How to Schedule a Week of Workouts for Resistance Training
Welcome to The Spotter!
I am Nolan Vannata. This newsletter is a part of my mission to make health, fitness, and nutrition content that is evidence-based, digestible, practical, and accessible.
Big news!
Before I go into this article, I’m excited to share my new business: The Spotter Fitness and Nutrition! I have been coaching and training others in person for years and I’m excited to expand into online coaching.
If you or someone you know needs help with their fitness and nutrition, you can find all of the information you need by clicking this link. I’m happy to schedule a call to answer any questions you have.
For all future articles, I will be putting this information at the end of the article. Now, onto the main topic: how to schedule a week of workouts.
Knowing how to schedule your week matters… a lot
Your workouts do not exist in a bubble. Your recent workouts and life stresses will affect the exercises you do today. Also, what you do today should be based on what you plan to do tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.
You could do the most perfect single workout, but it won’t make a significant impact on its own. However, doing similar workouts three to five times per week for several months (or years) will make a difference. If you haven’t read my previous article, How to Create a Full Body Strength Workout, I recommend starting there. That article will complement this one.
I run through a couple of questions when scheduling a week of workouts, both for myself and others.
What days can you exercise?
Out of those days, what days should you exercise?
How can we distribute workouts strategically?
I will use my own schedule as an example and by showing you my thought process, you can apply this to your own exercise program.
What days can you exercise?
Look at your week and cross off every day where you definitely can’t exercise. I’m talking about a full schedule, no room for anything else, impossible to fit in a workout without bailing on another obligation you have that day.
For example, I usually have the option to exercise any day of the week. Lately, my Saturdays have been getting booked with other obligations. I knew ahead of time I couldn’t exercise on those days, so I had to plan accordingly and move things around. Here is my current “can I exercise” schedule:
In my case, this doesn’t tell a whole lot yet, but that will change in the next section. Your schedule much more restrictive than this
What days should you exercise?
“Should I exercise today” is a way of saying, “is my body able to absorb the stress I intend to put on it and can I recover from it?”.
This requires more thinking. Most weeks, I can exercise every single day, sometimes twice per day. However, I usually end up exercising four or five times per week given my current fitness level and life priorities. With some educated guessing and experience through trial and error, I came up with my current schedule shown below.
I am usually too tired on Wednesday due to my work and exercise schedules on Monday and Tuesday. I have tried to push through and usually end up feeling like crap. That makes Wednesday a day off for the foreseeable future. Saturdays and Sundays are a “maybe” depending on how I am feeling.
I make Monday and Tuesday my hardest workouts of the week. With a weekend full of extra sleep and low stress activities, I’m full of energy and ready to smash my workouts once Monday rolls around. If possible, schedule your hardest workouts when you think you will be the least fatigued. By doing this, you are giving yourself the best chance of executing the workout to the highest quality.
Strategically planning your week
Once you block out some time for your workouts, you can start to write down the specifics. Below is my current schedule.
I’ve been doing this for the past four months, only deviating when I have a scheduling conflict. It’s not fancy, complicated, nor is it that impressive. Most of these workouts are about 40-60 minutes long with generous rest periods in between sets. These workouts usually have less than six different exercises aside from my warmup. The “easy lift” you see is a lower effort, unstructured workout where I target certain muscles that I feel weren’t hit enough during the week.
I have been training seriously for 12 years, and this still works.
The most important questions you can ask yourself when spacing out your workouts are:
How much do I need to do today to see a benefit?
How long will it take to recover from that?
Exercise results in a temporary decrease in performance capacity. After we eat, sleep, rest, and recover, we come back stronger than before. This is known as “general adaptation syndrome”, as shown below.
If you are only training two or three days per week, I recommend sticking to full body workouts. The more frequently you exercise, the more I would consider having more variety from day to day. If you lift six or seven days per week, it would be unwise to train all muscle groups every day because of two possible scenarios:
You will become way too fatigued to have high quality workouts and likely not make any progress because of it, OR…
You are able to do it every day without fatigue because the workouts are too easy for your fitness level.
When you are resistance training very frequently, you can train specific muscle groups while others recovery.
Summary
“Can I exercise on this day?”
Check if you even have the time available to exercise on a specific day. In reality, most people usually have time to do something on almost every day.
“Should I exercise on this day?”
Does it make sense to exercise? If you currently only workout twice per week, having the time to exercise every day doesn’t mean it would be a good idea.
“What should I do today?”
Ask yourself those two questions again:
How much do I need to do today to see a benefit?
How long will it take to recover from that?
If your “should I exercise on this day” results in only two workouts per week, you don’t need to be that strategic in how you space things out as there are five other days for you to recover. However, more frequent workouts will require you to do certain workouts while you recover from others.
The most important thing to take away from this article is that this philosophy is what I have seen work for me and those that I program and schedule for. The best schedule is the one that works for you and gets the results you want.
This got me jacked.
As always, well written sir — and congrats on the company launch!