How proper programming will save you time in the gym and get you results

Immediately before I sat down to write this email, I finished writing a blog post, checking in with my Facebook groups, filming a video about mindset goals, and checking in with some of my one-on-one clients.

Next, I have to finish emails, and then I have to train an in-person client, and the list goes on — phew!

Yep, the schedule is packed…but I know I’m not alone here. If you’re reading or watching the video below, I want to thank you very much because I know that you are busy, too.
It’s one of the reasons I dislike complaining about being busy, and when other people do it too.– It explains 99% of women’s lives in 2017.

Since I’m busy, you’re busy, and we’re all busy, it makes sense that when we go in to do our workouts, you want to make the most of your time — you don’t want to waste time there.

Since you’re taking 45 minutes to an hour getting in your workout, you want to make sure it’s doing something for you, right?

Maybe you go into the workout without a plan and you do what you’ve always done, just because it makes you tired by the end, and you feel like you got a “good workout”.

Or maybe you are following a plan, but your trainer or coach doesn’t know enough about program design or hasn’t studied program design. Or maybe it’s just not an effective program for you.

Workout Program Design

Program design — or the type of exercises, their order, frequency, amount, set-up, and a lot of other criteria — absolutely matters when it comes to your goals! 

In the video below, I’m going to share —

• What program design is and is NOT
• Why program design is important
• How to recognize a good program

I would say that as my job as a personal trainer, especially as an online personal trainer, I spend about 50% of my total work hours designing programs, or studying program design.

Whether it’s for individual clients, or my group programs and boot camps, or my membership community, or for myself and my in-person clients, I write programs every single day.

I think program design is one of the most important skills a personal trainer should have. It should be constantly studied and done, and you should constantly be getting better as a trainer or coach.

So how do you know if you have a good program?

There are lots of indicators, but the most important one — the one that you care about — is that it gets results — you should see the intended results from your training plan.

Are you seeing muscle definition in the right places? are you losing body fat? are you getting stronger in certain exercises?

For my one-on-one clients (online and in-person,) we change programs about every 4 weeks, but we don’t just change programs all willy nilly — we do it in periodized fashion.

Either with the exercise progression itself, or with adding new layers and facets to progression or intensity, or changing the focus of different muscle groups, movements, and so on, there’s lots of ways to progress!

Here is what program design is NOT — I see many experienced and/ well-known trainers, in order to progress clients either with nutrition or exercises, ask themselves, “How can I make it harder on my clients?”

Yes, your training program should be challenging to you, especially in the beginning, but that should not be the only indicator when it comes to progressing your program! 
One of my core principals is this: train smarter, not harder.

Train Smarter, Not Harder

They can be correlated, but they shouldn’t always be intertwined. When I work with my boot campers, for example, I literally create a person whose goals are the intent of the boot camp.

I currently have two groups of ladies who are kicking butt in my Lean Body Boot Camp in weeks one and two. The goal of the program is to lose body fat, gain lean muscle definition, and I write the program for those goals.

It’s a six week accelerated periodized program. I write two versions of the program, one for women who work out at home, and one for women who work out in the gym. The nutrition plan is customized for the individual, but the training plan is written for the goal.

Progression

For my one-on-one clients, the training is more personalized and we discuss their exact goals. Which muscle groups they want to bring up, which movements they would like to master, their equipment, their gym set up, and so on.

Then I write a program for them based on what I know for sure works, and science. If your’e writing a program, you should definitely be taking into consideration studies and scientific evidence.

For example, did you know that in order to induce muscle growth, a trained individual needs to do 12-20 sets per week per body part at a rep range of 8-15 reps per set? That’s just one example of using scientific evidence when writing a program.

So that’s a little of what goes into writing a program, and why it’s so important in order to see the best results. I hope that helped you understand why program design is so important, and if you want to have some hard, specific goals in changing your physique or tackling some strength goals, then I strongly suggest following a solid, effective, and properly designed program. It’s infinitely helpful!

For me, I change programs every 4-5 weeks, changing either the volume, density, muscle group-focus, and always exercise selection. It has made such a huge difference in my training attitude and my results!

XO,
Paige