Good training basics
Good fitness training meets your individual health and fitness goals. It takes into account your health status and physical and social environments and is based on a balanced combination of endurance, strength, and mobility training. You can focus on one at a time, or combine them together.
In this document, we concentrate on endurance, strength, and mobility training. The recommendations presented here come from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and are for healthy adults whose goal is to improve physical fitness and health. Recreational and competitive athletes may find more advanced training techniques more beneficial.
Endurance training develops your cardiorespiratory performance. This means that your heart, blood vessels, lungs, and skeletal muscles can better transport and utilize oxygen to perform physical work. Endurance training also supports weight management.
There are many sports available for you to choose from:
- Walking, leisurely cycling, and aqua aerobics, for example, are suitable for everyone.
- More demanding sports like running, rowing, swimming and cross-country skiing suit people with more substantial training background.
- If you want, you can try sports like basketball, soccer or racket sports. Just make sure that your training is vigorous enough to gain the benefits of endurance training.
The recommendation for most adults is to train on at least 3 days a week but you might find training on 3-5 days to be the best strategy to reach the recommended amount of physical activity . The recommendation for each training session is to train
- 30-60 min in moderate intensity (you can talk but not sing), or
- 20-60 min in vigorous intensity (you cannot say more than few words without pausing for breath), or
- by combining moderate and vigorous intensities.
Or, consider counting and tracking your steps. This may help promote aerobic fitness and estimate the amount of training needed. Even though people usually mention 10 000 steps as the recommended daily goal, 7000-8000 steps have been shown to be enough for health benefits to start to accrue. Just make sure that at least 3 000 of those steps are brisk, i.e. you take more than 100 steps per minute.
If you don’t have time for continuous training sessions, don’t worry. You can gain the same benefits with two or more shorter training sessions a day. Even physical activity shorter than 10 minutes is beneficial.
Your weekly goal depends on what you wish to gain:
- For substantial health benefits, aim at 150 minutes per week in moderate intensity, or 75 minutes per week in vigorous intensity, or by combining moderate and vigorous intensities.
- For additional and more extensive health benefits, aim at 300 minutes per week in moderate intensity, or 150 minutes per week in vigorous intensity, or by combining moderate and vigorous intensities.
A good advice is to start low and go slow. If you've been inactive, it's always good to start with light to moderate intensity training to avoid soreness, injury, undue fatigue, and the long-term risk of overtraining. You can increase the exercise duration with 5-10 minutes every 1-2 weeks. After 4-6 weeks, you can increase the exercise duration gradually over the next 4-8 months. Take it easier if you notice excessive shortness of breath, fatigue, and muscle soreness.
Strength training improves the strength and endurance of your muscles. It makes your daily tasks, like climbing the stairs or carrying bags, easier. Good muscle fitness can also be useful for preventing or relieving chronic diseases and health conditions.
You can train an individual muscle group or more than one muscle groups at a time, or do core exercises. There's a wide variety of resistance training equipment available:
- free weights, e.g. barbells, dumbbells, or kettlebells
- body weight or body weight suspension devices
- machines, e.g. weigth stack, plate loaded or pneumatic resistance equipment
- resistance bands or tubings
Even so, it is also possible to train without equipment. For example, you get a pretty nice workout for big muscles simply by climbing up stairs.
To keep your training balanced:
- Train opposing muscle groups equally, e.g. do push-ups and dumbbell rows, or planks and bird dogs.
- Address concentric (muscle shortening), eccentric (muscle lengthening) and isometric (no change in muscle length) muscle actions.
- Perform dynamic exercises (exercises with movement), and static exercises (exercises with no movement).
If you haven’t trained much earlier, you may notice improvement already with one strength training session a week. Later on, you should focus on the number of sets you do instead of how often you train. Even so, the main guideline is to train each muscle group on 2-3 days a week and have at least a 48-hour rest period between the training sessions.
If you're a beginner even a single set can be effective. Others should aim at doing 2-4 sets per exercise. The number of repetitions per set depends on your background:
- most adults: 8-12 repetitions
- middle-aged or older people just starting to train: 10-15 repetitions
- those wishing to improve their muscular endurance: 15-25 repetitions
If you wish to continue increasing your muscle fitness, you should train progressively. There are several ways you can do this:
- Add weight, e.g. if you can complete 10 repetitions with 100lb (45.5 kg), add 5% for the next training session.
- Perform more repetitions with the same load, e.g. if you did 9 repetions on day one, do 11 repetitions on day two.
- Increase the number of sets per muscle group per week, e.g. instead of three sets per muscle group, do four sets.
- Increase the number of training days per week, e.g. instead of two total body workouts per week, do three total body workouts.
Notice that the guidelines in this document are for improving health. If you wish to increase muscle strength and mass, consider a more rigorous training program.
Mobility training improves your range of motion. Good mobility helps you carry out your daily activities, may prevent injuries, and is important in athletic performance.
Mobility training should target your major muscle tendon units of the shoulder girdle, chest, neck, trunk, lower back, hips, posterior and anterior legs, and ankles. You can stretch dynamically (the stretch is done with movement) or statically (stretch is be held for a given duration).
The main guidelines for mobility training are:
- Warm your muscles before starting. Mobility training is the most effective when your muscles are warm.
- Have at least 2-3 training sessions per week keeping in mind that daily mobility training is the most effective.
- Stretch to the point of feeling tightness or slight discomfort.
- Hold a static stretch for 10-30 seconds. If you're a bit older, you might benefit more from holding a stretch for 30-60 seconds. However, if you wish to improve your performance, avoid longer stretches.
- Repeat each stretching exercise 2-4 times to accumulate a total of 90 seconds of stretching per exercise. To get there, adjust the duration and the number of repetitions.
If you follow these guidelines, your stretching routine shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes maximum.