Create workout schedule program

With daily accountability to the workouts you want to do, the WLC is just the thing you need to make consistency your middle name. This means we need to build a program that is do-able , with the right mixture of activity and rest. There is a bit of art to this, but the first step is simple: write a general schedule. What are you going to do each day, Monday through Sunday? To begin, plan to workout five days per week and rest two days.

For most people, this is more than adequate for getting good results. Keep in mind that every workout day will not be a day of intense training or insane mileage: some days will involve hard training, others will involve only recovery or accessory work. I like to do some sort of activity Tuesday through Saturday, leaving Sunday free to spend time with my wife, and Monday free to tackle the work that inevitably piles up on my desk over the previous week.

Action Step 1 : Regardless of whether you like my schedule or prefer another one, grab your paper and:. Active recovery is meant to help you recover from your more intense training. The point of these days is simple : you want to keep moving, improve your range-of-motion, repair your muscles, and maintain a habit of activity. A long walk burns energy, reduces stress , and gets your muscles and joints warm.

It relieves soreness from previous workouts, and if combined with a light stretching, helps maintain your range-of-motion your ability to move fully around any given joint.

Your exercise requirement in the Whole Life Challenge is what you say it needs to be. Foam rolling and myofascial release are keystones to recovery , and should sprinkled liberally throughout your program. Myofascial release will help you avoid injury and maintain athletic ability. While it will get its own day in my sample schedule, note that you should take ten to fifteen minutes before of after every workout to do some myofascial release. Action Step 2 : Take your schedule, and choose one of your rest days and one of your five workout days for active recovery.

Ideally, place active recovery days throughout the week, breaking up your more intense training days. Then, pick a few of the recovery activities that appeal to you, and pencil them in for the selected active recovery days. We want to avoid too many workouts that follow the same pattern. Rep schemes, times, miles, loads, and activities need to be altered regularly. Doing the same thing every day is an excellent way to induce mental burnout and bodily injury.

Therefore, we want to choose several different activities across workout days , choosing those that address our athletic deficiencies while building up our strengths. A classic example of the problem : the unguided, novice distance runner. She starts running with one goal, going further. She does a mile every day for the first week, two miles every day the second week, and so on, repeating for months until joints hurt, range-of-motion is limited, and plantar fasciitis infects every step.

She does the same thing at the same intensities, with predictable results: nagging injury. She would be better off running three days a week, doing intense hill sprints and track work one day and a long, slow five-miler later in the week, and capping it off with a one-mile max effort, each intense running day preceded by an active recovery day or lighter work. She would build in some full-body strength training on her fourth training day to help make sure her muscles become strong enough to support the natural battering of frequent running.

This variety would build her speed via the track day and the one-mile max effort , her endurance via the long distance day , and her strength via the lifting day , while the interspersed recovery days swimming, yoga, and myofascial release would keep her injury-free and able to train consistently. By contrast, running long and slow every day would build her endurance only while exposing her to injury.

Beginner Workout Schedule. Intermediate Workout Schedule. Advanced Workout Schedule. Monday Cardio: 10 to 30 minutes. You can do the same workout you did on Monday or a new one. Friday Total body strength and core training. It's a great idea to do the same workout you did on Tuesday so you can practice the exercises and build the strength and endurance to do more.

Saturday Rest or optional cardio: This is a great time to do something less structured like take a walk or a leisurely bike ride. Sunday Rest. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Fit uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Related Articles.

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We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. For weight loss focused goals, combining cardio and weightlifting into a workout plan can be effective in combination with a diet. Choosing the best workout split will depend on how many days you can train and your specific fitness goal.

Total Body programs f ocus training major muscle groups from the upper and lower body in the same workout. These types of programs are popular with field sport athletes and Olympic lifters because they predominately include compound movements like squats and power cleans which efficiently target multiple muscle groups.

These types of training programs are popular with strength athletes like powerlifters and some bodybuilders because it allows for a more targeted focus on specific muscle groups.

Single Muscle Group programs split workouts into dedicated days for specific muscle groups ie leg days and chest days. This type of training is popular with many bodybuilders because workouts can be hyper focused on a singular muscle group. In general, single muscle group programs require you to go to the gym more days so that each of the major muscle groups can have a dedicated workout day.

While a reasonable total body program may be done with just 3 workouts in a week. Make sure you rest enough between sets to support your goals. Both continuous endurance training and high intensity interval training can contribute to positive improvements in body composition and aerobic capacity. Research on concurrent training combining strength and aerobic exercise in the same program has found that strength, hypertrophy, and endurance focused athletes can do concurrent training programs without experiencing significant decrements, if the proper modalities are selected.

Good training programs are unified in their principle to cause a stimulus to the body that causes it to adapt. Having benchmark goals that you aim to achieve by the end of a week, month, or months can help you track and measure the success of your training program. Adding a supplement stack to your personalized program can help you kickstart energy levels, support hydration, and help improve your recover y.