Planning to Train: How to Construct the Perfect Training Plan

Image: Optimise

Fitness trainer, doctor and longevity expert, Dr Andy Galpin uses a ten-step approach to crafting the perfect training program for anyone willing to train to their full potential. A well-thought-out plan is the only way to create a clear path to success, regardless of your starting point. The following are Galpin’s steps to training success, broken down.

Step 1:

What’s The Goal?

The first step is simple. What is it you are training for? Strength, hypertrophy (muscle size gain), speed, longevity, cardio are all great goals to consider, and each will be assessed later in this article. You can even train for all these things, as long as it is clear what your priorities are.

Step 2:

What’s Stopping You?

Identify what it is that is stopping you from reaching your goal(s). This could be joint pain, sickness, travel etc. The step to take from this is to directly address the point of failure and adjust the way you train to fit around this. With injury and joint pains, the step to take would be to rehab them correctly, before returning completely to goal-based training. If the issue is travel, the solution would be to adjust the way you travel and manage time, unless this is an unavoidable challenge (step 4 addresses this issue properly).

Step 3:

What’s Your Timeframe?

Set the realistic timeframe for how long it will take for you to reach your goal. This is where you must gain perspective. Look at your schedule for the whole year, what limitations will you face? How will your training be impacted by family commitments, work, travel (essentially plan around your life)? Once you have this information, you can move on to step 4.

Step 4:

How Many Days?

Now select how many days a week you can realistically work out during, and for how long. The main tip Galpin suggests here is to underestimate, don’t overestimate, as it is more important that you hit all your weekly goal days with spare time, as you can then adjust to add more days, instead of missing training days. Take everything into account in this stage, therefore working out will become a non-negotiable.

Step 5:

What Exercises?

Now time to select exercises and movements for your training, balancing exercises across the week between muscle groups. Once you know how many days you can train, you can figure out a plan to hit every muscle group, or to train effectively enough for your goal(s). From here, a progression strategy can be decided upon, through increased repetitions and/ or weight, this is essential for further growth in your plan.

Step 6:

How Will You Order Your Routine?

Order is essential to building a successful workout regimen that will allow you to both hit your goals and stick to the plan. Do what you find most important first. This could be scheduling your cardio before your weight training, or vice versa, or even placing your stretching routine before your intense exercise to help with flexibility. Build your routine to meet your goals: Whatever is most important in achieving your goal, do first. By training this way, you will be able to achieve your goals more successfully, with any training compromises impacting your sub-goals, such as if a gym session needs to be cut down, you would miss out your less important exercises which you have placed last in the routine.

Step 7:

How Intense Can You Train?

Remember, a goal is simply an adaptation within yourself, so remember this adaptation when deciding your training intensity. For the most optimal gain (in adaptation of muscle, strength or cardio), your intensity should increase by around 3% each week. If you can do 100 press-ups one week, with consistent training, you should be able to do 103 the next. While this is hard to measure practically, a simple protocol can be taken regarding working out in any form. If you can lift a certain weight, for a certain number of repetitions, make sure that either the weight or reps are increased by the next week. This goes for cardiovascular training also, if you can run 10km one week, run 11km the next. The list goes on. The aim here is to progress week on week.

Step 8:

How Many Will You Do?

This is a very similar premise to intensity, as discussed in the previous step. Volume increases are necessary for progress in any form of training. Galpin describes the safest increase in volume regarding training, cardio, and even caloric intake to be 5-7% on week for growth and longevity. However, with increases in all the aforementioned metrics week-on-week, you will see early growth, but may run into problems down the road. To mitigate such problems, use de-load weeks to optimise health during training phases. This is where you reach a plateau in training, and for the next week you reduce weights and repetitions by half, for the muscles to recover while remaining active. This could be used in cardio also by shortening cardio sessions in zone 2 (see my article on zone 2 cardio here).

Step 9:

How Long Will You Rest?

Galpin prescribes higher rest intervals between exercise sets for things like speed, power, and strength. These are for the more compound-style lifts, those which help you train like a high-performance athlete. Rest breaks of 2-5 minutes are best for this type of training. For hypertrophy, aim for lower rest periods between sets, between 90 seconds to a maximum of 3 minutes (for where muscle-breakdown is aggressively felt). For the Optimise protocol on hypertrophy, click here.

Step 10:

How Can You Fail?

“Chaos management” as labelled by Galpin, is an important final step to increase the effectiveness of your training. Look through your program and pick all the ways in which you could fail. Do you hate a certain exercise? Is an important movement placed too late in the workout? Have you chosen too much of a cardio type which you don’t like doing? These are all problems you could run into which could de-rail your progress. Create solutions to these problems to make your plan as easy to stick to as possible. This could be through adding cardio you enjoy, placing more of your workouts outside, or shifting training days around to fit better with your realistic schedule.