Welcome to your programme section hosting your personalised training schedule and probably the main reason you signed up. Your programme will consist of your goals and aims for the upcoming cycle, overall weekly schedule for the particular cycle you are in. You’ll see your cardio sessions written into this. A separate programme for your resistance sessions is just below the weekly plan. This consists of a detailed warm up and your main programme with links to the correct video clips and a cool down.
Warm ups are probably more important than you realise. A lot can be fit into them. Great Britains heptathlete Jessica Ennis changed her warm up routine en route to the Olympics in London in 2012 where she won gold. She was struggling with her 800m race, however she did not have time in the training programme to focus more sessions on it, so her physiologist Steve Ingham decided to alter her warm up. He realised she just went through a few light runs for 15mins prior to her sessions, he felt this was time wasted and instead implemented a much more rigorous warm up within the same time frame. For 2 years he used this time to solely focus on her 800m race, and it successfully brought her times down slowly but steadily, leaving her in prime position to close out her heptathlon in style by winning it and bringing home the gold. So your warm up will be specific for your needs.
A massively important yet skipped part of every programme. Flexibility will be part of your cool down, along with some supine box breathing. Smash two birds with one stone. Box breathing as mentioned in the sleep section involves a 2s inhale, 2s hold, 2s exhale, 2s hold. You can envisage a box as you do this, your breath pattern is the circumference of the box. This is a form of meditation and it helps to up regulate your parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) ad lower your sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight), bringing down cortisol levels quickly as we don’t want them elevated for too long, only briefly to create a bit of muscle damage for anabolic hormones to go in and make your muscles better. As you do this, you’ll work on your specific tight muscles, a quick 5-10min chill out whilst working on some imbalances.
For those that enjoy training at home, I have developed a very simple system for you to create your own programmes. You simply pick the exercises that apply to you and your needs from the various tables and place them in the correct place in the session template. Keep a record of your scores and try to beat them each session/week so that you are constantly improving.
