Legacy Post: Design Your Weekend Warrior Fitness Program

*This is an older post from years ago that still holds up pretty well today. Check out my online coaching page if you are interested in customizing a program for your goals.

WWRx exercises are daily, apple a day type exercises that are up there with brushing your teeth. If you do them daily, or almost every day, you can do a pretty good job of keeping the rust off. WWRx exercises focus on QUALITY of movement before QUANTITY of movement. (Movement literacy, then fitness literacy.) If you want to be fit, get into shape and perform well, it is going to take some work. It will take a good quantity of work.

The ideas below are for those of you who are making time to exercise for 20-60 minutes a day, maybe 2-5 days per week.

You can skin your workout routine cat a hundred ways, but designing your daily or weekly training routine really does not have to be rocket science. Here is how I set up every 6-8 weeks when throwing together a new weekly “split”:

Training Terminology:

• Fitness – fitness can be defined as your ability to perform a task. Performing a given task require any number of fitness attributes: strength, power, balance, agility, mobility, speed, endurance, etc. You develop fitness by practicing or preparing for tasks you want to perform or choosing tasks that develop specific fitness attributes you desire, such as strength. Decide what your own, personal definition of fitness is before designing your training routine. Consider who is more fit, the marathon runner, power lifter or a parent who wants to pick up his young children without throwing out his back? It’s all relative.
• Corrective Mobility & Restoring Patterns – mobility can be defined as your ability to express your joints through their entire range of motion, considering your genetics, limb lengths and current restrictions. Assuming we have some baseline of “good movement” or healthy mobility, we are always attempting to restore or “correct” our movement patterns to reduce injury risk and compensation patterns. Therefore, when you stretch and do other corrective exercises, do them with the purpose of correcting your potential problem areas.
• Workout Split – if designing a workout by the week, this is the days you are training and the exercises, movements or body parts you are hitting each day. It is amazing the classic bodybuilding split from the 80’s: Day 1: Chest/Tris, Day 2: Back/Bis, Day 3: Legs/Shoulders, Day 4: Off, Repeat – is still being used by so many people. The Muscle and Fitness magazines of the world have this crazy way of recycling the same information for decades.
• Superset – alternating between 2 exercises, you will typically pair exercises that hit different fundamental movements. A kettlebell swing/farmers Walk superset is an awesome pairing for the “carry” and “hinging” patterns.
• Circuit – 3 or more exercises you would perform in a succession – there are many ways to perform a circuit, some of which I note below to improve workout time efficiency and get more bang for your total body conditioning buck.
• Work Capacity – this is key for getting into shape, and is probably the simplest, yet effective way for increasing your overall fitness level. This is the amount of work you can complete in a given amount of time. If you can do 50 push ups in 60 seconds, and in 4 weeks you can do 55 push ups in 60 seconds, you just increased your work capacity.
• EMOM – every minute on the minute – this is a great technique for getting the most bang for your buck in a given amount of time. 10 sets of 10 squats EMOM means you begin a stop watch, then perform 10 squats, then rest for the rest of that first minute. You begin each set “on the minute” for 10 minutes. You can increase intensity by increasing your work capacity each week by adding 1 rep to each set each workout. This is also called “density training”, where you are making the given time as “dense” with work as you can during that given amount of time.
• Everyday Strength Moves – there are several ways to list these, and I actually use 10 moves in my programming, but for now, I will use a basic six exercise list here. The movements we should all focus on are: Carry, Hinge, Squat, Pull, Push. The sixth move then is the one you aren’t doing, and includes more complex moves like a Turkish Get Up.