Custom Fitness Program: How to design your own

By Doug Jackson, M.Ed., CSCS

You need your own custom fitness program.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make in the gym is following fitness programs that are not customized. Unfortunately, creating imbalances is easy to do with weights unless you understand how your body works and how to develop a balanced program.

The balance is critical for long term health and fitness. Without it, you will end up with injuries...guaranteed. In western culture, we have tended to emphasize the frontal muscle groups while ignoring the muscle groups we can't see in the mirror. Thus, we tend to overdevelop and overwork the chest, abs, quads, biceps, etc. While this occurs, we generally underdevelop the muscle groups that are opposite of these muscles. Thus, we undevelop the upper back, lower back, hamstrings and glutes, as well as triceps.

When we overdevelop the muscles on one side of a joint and underdevelop the muscles on the other side, we are setting ourselves up for injury. A good example would be the overdevelopment of the chest and underdevelopment of the upper back. This causes the funny posture that people mimic when making fun of overly-muscular bodybuilders. These people don't look healthy, they're made fun of, and they're just waiting for a shoulder injury. Don't let this happen to you.

Let's get into the details of how to avoid this. When you are designing an exercise program, you must understand what muscles groups you are developing with each exercise. Assuming that you are starting your exercise program with a natural balance, you want to make sure that your program is balanced as well.

Ian King, a well-known Australian strength coach, has influenced my thinking in regards to exercise program design. He suggests, rather than analyzing the muscle group that an exercise works, to analyze the movement pattern instead. For example, he will develop a upper body program that emphasizes horizontal pushing movements (ie. chest presses), horizontal pulling movements (ie. rows), vertical pushing movements (shoulder presses), and vertical pulling movements (ie. chinups or pulldowns). His suggestion is that on any given week, you should have a 1:1:1:1 ration between each of these movement patterns. If you include specific arm exercises for the biceps and triceps, there should be a 1:1 ratio between movements that flex (bend) the elbow that works the biceps, and triceps movements that extend the elbow.

Using this program design will balance the pulling and pushing exercises, which will develop a healthy, strong, and attractive shoulder girdle. Following guidelines such as this, it's unlikely that anyone could look at your physique and say that it looks overdeveloped. You will develop classical symmetry and you will be a good representation of health and fitness. More importantly, I believe this approach helps prevent injury inside and outside of the gym.

Applying this principle to lower body exercise has a few more "ifs, ands, and buts", however the concept still applies. If you perform natural movement patterns for lower body exercise, as I suggest, you won't need to worry as much about developing imbalances. For example, performing squats, primarily considered to develop the quadriceps in the front of the leg, will work the hamstrings and glutes as well. This will help avoid any imbalance. The same scenario is applied with lunges, and variations of the deadlift that I recommend.

However, you must be more concerned with balance in the program if you perform exercises that isolate specific muscle groups. For example, if you decide to use leg extensions to develop the quadriceps in your program, I'd recommend that you make sure to also include leg curls for the hamstrings. If you don't include exercises to develop each side of the knee joint, you are in the process of creating long-term knee pain.

Just to emphasize...you need to be very careful when implementing exercises that isolate specific muscles because it's easy to create an imbalance. For this reason, I highly recommend functional exercises. To get your started on your path to increased strength, joint health, muscle tone, and functional quality of life, try doing a few sets of pushups and body weight squats every other day. If you haven't done either of these in the past, you will quickly notice your improved fitness after your begin. Of course, if you have any injuries that would be aggravated by pushups or squats, avoid them.

To set up an appointment with me to get your exercise program on track and make sure it's balanced, email me at doug@personalfitnessadvantage.com

Sign up for Doug's can't miss newsletter, Fitness Empowerment

Ask Doug your most pressing fitness-related question

Schedule a FREE phone consultation