What is the best fitness training program?
This can be confusing for many people. You can ask 100 different athletes and will get 100 different answers. Depending on your fitness goals, any form of exercise is better than none. There are two types of fitness, muscular and cardiorespiratory or aerobic, both offer great benefits to your physical well-being.
I personally focus on muscular fitness a bit more for my competitions than aerobic fitness. What is the difference? Well muscular fitness includes your muscular strength and endurance and uses the overload principle. What is overload? You must increase the resistance, frequency, or duration of your training above normal levels. Aerobic fitness is your ability to perform repetitive moderate to high intesity, large muscle movements for a prolonged period of time. This includes long brisk walks, biking and swimming. Again, you must overload your body by changing the frequency, intesity, duration or exercise choice in order to see positive results.
Your fitness routine will depend on your fitness goals. Do you desire muscle strength as a powerlifter, muscle endurance as a long-distance runner, muscle hypertrophy as a bodybuilder, or just general training? Each utilize different exercises and are specific to that particular goal. I train for muscle hypertrophy. I like to do many sets (4-6) of several reps (6-15) with brief rests (30-90 sec) between the sets. A "muscle pump" is produced during the resting phase. I sometimes will do split routines to focus on a particular body part and really like pyramiding my weight first from light-to-heavy and then heavy-to-light. I do vary my training and will also incorporate a high rep/low weight all body workout such as Body Pump at Gold's gym. I really do listen to my body and exercise accordingly. For example, if my legs are sore but it is "leg" day, I will switch to another body part until my legs are completely recovered. I also prefer to work one body part fairly intensely once/week. I may workout a lagging area more often (every 4 days) over a stronger bodypart.
As far as fitness equipment that I use? I love the Freemotion equipment offering a fuller range of motion and core stabilzation when performing one side with proper form. I do prefer dumbbells over barbells particularly for upper body work. Proper form (full range of motion) and slow controlled movements (3-4 secs during both phases) are my preference. To avoid a plateau, I will change my choice of exercise, inrease or decrease the rest recovery time, change the number of sets or reps, change the intensity and/or speed, or changing my training system, for example, from pyramiding to super-setting the weights.
I was diagnosed with spondylolysis with mild spondylolisthesis at the L5 vertebrae in 2008. Spondylolysis is a defect in the pars interarticularis (often called the Pars Defect) in the lumbar vertebrae usually caused by a stress fracture of the bone. Can you see the fracture in my x-ray? It is often a genetic condition toward having thinner vertebral bones. Spondylolisthesis is vertebral slippage from the weaken bone caused by my stress fracture. If the slippage worsens, the bones may begin to press on the nerves causing pain in my legs. Surgery may be needed if this occurs. I have modified my workout routine to include exercises that help my condition while avoiding exercises that would aggrevate it such as heavy deadlifting & free-weight squatting. I still do these exercises but with much lighter weights while avoiding excessive hyper-extention movements. I am always aware of any stress or pain that may arise during my workouts and if this occurs, I immediately stop that exercise and evaluate my condition. I do wear a back brace only when my back is feeling strained. I try not to depend on it since the brace has a tendency to weaken the spinal muscles if worn for prolonged periods of time. Since the back muscles are short and tight, I try to balance both my abdominal and lower back muscles following some stretches for the spine and hamstrings.
I would lastly like to talk about women and training. Many women are afraid of obtaining large bulky muscles but this is very unlikely for the average female. Women generally are weaker than men just because they have less muscle mass. But there is no difference in strength relative to lean body mass. Women who are able to develop large muscles may have: 1) higher than average testosterone levels; 2) lower than normal estrogen-to-testosterone ratio; 3) genetics for developing more muscle mass; and/or 4) a very intense resistance training program. So please to all the women out there, don't be afraid of resistance training, there are many benefits such as increased bone density, strengthen connective tissue, decreased risk of injury, enhance well-being & self confidence, reduced blood pressure and the best of all, shapely curves : )
