So I’ve thrown a lot of information at you so far. What will you do with it?
Well, you can ignore me, develop a new exercise regimen that follows my principles of athletic living, or simply tweak what you’re currently doing to even things out. Either way, let me share ten principles for creating a fitness programme.
1. Plan a block of time. I would suggest around 2–3 months as a good starting point. Long enough to create an adaptation and see some genuine progress, but short enough that you can reassess and change direction if needed.
2. Think about your goals. Choose the three pillars that relate most closely to those goals and allocate roughly 70% of your training time to them, with the other 30% spread across the remaining pillars. If you don’t have a clear goal and simply want to feel more athletic, then spend more time on the pillars you have historically paid the least attention to.
3. If your goals relate to looking good, please factor in my body transformation and sculpting tips from Lessons 12 and 13. Athletic training and aesthetics don’t need to live in separate worlds.
4. Keep things simple. For most of the physical pillars, choose a relatively small number of useful movement patterns and get good at them rather than constantly changing exercises for novelty’s sake. You don’t need twenty different exercises in every workout. A handful of well-chosen movements performed properly will usually take you a long way.
5. When in doubt, aim for mastery of technique rather than intensity. Aim for fluidity over speed and control over power. Intensity has its place, but it should sit on top of competence rather than replace it.
6. Always warm up first! Then focus on the most complex, technical or demanding movements while you are fresh, and leave the easier stuff until later.
7. Train according to your current ability and recovery. I like people to move every day, but that doesn’t mean every day needs to be hard. Some days can be intense, some moderate and some very easy. Walk, stretch, practise a skill, play, recover. You are designed to move, but you are also designed to recover.
8. Progress over time. Training should gradually become more challenging, but that doesn’t mean every session has to be harder than the one before. You can progress through load, speed, control, range of motion, volume, complexity, density, skill or simply better execution. For those of you who train with weights a lot, you can also play around with drop sets, supersets, ladder sets, compound sets and negatives. Just be mindful that changing one variable can change the whole nature of the session. If you are doing strength work one day and then eliminate nearly all the rest between sets a few days later, you may have turned a strength session into something much more endurance-based.
9. Look back regularly and assess how you are doing. Hold yourself accountable, but don’t expect every physical quality to improve every single month. Training doesn’t work quite that neatly. Look for trends over time and pay attention to the things you have actually chosen to develop. When training, stay mindful of whatever KPIs matter to you.
10. Stick to your plan most of the time, but leave some room for instinct and fun. I like the rough idea of 80% structure and 20% freedom. Training plans are guides, not prison sentences. Your brain and body are designed to move and learn. Treat yourself to a movement practice that both challenges and nourishes you, and if you ever get really bored with training, I recommend focusing more heavily on the skill pillar for a few weeks to wake your brain up again.
A more scientific or bespoke approach to exercise programming goes beyond the scope of this little course. Rather than always listening to me, learn from two of my all-time favourite fitness educators: Strength & Conditioning Coaches Mike Boyle and Dan John. Both are hugely respected coaches and have spent decades teaching people how to think about training rather than simply handing them workouts. If you Google hard enough, there are loads of free lectures, podcasts and interviews worth listening to.
Or, of course, ask ChatGPT to write you a programme. It’ll be very confident.
Exercise programming is one of the reasons I still love 1-to-1 coaching so much. You can be both an artist and a scientist when looking after someone. You have principles, evidence and structure, but you are still dealing with an actual human being rather than a spreadsheet.
Anyway… get learning, please, so you can become your own fitness guru and create a personal movement practice that genuinely serves you.
It was a big lesson today. Well done!