A new health initiative tends to be preceded by an event or moment that tells you that’s what has long been a should is now a must.
In other words, something needs to change.
Which positions exercise as the perfect vehicle to facilitate the change youโre looking to see in your life. This might mean increased confidence, more energy, better mood, and transferable skills that you can apply to anything you might go on to pursue.
Of course, there are all the usual fitness carrots like fat loss, muscle gain, a bigger bum or six-pack abs, but at its essence, exercise presents the pursuit of something greater than all of that, it’s a call to become the best version of ourselves.
As Kevin Kelly saysโ habit is more dependable than inspiration. So it’s better to focus on being the kind of person who never misses a workout rather than getting in shape. That way being in shape will happen by default, and crucially, in a way that can be maintained due to the force of habit.
For the purpose of this article, let’s set up a very simple goal. I want to set you up to workout shortly after reading this article, and I want you to still be exercising in 30 days from now, that’s it, that’s the goal.
If you’re up, indulge me, I’ll cover a little background as to how exercise works and then outline a strategy for this 30-day fitness challenge.
The three-stage model of exercise
Stage 1: Habit forming + find your baseline – This is where you go from not exercising to exercising.
Stage 2: Specificity – This is where you pursue a specific goal.
Stage 3: Multiple goals (at the cost of maximal results) This is where you become the ‘all-around athlete’ At this stage you are basically where you want to be year-round so you edge up gradually in all areas at the voluntary cost of specificity.
This guide is to establish your stage 1: Habit-forming
The reason we want to focus on stage 1 initially is that when you are a beginner in exercise or making a return from a period of inactivity you will stand to see benefits in multiple areas from muscle growth, fat loss, improved endurance, better flexibility, and improved cardiovascular fitness, and this can be achieved with a broad profile of exercise, you could consider this stage the universal on-ramp to all of your other training goals.
Right now we arenโt looking to maximise your potential in any one area, weโre aiming to account for any weak spots and see incremental improvements over time. If you have a number of weaknesses at the moment, and then you double down on a very specific goal, you could end up with imbalances. To put it bluntly, there is no need to specialise your training because there is so much low-hanging fruit in every direction that it would be a false economy.
A simple exercise quadrant I like to use looks like this. A complete and diverse workout program will include a proportion from all of the below:
- Resistance
- Mobility
- Cardio
- HIIT
- LISS
Weโll discuss the role each one of these plays in an effective exercise program shortly.
The idea is that no matter what your goal is, you keep your hand in each quadrant to some degree. This way youโll never develop unnecessary weaknesses.
For our initial purposes, weโll start out with the quadrants relatively even. Once youโve reached your cruising altitude and exercise is a firm habit for you, that’s when you move into phase 2 and will begin to benefit from more specific goals.
Again, the reason I suggest only having specific goals once youโve been consistent for at least 30-days, is that itโs easy to get excited about a particular fitness goal and lean right into it. But once it’s achieved you can find yourself in no man’s land. Either with a lifestyle that can’t be sustained as with typical weight loss methodology (which I’ve never seen work), or completely over-indexed in a single area of fitness as with a distance running goal.
It’s far better to establish a multi-faceted baseline which automatically makes the various types of exercise feel like a part of your normal lifestyle. Otherwise, youโre going to fall into an all-or-nothing cycle which is a big mistake and the cause of a lot of unnecessary setbacks in fitness.
So if weโre going to be starting out with exercise, or more likely making a return to exercise after some time, then the main goal should be to get to a point where youโre exercising consistently without it feeling like a strain to do so.
The advice weโll cover here is broad and will apply to either training at home or in the gym. I wonโt insist on gym training at this point because many people suffer from anxiety getting into the gym, and whilst I could say weโve all been there, and anyone who would judge someone that new to the gym, isnโt worth your time, sometimes just getting active is your fight. And there is no need to fight a battle on two fronts. The priority here is to get consistent so the least amount of friction we face in doing that the better, at least right now.
5 Questions to ask yourself before you start exercising
To Make sure weโre stacking the odds in your favour I would invite you to answer the following 5 questions about exercise. They will help you make some decisions about how you’ll approach your first 30 days of training.
The more authentically you are able to answer these questions the better your chances of having fully established your exercise habit 30 days from now. There is no judgment toward your answers, and there should be no ego, no pretence. You’re the only one listening, and you’d only be cheating yourself not to tell the truth.
Do you actually like exercise?
If you do, then you have what is called intrinsic motivation. You are actually set up psychologically to enjoy your training. So if you aren’t right now, like so many, what has probably happened is that youโve had a busy period, hit a setback or experienced a darker chapter of your life and youโre ready to make your return.
If this is the case the biggest step you can take is to start, nowโฆ Like, literally right now. Stop reading this article and go for a walk, because you are one of the lucky ones and all you need is momentum to be back in the game.
However, if you generally don’t enjoy exercise, but know you need to do it you’ll need a different strategy. Take a moment to think about whether there is anything active, adjacent to actual working out that you do like. Because if there is, we might be able to harness it to increase your general activity level.
Maybe you donโt like working out in a gym and lifting weights, but perhaps you like to dance or go cycling in the country. Start there and then build very efficient workouts around that activity so that youโre not spending too much time in structured training, but are gradually filling out your exercise quadrant.
The good news here is that the more you exercise, and the more results you see, the better youโll feel and the more youโre going to start enjoying exercise. It’s a self-perpetuating ‘virtuous’ cycle.
What has caused you to struggle with your fitness goals in the past?
This is going to be a personal question only you can answer. For some, itโs going to be too hard too soon and has seen you burn out. For others, itโll be getting too busy or too stressed in unrelated areas of life and giving up on exercise. Perhaps more insidious, for many it will simply be a failure to prioritise your own self-care.
There was probably a very good reason for it, but almost certainly you’ll have suffered some seen and unseen consequences. So to avoid this happening again in the future youโre going to have to put a strategy in place that ensures what’s gone wrong in the past won’t go wrong again.
This could mean anything from setting your environment up differently, having some difficult conversations with those around you, or just demanding more from yourself than you have in the past, in a positive way. Again, only you will know exactly what you need to do, I’m sure you’re already well aware of the answer. The more uncomfortable the potential solution feels to you right now, the more likely it is to have been the exact thing that’s held you back in the past.
What’s your real motivation?
Youโve probably heard a lot about the importance of having a โwhyโ when it comes to fitness or just about any goal for that matter. The idea is that it’s great for motivation and whilst that is true, I want to discuss how motivation really works because it’s probably not what you think.
A lot of people look to personal trainers like myself for motivation. The truth is, nobody can make you want something if you donโt want it for yourself. Really a coach’s role is to hold you accountable to the actions you need to take to get you to the goal. A goal that youโve already decided that you want to achieve. Sure a great personal trainer will remind you of why you want it, encourage you and lead the way, and ensure you are getting the most out of your workouts. But it only works if you want it for yourself in the first place.
To help you get clear on your motivation, there is a very simple mental imagery task you can do. It works by harnessing motivation that’s already there. Technically motivation is present when youโre either trying to get toward something, like achieving a new goal or youโre trying to get away from something, like avoiding a health issue or getting as far away from how you feel right now as you can. At some point, weโve all been there.
So here’s the exercise. Take a few moments to think and feel through both what you want to achieve and what you seek to avoid. For example, think about what life is going to be like for you once youโve achieved your goal.
Ask yourself questions like: What will it mean for you? what will you be able to do? Will new opportunities arise for you and how will it change your relationship with yourself and those around you?
Negative motivators can be equally powerful, sometimes a harsh talk with yourself is exactly what you need. Again, what would it mean to never achieve your goals? how would this inform your relationship with yourself? what may begin to be taken away from you in terms of abilities, opportunities and freedom of activity?
These are very personal questions, but I really think there is a lot of value in reflecting on them. The answers will give you all the motivation you need.
Am I ready to make a long-term commitment?
Reflect heavily on this question, and make sure you’re clear on its implications. Iโm not talking about signing up for some kind of quick-fix fitness program or going on a crash diet. I mean fundamentally changing your relationship with exercise and healthy eating so that today represents a line in the sand for you. Leading to a situation where you never again fall below the level of consistency you’re going to establish over the next 30 days.ย
What’s your current fitness level?
This question is going to help us decide how frequently and how intensely we want to start exercising. If itโs been a while and you donโt quite have your fitness levels and strength where they used to be, you need to make your return to exercise nice and steadily. If you go too hard, too soon youโll likely under-recover and over-train. This will not only have negative physical effects, but also sets about a trend of feeling tired much of the time, and ironically even though youโre tired, itโll actually be harder to get good sleep. Compounding the lack of recovery, perpetuating poor energy and before long you’ll be tempted to make expedient food choices just to make it through the day. A well-intentioned but poorly informed cycle that derails so many people, I see it all the time and I’ve had to develop my own approach to fitness to navigate away from it.
Interestingly, in my experience for many holding back the reins actually takes more discipline than starting in the first place. Especially if youโre a bit of a go-getter. But you have to resist this inclination because itโs part of an all-or-nothing mentality that leads to a lot of burnout in fitness. If you go too hard too soon youโll end up back on the sidelines which completely undermines what weโre looking to achieve.
Remember when considering your current fitness level, I donโt just mean could you practically turn up to a 10k and get it done, I want you to think more about where your baseline energy levels are. How much stress youโre under and how well youโre sleeping. Unless all of those things are above average, I’d taper your fitness for a staggered start, there would be no utility in red-lining right now if your lifestyle can’t support it.
How to create your workout program
To determine what we want from a workout, we should define what a workout really means. Ideally, a workout is going to be time spent in an activity that is pushing us to a point where weโre going to make an incremental improvement, in this way, itโs ‘outcome-oriented’. And in this way working out is different to ‘activity’. The key difference is that a workout generally needs an intended outcome, whereas an activity may just be done for the enjoyment of it.
You might also look at this through the lens of infinite vs finite games. Each of your workout goals or stages as weโve described them represents a finite game. As in something youโll do until the goal is achieved. Whereas regular activity is an infinite game and something that youโll always do for the sake of doing it, because you enjoy it. Your body needs to stay active, it doesn’t ‘need’ to workout, that’s a construct we put it through to serve the purpose of achieving a particular fitness goal.
As such, even on non-workout days, we want a period of activity, and depending on your goals you could make this very strategic as you might with specific fat-burning cardio, or you could just be going out for a nice walk or cycle. There is less pressure on activity than there is on a workout, weโre looking for its presence rather than its performance.
When youโre starting out, often the biggest challenge you face can be in habit formation, which means becoming the ‘type’ of person who is going to exercise regularly come rain or shine. This is a task as much mental as it is physical.
First of all, the funny thing about exercise is that yes there is a lot of nuance around rep ranges, training protocols, exercise selection, day splits and every other minor detail, but that all comes in stages two and three.
Right now what weโre looking to do is still be here exercising regularly 30 days from now. If you are consistent for the next 30 days youโre going to feel great, so letโs keep the exercise side of things simple. If you do want to get into the weeds I have a complete guide to how to approach any fitness goal on this website.
Your 30 day habit-forming exercise plan
So what is your 30-day exercise plan actually going to look like? Well, before we get into that, it’s important to consider that there are no secrets here and no single correct answer. A program for any fitness goal could easily be made 10 different ways and still work, providing each was well-calibrated and rooted in tried and tested fitness fundamentals.
Letโs start by referring back to the quadrant I mentioned before.
Strength Training
Weโre going to lead with strength training because itโs the most multi-faceted and adaptable element of the quadrant. To illustrate what I mean, strength training can help you gain muscle, gain strength, and burn fat. Up at the higher reps, it can also help with endurance and increasing cardiovascular fitness. So we should take care not to pigeonhole it as a tool only for gaining big muscles. Based on all of that, weโre going to aim for three training sessions per week.
As I mentioned earlier, we could use various rep ranges in our strength work. Really anywhere from 1-20 reps can be effective for gaining muscle, and even more if weโre doing cross-training or muscular endurance training. We’re going to start out with 15 reps, not necessarily because itโs the most effective rep range, but because itโs a great trade-off between effectiveness and safety.
I mention safety because if youโre new to certain movements you can de-risk them by using lighter weights. If itโs a big concern of yours you can de-risk further by using gym machines, which take the stabiliser muscles out of the equation and give you a fixed plain of movement which is easy to exit if you need to. Of course, you wouldn’t want to do this forever as those stabilisers are crucial, but machines can give you a lot of confidence when you’re a beginner.
To keep the training split simple, weโre just going to have two workouts An ‘A’ workout which is going to be Upper Body and a Lower body session which s going to be the ‘B’ workout, in week one weโll do two ‘Aโs’ and one ‘B’ and then weโll switch it up in week two, with two ‘B’ sessions vs one ‘A’ Session.
Take care always to begin with weights lighter than you think you could lift. Firstly because youโre less likely to hurt yourself, and secondly because it builds longevity into the program. Allowing you to lift incrementally more weight over time. This is called progressive overload and itโs this mechanism through which you are sending signals to your body that you want to make a change. Remember that the body will only change if there is a reason to, i.e. you are asking more of it than it’s already conditioned to. Otherwise, it will just preserve energy, and you’ll stay the same as you are now.
This then brings us back to what I said about being able to create ten different workout plans which would all technically work. So what we could do is line those ten programs up, stay in each one for 4-8 weeks before moving on to the next, and this is why if youโre wondering what the best fitness program to achieve youโre goal is, the answer will always be a moving target. Your workout needs to be novel enough to force the adaptation youโre looking for so by definition itโs going to have to change over time.
Think of it like this, our bodies evolved to survive, and when it comes to muscle mass it takes energy to gain muscle and to maintain it, so you need to convince your body that there is always a good reason to have it, or your body, on a long enough timeline will jettison that muscle. Not to spite you and all your hard work of course, but simply to be as efficient as possible. Less muscle, and fewer calories are needed to survive each day, and this is why you should avoid restrictive dieting at all costs, youโre sending a famine signal to the body, so you can imagine what itโs likely to do with that hard-earned muscleโฆ.
Your ideal solution will never lay in one single fitness program, but rather in a framework made up of exercise, healthy meals, activity and stress management. Over time, and despite external challenges the framework remains a constant but the pieces i.e. the meals, workouts and habits will change over time.
In terms of exercise selection, this can become unnecessarily complicated. Generally speaking, there are approximately 20-30 foundational exercises and that’s really all you need. Once youโve got the technique on those down, the way to switch up a workout program is to change the variables of a workout such as rep range, rest periods and day structure, this is going to be more effective than looking for an evermore intricate exercise selection.
List of best exercises by muscle group
Chest: Bench Press > Chest Flies > Push Up
Delts: Overhead Shoulder Press > Lateral Raise > Front Raise
Lats : Pull-ups > Bent over rows > Single arm dumbbell rows
Traps: Barbell Shrug > Upright Row > Face pulls
Abs & Core: Planks > Russian twists > hanging leg raises
Quads: Squats > lunges > Leg press
Glutes: Deadlifts > Hip Thrust > Kettlebell swing
Hamstring: Romanian deadlift > Leg Curls > Nordic hamstring curl
Calves: Standing calf raise > seated calf raise > Leg press calf raise
Biceps: Barbell bicep curl > Hammer curl > Preacher Curl
Triceps: Close grip bench press > Tricep Dips > Tricep Kickbacks
Start with 5-7 exercises in each session. Keep the workout total body, i.e. you are looking to work multiple body parts in each training session. With rest periods of 60 seconds between sets. This keeps the workout uniform and these reasonable rest periods mean the workouts wonโt be too intense. This should bring your workout to a close within about 45 minutes.
Generally speaking, if you lower the rep range youโll be dealing with heavier weights, and the shorter the rest periods the more intense a workout will be, until it becomes a spectrum you can fully manipulate to chase an adaptive response and lean into a particular goal. But for now, weโre just looking for our phase 1 consistency, so for the time being that’s all academic.
Cardiovascular Training
Next, we move on to the next two parts of the quadrant which cover both HIIT and light activity, which we might consider the bookends of cardiovascular activity. There is huge variance within both of these types of training, from a 30โ000ft view weโll want to utilise short bursts of HIIT to benefit from the thermic effect of such exercise. Weโll then want to bolster that with plenty of lighter steady state, or LISS training, this is going to be at a level of exertion that will burn less fats overall, but will be fuelled by a higher proportion of calories from fat than would be the case at a higher intensity. For example, when I did my metabolic gas exchange test I discovered that for me personally I hit my peak amount of fat being burning at a heart rate of 109BPM, which is essentially the heart rate you would experience on a relatively flat hike for example.
A way of looking at it then, is that HIIT training is a tool not just for burning calories in the moment, but for allowing your body to become more efficient at burning fat. By way of other mechanisms such as fat oxidation, production of hormones such as growth hormone and norepinephrine, improved insulin sensitivity and increased mitochondrial density. This is crucial because once you see that the benefits of HIIT are not just the calories burned during exercise or even the higher rate of calories burned after training through the afterburner effect (EPOC) then we can decouple from the idea that the longer we spend doing that kind of exercise the better. Allowing us to arrive at a new understanding which is that as long as the training session was effective then there are other mechanisms at play that facilitate our fat-burning efforts. To be clear then, studies have shown that HIIT training can be effective as a 10-minute training session. Meaning that the presence of the session in your training week is beneficial and you may stand to benefit from using the time you may have saved on the other end of the spectrum with LISS training.
LISS is the type of activity where fat burning occurs in real time. Crucially you don’t burn many calories in LISS compared to HIIT, but you stand to burn more calories from fat proportionately. Importantly the critical benefit of incorporating LISS into your training regime is that it doesn’t accumulate anywhere near as much duration-based fatigue as either strength training or HIIT. So effectively, your rate limiting factor will be the amount of time you can do it for (think long hikes, or watching a movie on a spin bike).
HIIT training is by its very nature intensive raining, which isnโt always going to be comfortable. Especially in the early stages whilst youโre trying to get fit, so what weโre going to do is keep is short, sweet and effective. All I want us to do is tack on a single 4-minute component of HIIT to the end of the strength session.
Weโre going to use a TABATA drill, which is a HIIT protocol from Japan that has been found to be very effective for fat loss. Itโs only going to take 4 minutes. What you do is set a timer, there are plenty already available online. I chose Tabata firstly because itโs short, but also because itโs another example of the protocol or concept being more important than the choice of exercise. Tabata can be done running on the spot, as a burpee, on a spin bike, in a pool, shadow boxing right now on the spot, getting a barbell and push pressing it, itโs up to you, pick something you can lean into intensity-wise. Go as hard as is comfortable for 20 seconds then take 10 seconds rest, do that eight times and youโre done!
If you want to make a full workout of it just pick 4 exercises, do them back to bake with a minute rest between each Tabata drill and you have a very efficient fat-burning workout wrapped up within 20 minutes.
So that’s how we’ll incorporate our early HIIT work, but we also need a way to include LISS. So what Iโd like you to do here for these first 30 days is simply to get out for a walk as often as you can, donโt worry about how long for, or how many steps. What Iโd like you to focus on, is that itโs brisk. This way itโll be at the level of exertion that serves our purposes.
Aiming for 10,000 steps is a great health goal, and maintaining that output daily will certainly help shape your physique, but I want us to get every more specific without activity, for the purposes of the program.
Consider this example, let’s say you go to a theme park tomorrow. Youโre on your feet all day and you cover a lot of ground, you might get in excess of 20,000 steps with ease, but they will all be at a level of exertion that is largely irrelevant for fitness and fat loss. Letโs say you go for a 20-minute hill walk instead at an average heart rate of 110 beats per minute, you might get only 3000 steps but would have made a big impact on your fitness and fat-burning pursuits because of the amount of fat being burned at that heart rate.
So what I would like you to do for the next 30 days is to find ways to do activities you enjoy that need to be done at an intensity that’s more than just the day-to-day moving around, you were going to do that anyway.
For example, as often as you can get out for a hike, a cycle, a swim, a surf, kayaking, rollerblading, or have a dance around the living room there is a time to do this monotonously on a treadmill just to burn fat, but what Iโd like you to do is get active on purpose, ideally reconnect with nature and the act of play. Itโs going to be great for your mood, how you handle stress, and getting vitamin D., itโs also a call to getting back in tune with your body and healthy movement because it feels good, keep it intuitive and donโt worry about the duration.
Itโs important to note here that strength training and HIIT training both have a barrier to recovery, so you cannot apply a more = better approach to them. Without adequate recovery, you’ll just burn out. But with fun activity or LISS, you can do it for hours, your body will tell you when enough is enough but youโre unlikely to burn yourself out with it so fill your boots.
Movement + Mobility
So the final part of the puzzle, which is movement or mobility training, is more of a preventative measure for most people, itโs really all part of knowing yourself. If your exercise history is all yoga and pilates then this will be easy for you, however, if you hate stretching then the workouts might be the easy part of the next 30 days, and the movement element might feel like a chore. But that doesn’t make it any less important, and without you’re almost guaranteed the occasional niggling injury that could derail your progress and prevent your main workouts from taking place.
Mobility is going to have immediate benefits for you if you ache a lot, or feel like you need to be really warmed up before your body moves like you want it to, in fact, internal surveys of my online personal training clients reveal that many feel like a different person after doing mobility consistently for 30 days.
So what weโre going to do here is use a short dynamic warmup to ease into your workouts, this is a lot more comprehensive than simply walking on a treadmill for example. Because it means you are warm and will actually get you ready for your exercises in a practical way, as youโll be using some of the same basic movement patterns as your actual workout. Try the following mobility routine to get you started:
The only other thing Iโd like you to do is set a 10-minute timer after your workouts, to stretch out, again keep it intuitive and stretch the muscles that youโve just worked or that feel overly tight.
Thats it! This whole workout program is only going to cost you three hours per week for thirty days, then just pepper that with as much fun activity as you have time for.
How to approach nutrition
It really can be that simple, you now have a diverse workout program that’s going to have all sorts of physical benefits, is well-calibrated so that you will actually have more energy in 30 days than you do now and most importantly youโll have established habits and will be able to use this framework to build out your future workout plans.
Weโre almost done, just a couple more points to consider, the first is how weโre going to approach nutrition. Nutrition is a huge subject, and outside of the scope of this guide, however, what I will say is that no matter your medium or long-term goal, I recommend that you eat at a break-even intake for the next month, this will ensure that youโre well fuelled, have plenty of energy and wonโt run into any of the many problems associated with restriction.
In terms of what you eat, whilst you are starting out, itโs best to keep everything balanced, make sure you have a good balance of proteins, fats and carbs, donโt allow any of those to represent over 40% of your total calories or under 20% and youโll broadly be in a good place. Iโm not going to make a call on what the best way to eat is here, itโs a very personal decision. One rule to go by is that you want to avoid processed foods as best you can, think of it like this, imagine you were having a conversation with someone who had lived their whole life in the rainforest, if you could speak the same language but still have a hard time explaining what your meals were to this person, the chances are they are too refined and likely not very good for you. If you want to take a deep dive on nutrition, I have a full guide to how to eat for your fitness goals.
Final thoughts
If you miss a day of exercise don’t worry too much about it. If you can’t control your food for a day, donโt worry about it, an 80/20% ratio is perfectly fine. If you aim for perfection youโll always be frustrated and giving yourself a hard time.
Watch out for perfectionism, it’s a momentum stopper and leads to an all-or-nothing mindset that could completely derail your progress. If you have a background where you the only option was perfect, either in your family, in academia, or at work, that isnโt going to serve you in health and fitness.
Not being able to do things is part of the process, Iโve been training for 20 years and I still canโt always complete my workouts as Iโd planned them, it’s all part of pushing your thresholds. Aim for what we might consider โnet-positiveโ days, not perfect ones.
Stack enough ‘net-positive’ days together and I promise it will be a transformative process for you. A year from now you will either wish you had started now or be glad that you did, and that’s up to you.
Often in life, we have one goal, the completion of which would make the chances of success in every other goal you have more likely. Or indeed, a single habit that acts as your keystone habit and empowers all of the other habits downstream.ย Let exercise be that for you, there is no telling where it might lead.