Are you doing a random training programme that you read in a magazine? Or maybe it’s from a particularly lazy fitness instructor who just wrote out a list of miscellaneous exercises for you to do. You end up walking back and forward from the rowing machine to the stepper with a vague idea of what you are doing. You’re confused!

It is common these days for busy personal trainers and gym instructors to just make a list of machines out of their heads and magazine workouts to recommend generic nonsense to people as being the holy grail of weight loss. Let’s look at a few examples.

Michelle joins a gym and asks for a programme to ‘tone up’ and she’s doing 40 minutes on the treadmill and some chest presses.

Paul wants to lose 40 lbs and he’s doing 40 minutes on the treadmill and some chest presses.

You see where I’m going with this?

Training Goals

Your training programme has to address your training goals. Everyone joins a gym for a reason; toning up, losing weight and gaining muscle being the primary motives. Trouble is they give up and lose interest because they aren’t achieving anything.

Why? It’s because they haven’t got a clear picture of what they want to achieve in the first place. Make sure your goal isn’t a vague ‘tone up’ or ‘lose weight’ make it more specific!

• ‘Lose 20lbs and fit into my skinny jeans’
• ‘Gain 10lbs of muscle and look good in a suit’
• Whatever it is, write it down and be clear on it. Write it down and then act on it.

Ability

Just because you seen somebody else doing it in the gym and they look the way you want to look does not mean you should be doing that exercise. It’s probably too advanced and out of your league and that person was probably given that exercise for a different reason to what you may think. Performing complex exercises when you join the gym first can only result in injury and disheartenment. If you don’t really know what the exercise is for and you are just doing it because Mr Olympia in the corner is doing it then you are setting yourself up to fail.

Exercise Selection

When choosing exercises, make sure they too address your goals!

If you want to lose belly fat or tone your bingo wings then crunches, sit ups and tricep kickbacks are the LAST thing you should be doing. Big movements using bodyweight and free weights, more metabolic training and less endurance training is the key to weight loss.

If you want to gain muscle or build up, bicep curls and shoulder raises should be very far down your priority list. You should be performing big lifts and eating lots of good clean food, not guzzling protein shakes and doing silly isolation/single joint exercises.

Bryan Kavanagh BSc CSCS

www.bryankavanagh.com

Bryan is a fat loss expert and physique transformation specialist based in Temple Bar, Dublin