the plan into practice, you will see that having a simple achievable plan in front of you helps motivate you to succeed.

Before you create your own fitness plan, there are a few things you need to learn about. As most people don't have the luxury of having a few hours in the gym, we need to learn ways to workout all our muscles within a certain period of time.

So lets look at the different muscle groups that we need to target:

MUSCLE GROUPS:

Chest
Shoulders
Traps
Triceps
Biceps & Forearms
Back
Legs
Core

We have 8 different muscle groups to target throughout the week. You now need to ask yourself;

• Which days during the week can you work out?
• Which body parts do you feel need the most development?

Working Muscle Groups Together

For most of us, free time isn't something we have a lot of, so I recommend that you work muscle groups together over 5 training days.For this to work effectively you will need to train different muscle groups together on the same day. This is where lots of people make mistakes that will ultimately be slowing their results.

I am also guilty of this mistake. I used to train back and biceps and when I researched more into it, I realised that this is in fact wrong!

Building Muscle Worldwide explains that:

“Training 2 muscle groups that compliment (support) each other during an exercise, means that the supporting muscle CANNOT be trained at maximum capacity during a workout due to it being partially fatigued before being fully isolated. For example if you are training chest & triceps on the same day and your muscles capacity is at 100% when you walk into the gym. Your first exercise is the tried and trusted barbell bench press which uses your chest muscles as primary and your tricep muscles as a secondary supporting muscle. After performing 6 sets of bench press, your chest muscles are now at a capacity of 60%, due to using this exercise your triceps have also been recruited heavily and are now at a capacity of 75% meaning that they CANNOT be correctly targeted during this same workout because they are already partially fatigued. Now if you're still thinking that for example, training biceps on a Monday and back on a Tuesday (which uses biceps in back exercises) you were not giving your biceps enough time to recover and are at risk of overtraining, my answer is simple;

When a muscle is recruited in a supporting or secondary role, it is not stimulated to a level high enough to impact on its growth. Although it is fatigued, it will be fully recovered within several hours post workout and can be trained as primary the following day.

The correct way around this is to ensure you combine muscle groups that DO NOT impact on each other during exercises.”

Here are the muscle groups that he has suggested. He combines muscle groups based on their sizes and exercise mechanics.

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CHEST with BICEPS/FOREARMS
BACK with TRICEPS
SHOULDERS with TRAPS
LEGS with CORE

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It is suggested to spread working out these muscle groups over a full 7 day week.

Day	Muscle Group
1.	Chest & Bicep/Forearms
2.	Back & Triceps
3.	Rest Day
4.	Legs & Core
5.	Shoulders
6.	Rest Day
7.	Repeat Day 4 (If you want to improve a certain area)

All you need to do now is organise them around your availability and ensure the muscle that needs most attention is trained after your day of rest so it has over 48 hours of recovery before being retrained again on day 7. So if you want to work on your abs for example work it out on Day 4 and Day 7.

Here is my planner of what I hope to stick to this month. Use this as a guide when creating your own.

On Saturdays you see ‘HIIT Extra’, this means I do a HIIT routine non-stop for about 45-50 minutes. On Tuesdays, I have a light session where I just do a 12 minute HIIT session with bonus round. Remember to switch up your routine each week to keep the body guessing.

SUN	MON	TUE	WED	THUR	FRI	SAT
	1	2	3	4   IRELAND	5   IRELAND	6   IRELAND
7   IRELAND	8 HIIT   Chest/Biceps /Forearms	9 HIIT Light   Back/Triceps	10 REST DAY   Yoga	11 HIIT   Chest/Biceps Forearms	12 HIIT   Legs/Bum ABS	13  HIIT EXTRA Shoulders/ Traps/Abs
14 REST DAY   Yoga	15 HIIT   Back/Triceps	16 HIIT Light   Shoulder/I Traps/Inner Legs	17 REST DAY   YOGA	18 HIIT   Chest/Biceps/ Forearms	19 HIIT   Legs/Bum/ ABS	20 HIIT EXTRA Shoulders/ Traps/  Oblique ABS
21 REST DAY   Yoga	22  HIIT   Chest/Biceps Forearms	23  HIIT Light Legs/Abs	24 REST DAY   Yoga	25  HIIT   Back/Triceps	26  HIIT   Shoulders/ Traps/ obliques abs	27 HIIT EXTRA   Inner Legs/ Biceps
28 REST DAY   Yoga	29  HIIT   Back and Triceps	30 HIIT Light   Shoulder/Traps Oblique Abs

 
Turquoise- Rest Day

Pink- HIIT LIGHT

Red- HIIT EXTRA

Legs/ABS
Chest/Biceps
Back/Triceps
Shoulder/Traps

Here is a link to a printable calendar so you can print off and create your own to stick up and follow.

http://www.calendarlabs.com/printable-calendar.php

I hope this helps you create a better schedule for your training.