Fit to play

Recently I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about exercise programmes that are a bit too specific for a simple one-size-fits-all answer.

I suppose I wish there was one, as it would save me a lot of work with my consultations. But then again, if there was something that would work for everyone then I could find myself severely short of work … so I suppose, yes, I’m glad that every answer needs to be somewhat different.

Since we are all different people and therefore will have different ways that we need to train, I thought it would be a good idea to outline exactly what goes into the mixing bowl of creativity before we come out with a nice-looking programme. Just advising a challenge for everyone doesn’t work, we need to be specific.

For this post I’ll focus on one of the different personal aspects that will dictate how we should train. It is important to address these so that we know that we can be consistent with our training and stay motivated. Others will follow in the coming weeks.

This brings me to my second factor: age.

Youngsters can easily train five or so days a week, do minimal stretching or mobility work and get on just fine, not that I’d recommend that.

As we age our ability to recover from training will start to drop, this is not to say that some of the older guys can’t still train frequently, but they’d have to concentrate greatly on recovery and mobility.

Even then I’d prefer a lower total training volume.

In your first few years of training one can get fantastic results from training before they start to stagnate.

In virtually a reversal from the physical age, people who have been training for a longer time will need to try somewhat harder than those who are newbies. This is why so many fitness products seem to get results, they use untrained participants, any sort of activity will make a difference to them.

When you factor in both the training age and the physical age then you end up with a conundrum – new trainers will be younger and therefore be able to train more, but they will not need to in order to get great results, they’ll get similar results from five days as they would from three.

This is where I’d come in and keep it to only three, only adding in a fourth when we’ve got absolutely everything we can out of using the three sessions.