Whats My Personal Training Plan?

Wow so for much for my plan to keep regularly updating you guys about my progress. I’ve been run off my feet and not had time to sit down and get typing properly.  The last month has been spent developing my online Metabolic Typing program and now for the first time I’m offering Metabolic Typing to non training clients. Also the modelling seems to have picked up again so I’ve been back and forth to London quite a lot. Who said being a personal trainer is easy? Well me normally, but that’s because I enjoy what I do and gain an enormous amount of satisfaction from seeing people transform themselves and improve their health. Sorry I digress!

 Today I’m going to discuss my training or the focus of my training at the moment. From my last blog you will know that my primary concern is with improving my conditioning for tennis. You will also know from my last blog that I have picked up a few injuries recently, so my priority is to reduce my risk of injury in order to improve my level of conditioning. To achieve this I have been forced to drastically change my training regime. I’m still training 3-5 times a week but the focus on increasing my flexibility. Flexibility training is something that I have often neglected because I don’t tend to enjoy it, but I have made a real effort this time to stick to my plan. I’m also doing about 15 minutes of mobility training after waking up.

 My workouts are pretty short lasting around 60 minutes including warm up, training and cool down. As any good personal trainer will tell you doing intense short workouts is the best way to maximise growth hormone production. The very same personal trainer should also tell you that this is vital for reducing body fat and increasing muscle mass.  So my warm up of joint mobility exercises is lasting 10 minutes, the strength component is lasting 30 minutes which leaves me with 20 minutes of stretching. I’ll cover stretching more in another blog but rest assured I am not using static stretches because they are almost futile if you want to seriously improve flexibility.

 Another aim of my sessions has been to not push myself as hard. I’ve been guilty in the past of training to hard and unfortunately this can be as damaging if not more than under training. The body only has a limited ability to cope with stress and just like sitting in traffic, paying bills or your boss shouting at you; exercise is also a stressor on the body. In moderation stress is a good thing, but too much can cause major problems. At this point I will add that my eating and supplementation plan are also designed to support me by helping my body deal with stress more effectively.

So there you have it. This is how I am focusing my training at the moment. I’m sure it may not be quite what you were expecting. Normally when you think of conditioning you think of running and really increasing the heart rate. For the most part this is true especially for a sport like tennis, but being injury free and healthy is the first piece of the puzzle. By increasing my flexibility and reducing the stress imposed on my body my conditioning will increase long term rather than break down.

 When designing a training program it is very important to look at each piece of the puzzle. If your personal trainer doesn’t ask questions about your health and injuries then you need to start asking a few more questions of them. Next time I will talk about my mobility training in more depth.