3 Components of Balanced Workouts Plans

Everybody always wants to have a balanced fitness plan. They want to make sure that they’re balanced that they’re getting all their needs met, that they’re not missing something right, that they’re they’re doing everything that their body needs. But what does a balanced fitness plan actually mean? Like what is balanced?

Well, in my coaching, I always talk to my clients about there being three components to fitness. And today we’re going to talk about what those three components are that you should definitely address somewhere in your workout plans. We can talk about how to address those three. And then finally, we’re going to talk about how to balance those three, what ratios how much of one should you get? How do you know if it’s actually balanced in your workout plans.

So real quick, I just want to give an overview of what the three components are that every workout plan should address. And you should get this in your weekly routine, somehow, some way. And, honestly, maybe a little bit more than just trying to pretend like something kinda sorta counts to one of these components. We want to be deliberate, intentional, and we want to chase these three, and do quality work with each one.

So the first component of fitness that you should absolutely have in your training program is strength, you should have some sort of strength, some type a muscular strength training, some type of resistance training in your program. And this has a dozen options. Right? There’s the traditional bodybuilding training, there is powerlifting, there’s kettlebells, there’s dumbbells, there’s barbells, there’s resistance bands, there’s bodyweight, there’s cable machines, there are a million ways to do resistance training.

All resistance training means is that you are moving the body with some sort of oftentimes external resistance. I say oftentimes, because sometimes we actually get away from that. And we just use internal resistance when we do bodyweight exercises, like push ups. But this is this is what most people think of exercising these days. Right, this is probably the most popular form of exercise nowadays, especially with the rise of personal training.

A lot of personal trainers will default to strength training. Part of that is, there are a multitude of health benefits to resistance training, you are going to run almost the entire gamut. You can also and we’ll talk about this at the end, but you can get the other components of fitness in this it with resistance training. So it can be a very efficient way to train, you can get a couple birds with one stone here. But then if you look at the nature of personal training, and this is one of the reasons why I tried to get away from the personal training industry is the structure of the job kind of demands it you know, we’re going to talk about other forms of of exercise that should be in your fitness plan. But as a trainer, to observe a client doing anything other than resistance training is awkward. It’s goofy, and it looks like a waste of money.

Let’s talk about one of the other components. And the second component of fitness that you should absolutely have in your workout program somehow some way is going to be cardio. Cardio is necessary for Balanced Workouts. You should have some sort of aerobic exercise that trains your heart muscles and the vascular system around it as well as the respiratory cardio includes the cardiovascular system, as well as the cardio respiratory system. We just call it cardio for short. But you should have some form of this. This is Often visualized as aerobics, so either running biking, but it can also be some sort of intervals or, or mixed up routines right. Zumba I would consider here counts as aerobics.

For me, cardio my definition of cardio is going to be elevating the heart rate and keeping it sustained at an elevated stage for a duration of time. Resistance training most often in its traditional sense will spike the heart rate. But then there’s a rest period in which the heart rate comes back down. Aerobic aerobics or cardio, whatever you will you wish to call it, cardio will oftentimes have that spiked heart rate, and it will maintain a high heart rate. When you do anaerobic, anaerobic cardio or interval training, you’ll get periods have spiked heart rates, and the heart rates will come back down, but they’re not going to come back down near the resting rates, they’re always going to be elevated.

And so anything that does that I consider to be cardio, whether that’s running, biking, rowing, Zumba classes, step, aerobics, boxing, anything that really gets the heart rate elevated and stays there, I’m gonna just count that as an aerobic activity as a cardio activity. And you can see, personal trainers will talk down about cardio, you’ll hear a lot of people talk about “cardio kills your gains.”

Part of this is professional validation. Because if you’re a personal trainer, and you’re giving someone a workout to go run on the treadmill for 20 minutes, and you’re standing there staring at them, it doesn’t seem like you should be getting paid to stare at somebody running on a treadmill. Right? That’s just ridiculous. However, if you run someone through a strength training exercise, it validates it looks like you’re doing something worth getting paid for.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of shortcomings in personal training, structured around just this, the actual demands of the job versus the demands and the needs and wants of the clients, which is unfortunate. But that’s why we at Health REBELs is we’re focused on breaking free from common standards, right, we want to redefine healthy living. And we don’t need to do that within the confines of a personal training session, we can actually talk about your biological and sociological needs.

Speaking of needs, the final need in a balanced exercise program is flexibility. Every balanced workout should have flexibility present. Now, when people think about flexibility, they’re going to typically think of the old school traditional static stretching. We did this in gym class where your gym teacher had you sit on the floor and try to touch your toes. That is some type of flexibility. But it’s not the only definition of flexibility. There is also dynamic stretches, there are ballistic stretches, there are PNF stretches that are facilitated stretches their band resistance stretches. And I hinted at this earlier. Resistance training done with a complete range of motion can also facilitates range of motion can facilitate flexibility.

For for all intensive purposes, we will define flexibility training as something that tests the range of motion the upper range of motion of a joint. So this can take a lot of different forms. Now, this is the one that probably gets the least attention for a lot of people. Unless you’re a really big yoga enthusiast or a Pilates enthusiast, you’re probably not really looking at flexibility. And in my coaching programs, a lot of times with most of my clients flexibility will honestly be the smallest component that we address. It’s not specific to most people’s goals.

So it gets the smallest bit of attention, but it is still absolutely critical for walking around day to day with viable movement patterns, but also feeling good as you go through the day. It’s a great way to improve the way that we feel and improve movement quality, so it shouldn’t be present somehow some way. In my workout designs with my clients, I create custom built fitness plans for them. And then each and each program. There’s usually some type of warm up and cool down activity that will include dynamic stretches for the warm ups, and maybe some slow comfortable static stretches as the cooldown. So we’re checking the box with the flexibility as we’re doing other workouts as we’re doing either cardio or resistance training.

Now, how do you get this the right amount for balanced workouts? How do you get the right amount of each three and know that you’re doing a balanced program. The first thing to consider is goals. What are your goals? some goals need a little bit more of one category than the other. If you have body image goals or aesthetic goals or or body composition goals, resistance training might be a little bit more efficient to that end. So we might put a higher premium on the balance of resistance training, maybe 70 to 80% of your exercise will be resistance training, and then maybe 10 to 20% will be cardio and then five to 10% would be flexibility, right, that could be balanced. Although it’s not, you know, all equal, it would be balanced because everything’s present and your needs are being addressed. But then we’re focusing on the needs of your goals.

The second thing to consider is personal preference. As, as a former personal trainer, I do have that bias towards resistance training. And typically, when people start with me, we most often have them at a ratio where you’re about a three to two or a three to one ratio of resistance training workouts to cardio workouts. However, I’ve worked with clients in the past that found out that they liked a specific type of cardio, one of my favorite clients that I’ve worked with in the past, she really loved like this hip hop, twerking cardio thing. I didn’t give it to her, she found it on YouTube, but it’s fun, and she loved it.

so we switched her ratio, instead of with her five days a week being three days of strength and two days of cardio. Because she was having so much fun with cardio, we swapped it, we made it three days of cardio and two days of resistance training. I know there’s some personal trainers listening to this right now. And they’re hating me, because that’s textbook wrong, you should do more resistance training. But we want to make it fun. And when we’re talking about health, when we’re focused on the health and not athletics, we have more freedoms to do the things that we enjoy. Because as long as we’re checking the box, we’re accomplishing health. You don’t have to be as precise or as perfect to be healthy. That’s a very good takeaway. If nothing else from this podcast, remember, you don’t have to be perfect to be healthy.

You don’t need to be perfect to be healthy

Heck, I might go put that on Facebook right now. So that’s a that’s a consideration when looking at a balanced workout program is what is your personal preference?

And then finally, what are you missing? Right, looking at your exercise program right now, if you look at the workouts, do you have any flexibility? Do you have any cardio? Do you have any resistance training, right, there are a lot of runners out there that like running and they’ll only run but they don’t stretch or they don’t do strength training. Right. So looking at that what you’re missing, then add that in or switch up one of your days to make up for that, right, we want to look at what you’re missing and get that in, then we want to look at what goals do you have been a little bit more specific towards that goal. And then finally, we want to also look at your personal preference, right and then adjusting there so that you’re getting a little bit more of what you enjoy.

Those three factors determine how much of the three components of fitness you want to have a balanced workout program. And those are some of the considerations that we make here at Health REBELs when we create custom built plans for our clients. And those are considerations that you should make if you’re looking to make your own workout programs. You want to be balanced. You want to have resistance training, cardio, and flexibility each week. You want to be focused on what’s most effective for your goals. And then we want to make sure that we’re not missing anything that we’re not leaving anything up to chance.

And that’s all I got for you today. Those are the three components of fitness and what you should have to have a balanced workout plan. Come on back tomorrow for another episode of the Health REBELs podcast. And until I see you then keep the oath

I hope that episode helps give you some steps you can take to break free from common standards so that you can live a happier, healthier life. I’d love to continue to support you on that path to redefining healthy living. So I want to invite you to join my free Facebook group, the Health REBELs community. There we post daily content to redefine what healthy living means by following the holistic wheel and the REBEL of you’ll also get community support with like minded Health REBELs. If you’re not already a member, search for To the Health REBELs community on Facebook or go to facebook.com/groups/health REBELs I look forward to seeing you in there REBEL