Working out is typically a hobby or an activity that people undertake, with a certain goal in mind. However, reaching that goal can be a challenge, mostly because people don’t really know what to do and when they should do it. 

Workout plans are a good way to get started on any sort of fitness goal, but how do you make a workout plan if you don’t know what you want to do? 

Well, here are a couple of pointers on how you should approach working out and making a workout plan, no formal physical education necessary.

What is Your Goal?

Ask yourself this question and you will already be one step closer to knowing which exercises you want to do. If you want to lose weight, then a workout plan is secondary but changing your diet should be the primary goal.

If you want stronger legs, then head to the gym and put lots of weight on them, probably exercising twice a week or more often, depending how fast you recover.

Do you want to grow muscles? There are excellent hypertrophy exercises and plans out there, though anything in the range of 5 to 30 repetitions will be effective for hypertrophy.

Do you want more endurance? In that case, decide on what you want to endure, long distance running sessions? Doing the most pull ups?

The sooner you know your goal, the sooner you can start working towards a plan.

The Basics Behind Strength, Hypertrophy and Endurance

Each of the three main categories that people work out for have their own principles and a couple of rules that you can apply if you want to maximize your efficiency when training for any of the three categories. 

Strength benefits from lots of effort in a single repetition or a maximum of three repetitions. Despite popular belief, it is much easier to recover from strength than hypertrophy exercises.

Hypertrophy typically requires anything between 5 to 30 repetitions and around 48 hours of recovery time between muscle groups, with the legs often needing more.

Endurance training requires effort over an extended period of time, as well as aiming to make a recovery as fast as possible, which means lots of sleep, high quality food and maybe some supplements like glutamine.

Plans Are Easy to Make (Once You Know What You Want)

Typically speaking, plans are very easy to make once you judge your own performance level by training for a single week, following some schedule you find online for the appropriate type of training you want to do. Once you’re done with your first week, you should adjust your training plan and add or remove exercises, reps and sets, to make it as personal as possible, so that you have enough load and volume and intensity, and enough time to recover between workout days or muscle groups.

Creating a workout plan is very easy provided you know what your goal is and you do a little bit of research on how to best achieve that goal, getting information from trusted sources only.