Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Developing an effective training system

There are so many people out there who are beginning there training programs but instead of having a PLAN, they have no plan and no idea where they are starting from and no idea of whether or not they are improving and to say the least having a plan is better than having NO PLAN AT ALL. What all this means is that the majority of athletes, weekend gymgoers are training but do not really have a clue how to measure the effectiveness of what they are doing rather like shooting a dart at a dart board and hoping for the best. I would like to be the first to say that many years ago I hardly ever wrote down my training schedules nor had any real idea of what I was really looking to achieve I just trained and trained without any real direction effectively wasting a lot of time and we all know how precious time is.

The formula for developing effective training programs is actually a very simple 7 step process and is fairly easy as well as long as you take the time to note down your workouts and starting and finishing points

1. Assess where exactly you are at to begin with (make sure you are using the right assessments)
2. Determine where it is you need to be and set your training goals accordingly
3. Outline the methods that are most effective in achieving the changes that are necessary to reach your goals
4. Develop a training schedule taking every aspect of your training program and timeline into account for example the training schedules and competitions you will enter for in the near future and how much time you have available to train each week due to different constraints like work, travel, kids etc.
5. Implement your training program
6. Manage the training process to make sure you are making progress and make changes to the program as necessary (this is the hard bit most training programs are great when you see results but what happens when these results start to taper off and what you are doing does not have the same result. This is when you will need the knowledge and help to put your program back on the right track to help you keep gaining better results
7. Finish your program and assess its effectiveness (have your assessments ready, if you are working on your general endurance or strength, do the right assessments).

Following this step process will help dramatically improve the effectiveness of your training programs. If you look at most programs out there, they are invariably missing one or many of these steps and thus they do not achieve the best results.
Next time to you begin to develop a training program I would suggest looking over this process and see what you are doing well and what you could improve on. Do you train with a purpose? What are your training goals? Have you taken your work schedule, football / soccer schedule as well into consideration part from the general fitness training have you set aside time as well to do your sport specific training? Are you using effective assessments? Are your training methods actually accomplishing the physiological changes you need them to? How will you know if you need to change your program along the way or not? Answering these questions will go a long way towards making sure you are training smart not just training hard, and I guarantee it will dramatically improve your results.

So write things down, use your assessments, be logical and be effective and your hard work will pay off and with it you will reach your training goals.

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