Anatomy of a 30-Minute Training Session: Part 1
Today’s post is the first of this week’s three-part series by guest blogger Chris Kelly. Enjoy!
Looking back on my career as a trainer, one of the lessons I learned early on is that planning 30-minute sessions can be possibly the hardest job in fitness. Due to family and business obligations, most individuals in this category are pressed for time and they train either shortly after rising from bed or immediately after work. Either way, they usually arrive to the session with a glazed-over expression and a cup of Starbucks coffee in hand.
The first order of business for these time-crunched clients is to simply wake up. Throw in late arrivals and frequent cell phone breaks, and it’s an uphill battle just to get people to pay attention, let alone bust out a warm-up and hit the weights.
With these challenges in mind, we must still somehow carve out a session containing strength, conditioning, mobility and core training in the span of 30 minutes (22-25, really). This means designing a template which not only takes into account the client’s current fitness level, but also their ability to navigate your program on a given day.
For example, assigning complicated exercises like multi-planar lunges may be just the ticket to improve clients’ coordination and balance, but not after a frustrating day at work has fried their concentration. As you’ll soon learn, a person’s occupation and training time must be considered when developing a program. (Here’s a hint: Keep it simple!) But whatever your goal is for the day, the most important step is to have a plan (and a plan B!) so that you control the clock as best you can.
Controlling the clock
Because every client moves at a different pace, I have found the most practical method of controlling the clock is to allocate time to each portion of the session, rather than adhering to a rigid set and rep scheme.
Here’s the 30-minute template we use at Peak Fitness:
Warm-up: 10 minutes
- Dynamic mobility: 5 minutes
- Active Isolated Stretching (AIS): 5 minutes (if time)
Strength training: 10 minutes
- Push exercise
- Pull exercise
- Leg exercise
Conditioning: 5-7 minutes
Corrective exercise: 3-5 minutes
With this plan in place, we then set a stop watch for each time period. This allows us to know exactly how much time is left to complete the current portion of the session before moving on to the next. Once the clock is running, we make extensive use of intervals and timed circuits to efficiently move the client through the workout. Of course, each client’s program is highly individual.
Understanding your subject
Because everyone is different, the first step in program design is screening the client’s work capacity and competency at taking direction. Below is the standard test we utilize to determine the amount of work and volume we can reasonably expect from a client. Since our goal is for clients to complete three or more rounds of a strength circuit, whether or not they can do this in our initial test will determine the primary criteria for scaling their circuits.
In Part 2, I’ll go more in depth into each portion of the template, so stay tuned!
Filed under: exercise programs
