The FITT Principal

How are those New Year’s Resolutions coming? Sometimes it can be difficult figuring out what might be the best workout routine for you. Should you lift weights? Go running? What’s a better use of your time: classes, free weights, treadmills or home-workouts?

You should continually be pushing your body to its max, and then as it gets stronger you only push it harder. For some people, their max may be 20 minutes walking on the treadmill. For others, they need interval training to get a benefit. If you don’t push yourself to your max, you will simply maintain, not improve.

When you design your workout routine, a good rule of thumb to keep in mind is the FITT principal: frequency, intensity, time and type. Each of these factors plays a role in making a workout routine successful.

Frequency: how many exercise sessions will you have each week.

Intensity: how difficult are the exercise sessions.

Time: how long is each exercise session.

Type: what is the activity being performed.

These four factors all play off each other in determining your overall workout. If you increase the intensity, you may have to lower the time of the session, or vice versa. You shouldn’t do every type of exercises with the same level of frequency; for example, weight lifting exercises need more recovery time in between sessions than do cardio exercises.

A good category to start with when designing your own exercise routine is actually the last one: type. If you find an exercise you love, you are more likely to stick to the goals you set for the other three factors. Are spinning classes up your alley? Maybe swimming? Or ? Overall, you should work with some combination of cardio, strength training, and flexibility training. But that doesn’t mean you are limited to weight lifting or running the treadmill (though of course that is an option).

, for example, is a great mixture of cardio and strength. You increase and decrease the resistance on the bikes all throughout the class. You may decide some days to make the resistance higher and go slower and then other days switch it. Another combo could be , which is a good mixture of strength and flexibility.

Once you have found an exercise combination you like, setting a frequency goal is a good next step. For optimal results, cardio sessions can be performed from three to six times a week. Full body resistance training, on the other hand, should be more like three to four times a week with a day in between sessions for let your muscles recover. Or you can do resistance with more frequently if you focus on different muscle groups at different times to still allow for recovery.

The time and intensity factors can vary from session to session, keeping in mind the principal of pushing your body to its max but also avoiding burnout. You never, ever need to be to the point of feeling dizzy, throwing up, or collapsing after a workout. That’s not beneficial. But you should feel like you worked hard.

For cardio training, you’ll want to monitor your heart rate to get the levels of intensity you need without overloading. For strength training, if you can do all your reps easily, then you should increase the weight or reps—but as soon as you break proper form or start using the wrong muscles to do the work, you need to lower or stop. And for flexibility, make sure you are sufficiently warmed up and then just keep pushing yourself, keeping in mind that tension is good, pain is not. Don’t force a stretch if there is a sharp pain.

As to time, a good rule of thumb is at least 20 minutes for cardio and not more than an hour for resistance training. Sometimes you’ll want to increase the time, and sometimes you’ll want to increase the intensity. A 30 minute bootcamp where you are pushing hard the entire time can be more beneficial than an hour of free weights where you wander from station to station and half your time is spent setting up the weights you want.

So find out what the best FITT combination is for your goals and design a killer workout.