Stages of a Workout Program
Anyone who wants to be as healthy as they can be needs to follow a regular exercise routine and you should adhere to this routine if you want to continually improve your health. For the sake of your general health you may not need to improve your physical conditioning past a curtain point but many people who want to improve their body on a continual basis should be prepared to do so in stages. There is essentially a beginning stage, an intermediate stage and advanced stage. In this article I will describe each stage and its characteristics as well as the sort of progress you can expect in each.
In the very beginning of your exercise program you will need to start with only lightly challenging workouts. When you first get started with a good workout program there will be ways you will rapidly progress and ways you will slowly progress. When you first begin the resistance training part of your program you will find that you get exponentially stronger very rapidly during this stage. There are theories which suggest that the reason people get stronger so quickly at this early point has to do with neural mechanism wherein your body is essentially learning how to perform an exercise. Unfortunately, when you are first beginning the cardiovascular exercise portion of your workout you will probably not burn fat at a very quick rate but this will change later.
Unless you are completely obsessed with exercise you will probably enjoy the intermediate stage of a long term workout program the most because you will continue to improve your body without exercising as much as you would have to in the advanced stage of your program. Your workouts however will need to be a bit longer and more challenging than they were when you first began. You will also probably be in this stage for a longer period of time than the other stages.
It is in this stage you will start to notice you aren't getting stronger at the same rate you were in the beginning stage but you will still get stronger nonetheless. You may also find that you have to constantly tweak and make slight adjustments to your program to get stronger. It is also during this stage that it becomes easier to lose weight because you can secrete high amounts of special hormones and enzymes that help you burn fat more rapidly. If you are able to maintain a healthy body composition and level of muscular strength during this stage then you may not need to progress beyond this point should you choose not to.
If you truly enjoy exercising and continuing to progress then you may want to move on to the advanced stages of a workout program. In the advanced stage of a workout program it isn't as easy to get stronger using the typical workout program as it would be in the intermediate stage.
You will be able to progressively get stronger but you would have to increase your training volume by a lot which means doing more sets and repetitions. You may also need to increase the amount of time you exercise If you choose to improve your cardiovascular capacity to an advanced degree you will find that it is very easy to burn fat when doing submaximal exercise because you will have such a high level of fat burning enzymes.