The hardest part of building a workout habit is starting it. Once you are off the ground, it’s pretty easy to maintain it. A lot of people aim to start working out but never get around to it. Some who do, do it for a few days and stop. One of the reasons why they do this is – the workout routine they chose to do is not suitable for beginners. So what are the things that you need to keep in mind when creating beginner workout plans? We discuss the same in this article. We give you a 5-step strategy to create the best workout plan for a beginner.
- What is the goal of the workout?
Identifying the aim of the workout plan will help you decide how to plan it. People have different reasons for wanting to work out. Some of them include:
- Losing weight
- Improving flexibility
- Building muscle
- Increasing endurance and stamina
- Increasing strength
Once you have established the goal, you can add relevant exercises to the weekly workout plan. For example, if you want to lose weight, a good blend of cardio and strength training will be most effective. If you are short on time, the HIIT workout (High-Intensity Interval Training) is the way to go. HIIT workouts involve doing intense exercises for a short time followed by a break. This is repeated a bunch of times.
If you aim to increase endurance, include cardio in your workout. Stretching will help you become more flexible. Strength training exercises like push-ups, crunches, squats, and lunges help build muscle and strength.
- What exercises should you include in the workout?
There are many different kinds of exercises out there. The workouts won’t be effective if you don’t plan them. Choosing the exercises to include in your workout for beginners depends on the goal, as stated above. You can do these exercises either in a gym or at your home. Some exercises do need some kind of equipment. But you can also work out without any kind of equipment.
Beginner gym workouts use equipment like treadmill, spin bike, chest press machine, shoulder press machine, etc. If you want to work out at home instead, you can use a resistance band. It is cheap and very effective in strength training. Following are the different basic kinds of exercises:
- Strength Training – This includes exercises like lifting weights and dumbbells. Other gym equipment targets different muscles of the body like biceps, triceps, chest, abs, thighs, etc. It can also be done without equipment. Push-ups, squats, lunges, and crunches are some of the ways to do it. This kind of exercise aims to carve and build muscles.
- Cardio – Any kind of exercise that raises your heart rate and keeps it that way for some time after the exercise is called cardio. It includes walking, running, cycling and swimming. The gym equipment used for this includes a treadmill, spin bike, air bike, and elliptical.
- Stretching – Here, you stretch different parts of your body so that they don’t end up becoming stiff and rigid. Any good workout routine includes stretching exercises. It improves the flexibility of your body.
- What is the amount of time available for workouts?
Workout can be made as long or as short according to the time you have. If you have got an hour, you can dedicate yourself to exercising. You can divide it like this:
- 10 minutes – warm-up
- 20 minutes – cardio
- 20 minutes – strength training
- 10 minutes – stretching
You can modify this according to your needs. In case you got only 15-20 minutes, you can do a warm-up for 2 minutes before the workout and stretch for 5 minutes after. You can include one or two HIIT workout sessions in this. Keep only the exercises that are most effective towards your goal, and discard the rest.
- Deciding on a workout split
You can’t do all the necessary exercises in a day. This is where the workout split comes in. You dedicate each day to a specific set of muscles. For every day of the week, you can focus on one set of muscles – legs, back, core, biceps, forearm, chest, and shoulder. Just make sure you cover all the muscle groups in a week.
- Plan the whole workout
Now that you have figured out all the individual elements, it’s time to put it all together. Make sure that the gym workout plan for beginners is not too intense. More often than not, people push themselves a little too much in the gym. This can cause body pain, and the person might not want to do it again. So, start slow and then eventually make it more intense. Leave a day for rest in a week. The body gets time to rest and recover.
That’s it! Your beginner workout plan is ready. Classplus provides a platform for teachers to teach online. This does include not only the conventional subjects but also extra-curricular activities like exercising, dancing, singing, etc. Professional trainers can upload their workout routines on the app we create for them. We will help you build an app that will reflect the brand of your institute. It is extremely easy to use, and anyone can record video lessons and upload them to the app.
