What does a “Good Workout” entail?

Balance

What should I be doing for my training sessions? I get this question from people all the time. Like most health care professionals I usually have to tell them that it really depends. In order to be on the right pathway to a safe and effective training program there are many factors that go into it. Client goals and health history are important things to gain better understanding of but even beyond that there is nothing like time spending together learning about movement patterns, range of motion and pure strength to allow for better program development. Once these aspects are learned we can take that information and use move forward. But let's say we wanted to develop a program for Jenny without knowing any of these. Jenny has no real imbalances and injuries. What should be included in her training regime? Assuming we are do a full body strength training session it will include a balance of push and pull upper body movements, squat and hip extension lower body movements and core stabilization work. We are looking for balance in the body. We don’t want to do too much upper body pushing without doing scapula retraction pulling. If we do one or the other too much it may lead to injuries or tightnesses down the road. Similar to the balance in our strength training sessions the same is true for our cardiovascular health. Let’s put aside Olympians and professional athletes that have isolated needs. I am just speaking in regard to the average person who wants to live a long healthy life. We don’t just want to do zone 2 cardio, we also want to add Zone 5 in as well. Longer distance steady state paired with interval training will develop a body that can do a variety of activities very well. I look forward to digging into the weeds a but more about programming design in articles in the future. Stay Strong!