Having a Blueprint (Part I)

When I started personal training 12 years ago, I spent a lot of time overthinking my clients’ workouts. My personal exercise library was too small. I relied on machines and your basic single-joint exercises. I wasn’t comfortable having my client do an exercise I couldn’t teach proficiently. My workouts didn’t flow efficiently and tended to neglect areas I thought weren’t important (a proper warm up, mobility, and activation). Being a 20 year-old college junior, fresh off my personal training certification, my ego was bigger than it needed to be. I quickly found out I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.

I’ve been fortunate to learn from some great coaches and trainers over the years. These experiences have helped me develop a blueprint for planning workouts that I’m comfortable with. Along with improving my clients’ workout efficiency and productivity, it gives me the flexibility with exercise selection. I’ve used this for both individual and small group training sessions. The blueprint is not groundbreaking, but it’s effective, and most importantly it’s FUN!

Looking at a 60 min session, I break my blueprint down into three parts;    

1.) Warm Up/ Mobility/ Activation

2.) Strength

3.) Work Capacity

1) Warm Up/Mobility/Activation: I encourage my clients to show up 5-10 early to each session. During this time they can foam roll and hit some target areas with a lacrosse ball. I always begin my workouts with dynamic stretches to increase internal temperature and blood flow. I typically spend about 5 minutes doing the following movements: lunge+reach, single leg toe touch, rocker lunges, straight leg kicks, elbow instep, a skips, b skips.

Since the majority of my clients have poor hip mobility, I’ll spend another 5-10 minutes improving hip range of motion. I’ll have them do a mobility exercise improving each of the following; hip extension, flexion, internal rotation, and external rotation. I may spend some time on thoracic and shoulder mobility if the workout focus is upper body.

Now that we’ve opened up the joints and improved our range of motion, I’ll start my clients with some simple activation exercises. From my experience working with the general population, one of our strongest, most underutilized muscles are our glutes. They work as powerful hip extensors and are responsible for standing up, climbing stairs, and standing in an erect position. Without getting into too much detail, it’s common to see a new client that is very quad-dominant. Meaning the anterior muscles (front) of the leg overpower the posterior muscles (back) of the leg. (Basically the quads overpower the glutes and hamstrings). To combat this I’ll have the client do a series of exercises to activate or wake up the glutes. These include variations of band walks, hip thrusts, and unilateral or bilateral hip hinging patterns. I also like to throw in some balance and proprioception work during this time. This can be as simple as balancing with one foot on an Airex Pad for a given amount of time.

(End of Part 1)