Improving Your Fitness with the Workout-X Training Plan
Now that you know your overall FitScore and component scores, you’re ready to start training for improvement. To get started, log on to Workout-X each day and follow the daily workout.
Putting It All Together
The purpose of the Workout-X training plan is to achieve real-world fitness by balancing your scores of the Five Components of Fitness. This initial journey will take twelve weeks or more, but throughout this period, you will be working out with a purpose rather than just going through the motions like many others.
If you happen to have a high FitScore, congratulations! Follow the Workout-X training plan all the same, as it ultimately directs everyone toward making each person stronger, more agile, powerful, more flexible, and in better cardiovascular shape! The larger the FitScore, the greater your real-world fitness!
The Real-World Fitness Map
Here are the essential elements of the Workout-X training plan.
Destination 1: Achieve balance in all five components. You must achieve real-world fitness before improving it! This will be the hardest part of the program, as your body naturally gravitates to what it is good at, and your mind will want to lead you there. Remember the specificity of training from the earlier discussions? The goal with Workout-X is to excel in all five areas: strength, power, agility, flexibility, and endurance. You’re training for general fitness, not elite bodybuilding!
Destination 2: Increase your FitScore to improve your real-world fitness. Once you’ve achieved balance and symmetry, you’ll want to increase your component scores. You’ll achieve balance in the previous stage and progressively increase your individual scores. As you set your individual targets for fitness, you’ll get a clear sense of what you need to focus on to keep progressing. The next stage is optional and is a sort of “off-ramp” for people on the program. (Think of it as a sabbatical from real-world fitness.)
Destination 3 (Optional): Purposely explore individual components you excel at at the expense of others. Through your training, you may find that you excel at one or two components and want to take those to the max. This is your choice, and we encourage you to explore but not specialize unless you are training for a particular sport or bodybuilding. Excelling in all five components will cover 90 percent of the sport-specific requirements. Exceptions include bodybuilding, power lifting, strength competitions (“strongman” events), and Olympic lifting.
Interpreting Your FitScore into a Workout
Exercise science is not an exact science but a science of probability. Everyone responds differently to exercise programs, and sometimes you can guess the results in people by looking at what kind of exercises they use and how often. In other words, if you use one type of exercise more frequently than others, such as a back squat (strength) versus running (endurance) or jumping (power), you will become better at it than at the others. The same is true for constantly training one component of fitness. If you constantly train for the fitness component of endurance but neglect strength, flexibility, agility, and power, you will be good at endurance and mediocre at everything else. Increase your training of the other four fitness components, and you will improve your performance in these areas.
If you scored high on a certain fitness component, it could be due to several reasons:
- This component is all you train or mostly what you train.
- You train this component for a long duration or with high frequency.
- You train it with great intensity.
If you scored low on a certain fitness component, it could be due to one of the following:
- You are not training this component at all.
- You are not training this component with enough duration or frequency.
- You are not training this component with enough intensity.
If you scored low on a certain fitness component, it makes sense that you need to do the following:
- Train for it.
- Train for it more (duration or frequency).
- Train for it with intensity.
Find the time and the physical resources to add more of one fitness component into your overall training schedule, as this is generally the best solution to improving that fitness component.
If you are like most people, you only have so much time, energy, and physical resource to workout. How can you add more exercises without having to commit more time and deplete your body? The answer is volume control. If you increase the duration, frequency, or intensity of one fitness component, you must decrease the duration, frequency, or intensity of another fitness component.
By decreasing the work volume of a specific fitness component (to make room for another), does it mean that you will sacrifice your performance at it? Maybe and maybe not.
If you scored high on a fitness component, you may lose some of your performance result (if you decrease your work in it). If your performance result is not that high in the first place, you may not lose any performance result or may continue to improve your performance simply because you are working out. In any case, it is more important to initially balance all Five Components of Fitness and work at increasing them all concurrently.
Now that you understand the concept of the Five Components of Fitness and how to score your current fitness level, let’s look at what you can do to balance these components. Let’s examine how to create a workout program that will balance the components for real-world fitness.
