F.I.T.T. Principle

Building your own fitness program? Good for you! Here are some foundation principles in very short and general terms to help you put it together.

Frequency-How many times per week do you exercise?
You should be exercising at least three times per week. I find it helpful to schedule these workouts on my calendar and/or some other program like BeachBody's Workout With You (WOWY) supergym at teambeachbody.com/jeffay (shameless plug!). If you don't manage and budget your time, including some time for fitness, it will manage you.

Intensity-How hard are you working out?
I use the voice scale to measure low, medium, and high intensity exercise. If you can sing while you workout, your intensity is low. If you can talk while you workout, your intensity is medium. If all you can do is breath and focus on your work, your intensity is high. This generally holds true with aerobic, resistance, and anaerobic exercise, but not with flexibility work: you will break something if you try to stretch until you can't talk!

Type- Is your workout aerobic, anaerobic, resistance, or flexibility based?
You should be doing some of each but depending on your goals and interests, you may focus more on one area and less on others. DON'T IGNORE FLEXIBILITY! At a minimum you need to stretch pre and post workout. In another post I will discuss stretching in more detail.

Aerobic- In general terms, this is exercise where your muscles get plenty of oxygen and don't generally reach muscle failure (ex. jogging, swimming, cycling).

Anaerobic- Also in general terms, anaerobic activity is high intensity level exercise where your muscles become extremely fatigued (ex. sprinting, insanity).

Resistance- Exercise based on moving a resistive object a short distance. This includes weight lifting, resistance bands, and some body weight exercises like push-ups and pull-ups.

Time- When you exercise, how long do you do it?
I suggest that all workout sessions be longer than 30 minutes in the form of a sandwich: 20 minutes of increased heart rate between two slices of warm-up and cool-down stretching.

I tried many times to put a program together that would maximize each of these things. I never could find anything that I could stick with that seemed like it was getting me toward any goals other than maintaining. Since I found the Beachbody programs, I have found that they do all this planning work for me. I still manage my goals and pick programs that help get me there, but the hard stuff is taken care of.

All I have to do is budget time, calories, and keep pushing play.