5 Training Methods For Your Fitness Intentions

No matter what type of fitness you do, it should always have a purpose, a why, an intention.

This blog is the start of a series of training education that will support bringing your best into every day fitness. As fitness professionals who are passionate about living your healthiest and happiest life, we encourage our readers to gain new knowledge and perspective on fitness, no matter what kind of fitness you do.

As our first blog post in this series, we want to start with our top 5 training methods for overall health and wellness. Understanding some basic methods of training and their purpose will hopefully inspire new perspectives and how it relates to living your best life.

1. Muscular Endurance Training

Muscular endurance refers to how long muscles can sustain exercise without stopping. In workout terms, muscle endurance = higher reps, longer duration under tension. How many repetitions of a movement people can do before the muscles reach a state of fatigue and are too tired to continue.

Training muscular endurance improves the length of time your body can carry out daily functional tasks without needing to stop. For example, you know when you do yard work or housework and you have to stop because your body gets tired? That’s muscle endurance. Train muscle endurance, and you can keep up with your crazy busy lifestyle!

2. Muscular Strength Training

Muscles protect the bones of your body. Your muscle helps to take some load off of your skeletal frame.

We’ve all had or know of someone with knee pain. For those working with a trainer, you’ve probably heard you need to strengthen the surrounding muscles of the knee to help with knee pain. One reason for this is strengthening the surrounding muscles will help to carry the load, taking pressure off the knee.

Having good muscle composition increases your metabolism because muscle needs more nutrients to maintain. The same reason more muscle helps to stabilize blood sugar because they pull in more nutrients from the blood stream.

You do not need to go crazy when it comes to lifting weights. Work your body up to a challenging weight, let your body adapt to the load, then you can increase as needed.

3. Cardiovascular Training

The heart is a muscle. We need to train our hearts to be one of the strongest muscles in the body because it takes a lot of the beating for us. Stress, whether physical or mental, effects the heart. Our bodies also don’t know the difference between mental and physical stress. When we get our heart pumping during exercise, we are prepping the heart to take on more tasks. Preparing it for battle... of life.

Cardiovascular training increases blood and oxygen flow in the body which has a number of benefits including increased energy, mood, better blood sugar regulation, sleep etc.

You know how they say exercise decreases stress? Because physical stress (exercise) is conditioning your body AND mind to deal with stress better. An important intention of cardio training is to prepare your body and heart to recognize and deal with stress better. Pretty important for a long and healthy life!

There are many other benefits to cardiovascular training for body composition that also has a direct effect on health, but that is for another entry!

4. Flexibility and Balance Training

Balance is all about creating mind body connection. Balance practice helps to keep your mind and body connection fresh and on point. As we age, this connections starts to get weaker, so keeping that connection by practice is imperative to prevent falls. Incorporating stretching exercises help to decrease injury by keeping the ligaments and joints active and lubricated. We often skip this type of training because either lack of time or its boring, but it is important when considering functional health for the long haul. Understanding what types of stretching and duration will be talked about in upcoming entries.

5. Fun Fitness

Sometimes your intention should just be for your overall well being of you. Bike riding, walks, hikes, playing with your kids, etc. This type of activity is usually our “why” to working out in the first place. To be functional enough to enjoy life for it’s beautiful adventures and opportunities. In order to get the most out of life, we need to train for life. Sounds so cliche but couldn’t be truer.

Part of Training With Intention is to recognize that every workout should have a purpose. The purpose to be the best and healthiest version of you so you can enjoy everything life has to offer.

If you would like to learn more about these methods and other methods of training, a great resource is Acsm.org or NASM.org

Until next time.. #trainwithintention