Much is made by fitness people about the indispensable and vital nature of a training program. The long and short of it is that you’re basically wasting your time working out if you don’t have a program all laid out.
I may have even said things to this effect.
And it’s true. But honestly only in a few cases.
If you really want to get as strong as possible, whether for competitive sport or you simply have a desire to fulfill, you (or your coach) need to sit down, draw on the sum of your knowledge and experience, and lay out a road map for your training, adjusting all along the way based on the day-to-day responses and fluctuations.
If you’re rehabbing an injury, you probably need a plan.
But, if you’re just trying to maintain good health and capability through training you may very well not need a plan at all.
You still need some sort of progressive overload, which is a cornerstone of any training plan. But you can achieve progressive overload just by keeping a training notebook and making sure that in some way: volume, density, or intensity you’re doing more than last time or last week.
There are some pretty big benefits to not having a rigid plan as well. It obviously allows for much for flexibility and creativity as well as adjustments to the needs of the day. Plus, depending on your personality some people really struggle with needing to adjust a plan, maybe because they don’t have time to finish the entire workout due to other constraints, or because something just doesn’t work that day.
All of that to say, if you don’t need a plan but you want someone to hand you a workout and say “Hey, do this!” you might be interested in checking out Lift Weights Faster Daily which we quietly launched a few months ago.
It’s really cool, you just tell us how long you want your workouts to be, what your skill or experience level is, and what type of equipment you have or want to use. Then three times a week (on the days you choose) a workout shows up in your inbox complete with explanations for all the movements.
Personally I’m not chasing any strength goals right now, and I’m busy enough with other stuff I want to be doing that I want to really minimize the time I spend lifting. I set my LWF Daily preferences to kettlebells only, and I’ve been having a ball.
Check it out, it might hit the spot for you.
Leave a Reply