How to Write an Exercise Program

1. You are probably looking to learn about all the professional techniques used by fitness professionals, in order to write your own exercise programs and become more confident while exercising. But to start, it’s always a good idea to ask yourself questions to be able to better define your fitness goals. So, in this section we'll be asking questions that we'll later use to develop your exercise program.

It’s standard practice to measure your fitness progress by way of testing. Fitness testing, when done correctly, is one of the best ways to track your progress. In this section we'll be looking at some of the most popular fitness tests.

After determining your short, medium and long-term fitness goals and understanding your baseline fitness through testing, we can now move on to understanding and building an actual exercise program.

Before we start looking at what exercises we need in our program, we need to determine what muscle group to exercise first. When looking at a “Push” day, for instance, do you put Skull Crushers before or after Bench Press? Or, in a full-body workout, would you exercise your legs at the start or the end of your session?

We will now talk briefly about biomechanics. This is not to be confused with form. By now, hopefully you understand how important form is while exercising. There are thousands of different exercises out there, many of which have confusing names or seem quite peculiar. It surprised me to learn that there are only six “foundational movement patterns.” These are the universal ways that all humans move.

To help you better-understand the sort of exercise you should do for different muscle groups, let’s get into a few examples. These examples are mixed in terms of their skill level to try and cater for all fitness levels. There are many more exercises that aren’t on this list, we suggest you research different exercises and their variations - incorporating them into your workout.

This downloadable PDF provides you with a more in depth list of exercises based on muscle groups. We've also included whether the exercise is a compound or isolation exercise and the equipment each exercise requires.

You should still research these exercises yourself and decide which ones best suit your goals.

Now that you know what types of exercises to put into your exercise program and what order to put them in, you will want to determine how many reps of these exercises to do.

With circuit training, you can shorten your workouts and make them more exciting at the same time. You can either do circuit training based on the number of reps or a certain time duration.

When people are training to gain strength, many wonder if they should be training to failure. While some people argue that this training method will do nothing but cause injuries, others believe that it’s the most effective way to build strong muscles.