One of the most challenging aspects of personal training is helping a new client overcome their preconceived beliefs about the advice they think they need. At least 90% of the new clients I have seen over the past 30 years have arrived with a clear set of ideas about what they should do to achieve their goals, and usually these ideas involve a particular type of exercise. Hopefully, this article will set the record straight and get you moving in the right direction.

Whenever you think about making changes to your body’s shape or fitness capabilities, please consider the list of goals below and assign a priority number to each one.

Increase Strength
Increase Size and Shape of Muscles (Hypertrophy)
Decrease Weight (for most, this means a decrease in fat)
Increase Tone (decrease body fat)
Increase Mobility, Flexibility and Stability
Increase Power and/or Speed
Increase Conditioning (increase cardio endurance)

Ideally, you should copy and paste your new list of priorities and bring it along with you on your free consult or next session. Short of that, I’ll try to steer you the best I can in this general guide. Just know that you can only excel at one fitness goal at a time. You can certainly work on most of them together, but you should always have that “most important” target at any given point. This will keep you honest and on-track with your training and lead to obtaining the best possible results.

If you are looking to lose weight, tone-up or burn fat, anything you do with your body is going to use energy, fuel and calories. However, if you are specifically looking to maximize “fat burn” then you’ll want to stick with low to moderate intensity activities, for as long as possible each session. For example, its better to walk for 90 min than three separate 30 min walks. If you are specifically looking to use energy or burn maximum calories (conditioning) then any high intensity activity is your thing, like HIIT, Tabata, boot camps, etc.

For building the strength, size and power of your muscles (and all connective tissue) you’ll want to use progressive resistance training. This can include any combination of free weights, cable machines, bands and body weight movements. This is a vast and complex category but in general, using heavier resistance builds strength (sets of 1-6 reps max) and lighter builds shape and size (sets of 8-12 reps max). Power training adds the component of speed and acceleration (used for sports and competition lifting mostly).

Mobility warm-ups and workouts can include many forms of gentle neuromuscular stimulation as well as the stretching and strengthening of key support structures.

This was a frustrating article to write because there is so much good information beyond its scope. For a reasonably quick learner, it may only take a few sessions of one-on-one training to comprehend the ideal workout that perfectly matches your fitness or weight loss goals.

I hope this has been a help to you and has at least got you thinking about your exercise choices. Please don’t hesitate to reach out for a consult with any questions about designing your best workouts! 🙂