What Makes A Successful Fitness Plan?

Over the past few years fitness, working out, and taking care of ourselves has increased drastically. While media and society may still have some work to do when it comes to promoting this, we can't deny that the urge for people to have the best quality of life has been on the rise. One of the ways many people have started to do so is with exercise! Yay!

It's a wonderful thing to see so many people exercising, wanting to push themselves and get stronger. With this journey also comes setbacks that can make us in turn, want to give up and no longer see the value in stressing our bodies. The dreaded plateau...

So how do we avoid this 'plateau' ?

Periodization !

What the heck is that ?

Well... in very simple terms. It just means changing your workout plan. You don't want to do the same thing day in day out, nor do you want to do the same type of training style month after month. There are different phases one must work through, depending on your goals and what exactly you're working towards.

The 4 basic phases a training plan can be broken down into are hypertrophy/muscle building, endurance, strength, and power. Technically you could put maintenance as a 5th, but that phase is pretty straight forward. Of course for a professional athlete, or someone training with a very specific goal will have these individual phases brown down into cycles within each phase, but we don't need to get that in depth here.

So depending on your goals, all of these phases are still important, especially hypertrophy. Even if you are trying to lose body fat you will STILL want to build muscle.. this is what will increase your basal metabolic rate and help your body burn more calories!

To prevent overtraining, hitting a plateau, or just simply keep your workouts exciting.. we must design a program that fluctuates in intensity, frequency, volume, and specificity in relation to our goals. Once you've lost your goal amount of body fat or gained the muscle mass you've been trying to we don't want to just keep doing these same workouts our bodies are used to...it's time to switch things up!