Why A Regular Exercise Routine Is Important
Regular and Routine are the most important words around exercise.
A regular exercise routine is an important part of your health, and it may be the largest obstacle between you and your goals. You know that you need to exercise and maybe you do exercise. But is it a regular routine and what should a regular routine look like?
To maintain your long-term health, your body needs to be taken care of regularly. Arbitrarily exercising, albeit better than nothing, isn’t going to do the job. You need a specific plan of action. You need a plan that works.
To create this plan, let’s focus on the two key words Regular and Routine.
Regular
Your exercise routine needs to be regular, consistent. Exercising a couple days a week isn’t going to do the job. The first step you need to take is to commit to 4 days a week.
Why 4 days?
You should exercise more often than you don’t exercise. It’s pretty difficult to claim you exercise regularly when you take more rest days than active days.
Regular exercise promotes a number of health benefits:
- Lowers blood pressure
- Decreases stress
- Improves mood
- Boosts energy
- Maintains a healthy weight
- Enhances memory and cognitive function
- Promotes better sleep
But regular exercise also means regular as in commonplace, normal, and nothing special. You probably don’t hear fitness professionals telling you to just do regular exercise routines, mainly because it’s not ‘sexy’ to market normal. Normal sounds boring.
In reality, regular is what you need and regular will out do every exercise modality fad.
Why am I promoting a regular routine?
Because you don’t need all the bells and whistles. In fact, all the extra stuff takes away from the fundamental movements that are proven to get the best results consistently.
Now don’t get me wrong, regular still means personalized to you and your goals. You just don’t need to incorporate every ‘cool looking’ exercise or use the latest and ‘greatest’ equipment. Doing what is regular works best.
Routine
The best exercise routine for you is highly dependent on you and your goals. This is why I interview prospective clients. I want to get to know them and their goals before accepting them into a program. The program, the goal, and the client all need to match.
Without getting into the specifics of various routines for different goals, here are the fundamental rules that routines should follow.
- Compound Movements: A majority of the exercises should prioritize compounds movements to build the muscle, improve body control and balance, and maximize calories burned.
- Progressions: Lifting the same weight over and over will result in a plateau. You need to gradually increase the weight and difficulty of the routine to see further progress.
- Appropriate Variety: Find the balance between incorporating every exercise you can think of and the basic compound lifts. Variety will stimulate the muscle to improve growth and control, but too much variety will hinder your progress and actually prevent improvement.
However, the most important part of a routine is actually having one and following it.
Most gym-goers use a couple machines at best, avoid the free weight section, jump on the treadmill or bike for the remainder of the workout, and call it a day. This is not a routine or plan that will get continuous results. You may have gotten limited results doing this, but you will plateau.
By creating an actual routine and following it, you will have remarkably greater outcomes and be in control of your progress.
If you haven’t been doing this on your own and you want consistent results, you may want to check out our Small Group Training or Semi-Private Training Program. Register for either one, and we’ll help you find the right fit for you.
