Training for Fitness Success
Training for success requires planning with your final destination in mind. Think of this as the overarching goal to be fit; how and how fast you get there depend on your drive and determination.
Map Your Route to Total Fitness with FitScore
If you were driving from Ohio to California for the first time, you would probably not start your trip without mapping out the directions. The same thing goes for your fitness journey. You need to map it out so that you will get to your destination, real-world fitness, in the least amount of time.
FitScore is your map or personal guide through your fitness journey. Using FitScore will help you define your starting fitness level, help you determine the best direction and approach to achieving your fitness goals, give you a space to record your results (so that you always know how your performance is progressing), and give you real-world fitness results. This is much better than guesswork.
How FitScore Works for You
FitScore is user-friendly and simple to use. It is a measuring system that helps you track your performance from beginning to end. You can measure your progress along the way so that you can stay motivated and, if necessary, make changes.
You begin with a performance assessment, and the five tests measure strength, power, agility, endurance, and flexibility.
Next, you determine your performance scores for all Five Components of Fitness. Never mind how high or low you score with any of the components; at this point, it does not matter. What matters is that all five of the components are balanced with each other. If they are not, as is the case with most people new to the Workout-X real-world fitness program, your first fitness goal is to achieve balance in all Five Components of Fitness. Balancing all five components can take several weeks to several months, but in the meantime, you will still be working out, burning calories, and improving in areas that truly need improvement.
After you successfully achieve balance in all five components, you will have what is considered “well-rounded fitness” and a solid platform from which you can launch to the next level.
The idea is to achieve real-world fitness so that you can do almost anything. Again, this means attaining well-rounded fitness or balance in all five fitness components. When you have well-rounded fitness, you can achieve your fitness goals much faster than if you were good at only a few activities, and because your exercise program requires great variety, it will be a good thing that you can do everything!
Where Do I Get My FitScore?
Logon to the Workout-X website and click on the FitScore tab in the main menu bar. You may perform the FitScore assessments with a friend, coach, or personal trainer. When you complete the tests, enter the scores online.
Push Forward
What you now have in your hands is a simple yet very effective workout plan that contains a vast array of exercises. FitScore will help you to understand the concept of training for real-world fitness. We know that if you use the plan in this book and on the website, you will be impressed and delighted with your results.
The following chapters include more in-depth discussions on each of the Five Components of Fitness. The chapters are short, but you will gain more of an appreciation for the quality of strength, power, agility, endurance and flexibility. Furthermore, you will learn the importance of how these Five Components of Fitness affect your life! Online, you will learn how to perform assessments for each of the Five Components of Fitness. Finally, you will learn how to train to attain balance among these components as well as continuously progress to more advanced levels.
Train with Purpose
Are you working out with purpose and specificity toward your desired goal? Or are you blindly following some trumped-up workout plan that you read in a muscle magazine? If so, it’s likely that you are training like bodybuilders. That’s cool if you want to be one, but totally wrong if your goal is just about any other fitness-related goal. Let’s take a closer look at something called specificity of training.
Specificity of training means that you get what you train for! If your goal is to be a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) athlete, you should train for strength and explosive power mixed with a healthy dose of metabolic training. If your goal is general health and fitness, you should focus on building endurance, strength, flexibility, with agility and power work added to make you fit for the real-world. That means being able to perform the activities of daily living with vigor and stamina.
Let’s say you want to run outside with your kids, maybe kick the soccer ball around or throw the football. Maybe you want to go on a hike with your spouse or partner. These are activities that you want your training in the weight room, gym, country club, or garage to support.
Think about the superb conditioning the Cirque du Soleil athletes possess. These are some of the most well-rounded athletes you’ll ever see. Their strength and conditioning program incorporates elements from gymnastics, Brazilian capoeira, cross-training, metabolic training, Olympic weight lifting, yoga, and Pilates. (If we tested them, I’m sure we’d find very balanced FitScores.) I’m not suggesting that you need to incorporate all these elements into your workout plan, but you can see how doing a circuit on strength machines will produce a fairly one-dimensional result.
Specificity of training is thinking about your end game and goals in a scientific manner. It’s not about guessing or instinct in the weight room. Coaches and athletes spend time analyzing their sports and activities using sophisticated software and video to better understand the exact biomotor abilities required to excel. For example, MMA requires explosiveness, strength, and a lot of conditioning, but would it make sense to prepare for a fight by running on the treadmill for forty-five minutes three days per week? Would it be smarter to set up a series of bodyweight exercises performed in a circuit-like fashion for one, two, or three-minute rounds? With a quick analysis, you’d undoubtedly choose the circuit-training approach.
I ask you again: what are you training for, and are you training with purpose and specificity toward your desired goal? Let’s take a deeper look at the components of fitness to better understand what fitness means to you.