How to make working out a habit: Part 1
This is the first in a series of articles that aim to educate the reader on how to set up and maintain successful exercise habits. These are based on my experience as both a personal trainer, gym manager and exercise enthusiast.
As a gym manager, I often wondered why the majority of people that came to the gym with such great intentions and motivation tended to fizzle out after about a month. If you can relate to this, don’t beat yourself up. The business model of commercial gyms is built off the expectation that the majority of their customers won’t use the facility.
I would argue that most people fail to make fitness a consistent part of their life because they fail to account for the lifestyle changes that are required to make exercise a habit. The dichotomy is that some people are afraid to even begin due to misconceptions about how difficult the task is going to be, with the flip side jumping into the gym and trying to cram as much fitness into their life as quickly as possible, to make up for lost time.
Thankfully, improving your health, putting on some muscle and improving how you feel in your body is not an unbelievably time consuming task.
I’d like to provide you with a helpful guide that will set you up for success in the gym. I can confidently say that this approach has assisted the vast majority of my clients over the years, largely due to its simplistic, methodical and common sense approach. This article will help you focus on the absolute fundamentals, and provides a helpful sample workout at the end that allows you to put theory into practice.
Where do you start? Your calendar.
I would argue that most people fail to make fitness a consistent part of their life because they fail to account for the lifestyle changes that are required to make exercise a habit. The idea of becoming healthier, fitter, or happier in your body is obviously alluring, and often I find that people tend to throw money at a gym membership before they have seriously considered the logistics.
Before we even talk about what you want to achieve in the gym, you should do two things.
Look at your weekly calendar and attempt to schedule 3 workouts per week, including travel time to and from the facility, for the next month.
Write out a list of your current short term priorities and goals. Ask yourself, “would I be ok with not achieving these goals in the same timeframe, provided that I improved my overall health?”
This is how I set my expectations for all of my clients from the get go. The only difference here is that you are going to have to be accountable to something other than me!
My advice to you if you can’t make this work: it may not be the best time in your life to add in consistent workouts. Please don’t be discouraged and avoid the gym completely, as any movement is better than none, but do be cognizant of the fact that you will need to prioritize enough time for 3 workouts a week in order to realistically see results.
The reason why I will always address your schedule first is because it will ultimately affect your consistency, which is undoubtedly the one factor that is absolutely crucial to achieving progress in the gym. I’m sure it will not be surprising to hear that the most successful clients I have ever had were the ones that were religiously consistent. But consistency is so important because it facilities the phenomenon known as Progressive Overload, which is ultimately how we get stronger or add more muscle. More on that later.
If you are concerned about this seemingly small time commitment, I would also like to assure you that most people outside of professional bodybuilders do not need to spend more than one hour in the gym per session, and that I have seen plenty of great results from clients who train 3 times per week. I’m sure the annoying gym enthusiast in your life will swear to you that anything less than a 2 hour session, 6 days a week, isn’t enough for them to make gains. I often find that those people enjoy the process of being in the gym more than they enjoy training for results, so trust me when I say that you can accomplish all the important things in an hour.
The flip side to this argument is that exceptional results take exceptional amounts of effort and dedication. I want to help you set realistic expectations from the get go and give you my perspective. If you are a person looking to improve your health and gain some muscle, and you aren’t currently exercising, your goals are not exceptional. If anything, it is a good thing to have unremarkable goals or extraneous circumstances, because exceptional things often seem impossible to achieve. But if you only take away one thing from this article, I would like you to understand that maintaining a consistent strength and conditioning routine will be exponentially more beneficial to your health, especially in comparison to the inconsistent gym goer.
Before we move into what you should do in the gym, you should probably pick some goals to direct your training.
Goals: What should you want to do?
Setting goals is easy. Picking a realistic goal is much more difficult than people imagine. A large part of the issue is that people are often very poor at judging themselves accurately, and thus fail to pick goals that are realistic. From my experience, I have noticed that when goal setting is just uninformed guesswork, clients tend to end up working really hard at something but not seeing the expected results, and then burning out and quitting.
In my opinion, the best way to counteract this is to gather as much objective data as possible about your starting point, so you can see some areas of opportunity for improvement. People often assume that coaches are uniquely qualified to do this, but I disagree, and often find a lot of coaches fail to use objective metrics effectively. Below are a list of what metrics I look for when onboarding a new client, many of which you can attempt to do by yourself.
| Metric | Measurement | Recommended Healthy Ranges |
|---|---|---|
| Waking heart rate | Self Measurement (count your pulse for 15 seconds and multiply by 4), Heart Rate Trackers like Whoop or Oura | 60 Beats Per Minute or less |
| Blood Pressure | Blood Pressure Cuff (a lot of pharmacies have them) | Less than 120/80 |
| Skeletal Muscle Mass and Body Fat Percentage | DEXA Scan (gold standard), Calipers (accurate as the user), BIA Devices (least accurate but ok for a ballpark) | Sub 20% for Males, Sub 25% for Females |
| Current satisfaction with health | Self reported | Very satisfied! |
I am not going to go into much detail about the metrics or methods of measurement that I have listed above in this article. Just know that if you find yourself fairly close to these recommended ranges, you are in a pretty decent place in terms of overall health. If you find yourself significantly outside said ranges, consult with your doctor and start to hit the gym.
But goals without timeframes are wishes that probably aren’t going to happen. Based on the metrics above, here is an insight into realistic timeframes that I find to be most suitable for my General Population Clientele. It focuses on both athletic performance and overall health, underpinned by the setting of health conscious habits that I know will be sustainable.
| Short Term Goals (6-12 weeks) | Medium Term Goals (6-12 months) | Longer Term Goals (1-2 years) |
|---|---|---|
| Get waking heart rate and blood pressure within a healthy range | Heart Rate Variability in an above average level for age group | Regulation of body fat percentages in above average ranges (Sub 15% for Men, Sub 25% for Women) |
| Consistently consuming adequate amounts of protein per day | Body Fat percentages in health ranges (Sub 20% for Males, Sub 25% for Females) | Above average strength levels in all the major movement patterns |
| Consistency in workout attendance | Ability to embark on any physical activity without fear of injury | Ability to take a week off from the gym without a precipitous decrease in performance |
If you find yourself overwhelmed at all the information or time frames above, or you are shuddering at the thought of having to track some metrics or pick some goals, let me simplify things. I am going to tell you what you should value and work towards (at the start of your fitness journey anyways).
Most people should always be aiming to add muscle to their frame, irrespective of whether their goal is to lose weight, reduce body fat or become a marathon runner who teaches yoga on the weekends.
Often, I find that a lot of clients provide pushback on the idea that people should always be focusing on gaining muscle. I have two points that I would like you to consider.
From a health perspective, additional skeletal muscle mass is never a bad idea. In addition to helping you move, muscle helps protect your bones, tendons and ligaments and is also more metabolically taxing than body fat (basically, it costs more calories just to maintain a significant amount of muscle mass). Unfortunately the same can not be said for excessive body fat.
I would argue that most people, provided they had their ideal physique and were in fine health, would not value scale weight whatsoever. In my opinion, the only people who should be particularly vigilant of their weight are athletes that compete in weight class sports, or in endurance events.
With that knowledge, I really struggle to think of any fitness goal where additional muscle would not be beneficial. Even if you are adamant that your only goal is to reduce the size of your waistband and to be able to wear clothes you used to fit into, I can assure you that gaining some muscle will help those clothes fit you better than before.
Despite the mountain of evidence extolling the benefits of resistance training, the prevalent mindset of many fitness and healthcare professionals seems to be pushing people towards weight loss as the sole method of improving your health and fitness. Irrespective of whether this is an appropriate goal for some people, there is an obvious physiological burden that rides with such a mindset. This is why I am so adamant about preaching the benefits of resistance training.
I feel that it is beneficial to focus on the process of adding things into people's lives, rather than focusing on cutting things out. At the end of the day, I’d rather help someone become a greater version of themselves that is far more robust, rather than trying to make themselves literally and figuratively smaller.
Enough Theory, what should I do in the gym in the first place?
Starting a training program can be as simple or as complicated as you would like it to be. The good news is, if you are completely new to the weight room, or if you are returning after an absence, your training program should be quite simple. The main things that will assist you in terms of successful and sustainable execution is honest effort, and tracking the work that you do.
I’m going to simplify this as much as possible and show you how I have taught programming to a lot of new coaches and clients over the years.
Below is a list of 6 movement patterns. These patterns categorize how we move our bodies, and what muscles are responsible for making this movement happen. I have listed the patterns along with some fairly common exercises that one could do that would fall into these movement patterns.
| Movement Pattern/ Relevant Muscles | Exercises |
|---|---|
| Knee Dominant/Quads, Adductors, Glutes | Squatting variations, leg press, leg extensions, lunges |
| Hip Dominant/Hamstrings, Adductors, Glutes | Deadlift variations, Hip Thrusts, Good mornings |
| Horizontal Pushing/ Pecs, Deltoids and Triceps | Pushups, Chest Press, Bench Press |
| Horizontal Pulling/ Lats, Rotator Cuff, Traps | Bodyweight rows, Chest Supported Rows |
| Vertical Pushing/ Deltoids, Triceps | Shoulder Press |
| Vertical Pulling/ Lats, Rotator Cuff, Traps | Pullups, Lat Pulldown |
In order to grow the muscles that correspond to said movement patterns, they need to be exposed to a certain amount of work on a frequent enough basis. How we track that work is called Volume.
There is a minimum amount of volume that one can do per week in order to see any positive improvement to fitness, and the inverse of that is doing so much exercise it is overtraining you, and is providing a negative effect (meaning you will not get stronger from it).
The minimum amount of volume you could do per week would be 4 sets per muscle group. I would hope that we would want to be slightly above the least amount of effort, so I would generally suggest that you go slightly above and beyond that and aim for around 6 sets per movement pattern per workout.
So here’s an example of a basic day I would run through with a client that was a novice in the gym. Please note that this is scaled to an individuals ability.
| Exercise | Sets x Reps x Weight |
|---|---|
| A1) Goblet Squat with pause | 4 x 8-12 |
| A2) Seated Cable Row | 4 x 12-15 |
| A3) DB Chest Press | 4 x 8-12 |
| B1) Reverse lunge with support | 2 x 12 per leg |
| B2) Half kneeling one arm pulldown | 2 x 8-12 |
| C1) Tempo Push Up | 2 x 10-12 |
| C2) Side Plank holds | 2 x 20s per side |
What would I do for my next day of training? The movement patterns I did not hit above, which would be Hip Dominant, Vertical Pulling and Horizontal Pushing movements. You can keep the exact same set and rep scheme if you wish, and plug in exercises that you find suitable.
As you will notice if you were to actually go and run through this workout, lifting weights requires some skill, and the best way to get better at something is to do it many times. So if you were to repeat this workout next week, it should be easier for you to manage the technical challenges of the lifts, so you can probably increase your performance by lifting more weight or performing more reps. This is largely a big part of why novice lifters can make exponential gains when they begin training consistently.
In later articles, I plan on discussing how to continue to make improvements and adjustments to your training as you progress, so you can get as much benefit out of your sessions as possible.
There's nothing left to do but to get after it.
I wanted this article to be practical and realistic for anyone reading this, irrespective of their current level of fitness. Hopefully you will read this and become inspired to take action on whatever goals you have. Even if the action steps you take seem small, commend yourself on any progress that you are making. In future articles, I plan on helping you figure out how you can nail your goals with some more specificity and precision, but for now, I hope that you go and take some actions that will help you improve your overall health and wellness.