Most people are overwhelmed at the thought of creating their own fitness plan, but that’s where you as their personal trainers come in. Making a fitness plan is one of the best things people can do to take control of their health and reach their fitness goals.
As personal trainers, it’s your job to help your clients:
- identify their fitness level through fitness assessments and
- design a long-term workout plan or workout routine that will get them closer to their goals and bolster their overall health.
A fitness routine should be balanced in terms of intensity, muscle group, and how many times a week you exercise. This includes accounting for rests and cool-downs. Focusing on strength training or high intensity interval training for all muscle groups will bring about many health and fitness benefits from building muscle to lowering your blood pressure.
Why Is Creating a 30-Day Fitness Plan Beneficial
While there are many models for different exercise programs, we recommend the 30-day fitness plan as an ideal training program to start out with. Tracking your progress over the course of a month serves as a great foundation for unlocking your full range of motion and developing exercise as a daily habit.
Tracking fitness results is great motivation to keep going and stay physically active. Personal trainers can encourage their clients to take body measurements and progress photos to observe subtle changes once they get started.
If your client wants to lose weight as a primary goal, acknowledge that they might not see results as quickly as they would like because body weight normally fluctuates due to other factors. Instead, consider other metrics of improvement throughout the month such as muscle mass and waist-to-hip ratio.
After a full month of sticking to a fitness plan, you and your client can review their progress together and adjust as necessary.
What Do I Need to Create a Fitness Plan
When creating a fitness plan, you must clearly define which areas you especially want to target and how they align with your goals. Doing this will inform the types of exercises you will include from bench presses to Russian twists.
It’s also important to pick exercises your client enjoys so that they’re having fun as they work out. For each exercise, adopt a three-step approach: warm-up, conditioning, and cool-down. In other words, ease into the workout, maintain a steady flow, and slow down to a finish.
Once you and your client have determined which exercises to implement, it’s time to organize them into rotations, sets, and reps. A rotation is made up of different exercises, a rep is one full motion of an exercise, and a set is a series of consecutive reps. As a general recommendation, plan to perform at least one set of 12 reps for each exercise.
We also recommend starting your order of exercise by focusing on your larger muscle groups first as they often require more energy. Then you can isolate smaller or individual muscle groups with exercises like bicep curls or shoulder shrugs. Afterwards, we recommend adding stretching and flexibility in the beginning, middle, and end of your fitness plan.
Creating and sticking to a fitness plan is hard but rewarding work. With encouragement and discipline, you can do everything you set your mind to on your fitness journey.
