How to get FITT the
professional way
If we exercise, improvement will automatically follow. Not true, says fitness expert, John Leonard. To achieve positive physical improvement, he says, the human body needs constant challenge. Here John explains FITT, the basic principle top fitness professionals use to help clients get fit, lean and healthy.
By John Leonard
There are endless ways to challenge the body physically, so why do so many members of the fitness seeking public just hit the gym with the same training program on every visit? When setting up a resistance training program designed to bring about positive physical change, fitness professionals tend to follow a basic principle. It’s called the FITT principle – Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type – and here’s how it works.
Frequency
The frequency of training each body part varies with the amount of work done during each exercise session. If you want to do more work at each session, you should exercise less frequently, as you will need more time to recuperate. If you do less work per body part at each session, you can train more frequently.
How often you train depends on your ability to recuperate in time for the next workout. This you will determine for yourself. It is better to be consistent in your workouts and make steady progress than to over-train and be discouraged by inconsistent and poor training results.
As a general guideline, you should aim to exercise each body part one to two times per week, or every four to five days if you are a beginner or are doing high load workouts. Those pursuing lower intensity workouts, or those who are more highly trained, could try working each body part two to three times per week. You can work different areas of the body on different days, or you can train your whole body at each workout, doing only a few exercises for each body part.
Intensity
Intensity is more complicated to measure in resistance training than in cardio-respiratory training. The main aspect of intensity is workload. The amount of work you do during a workout is your workload, and your workload can be measured by three components.
The first component is the amount of weight you lift during an exercise. The second component is the number of repetitions and sets you perform of that exercise. A repetition is one complete movement of an exercise, and a set is the number of repetitions of an exercise performed before stopping. The third component is the length of time it takes you to complete the training session.
As a result, the workload or intensity of the training session can be measured by the amount of weight lifted, the number of repetitions completed, the number of sets of the exercises performed, and the amount of time it took to complete the workout.
You can also determine your workload for a single exercise as well as an entire workout, so it is plain to see that any combination of lower weights, fewer sets and repetitions, and more time will decrease your intensity. Likewise, increasing weight, sets and repetitions during a shorter workout time will increase intensity.
Choose a weight that can be performed eight to 12 times (repetitions), or if you are a true beginner, perform 10 to 15 repetitions before momentary muscle exhaustion prevents you from doing another repetition. This is called training to failure, and it is important because as you are doing your repetitions, your muscle will start to fatigue, and the last few repetitions will be at maximum effort or close to maximum contractions. It is these last few repetitions that create a training effect and make changes in the muscle in the shortest period of time.
When you get to the point of performing more than 12 repetitions, add weight the next time you do the exercise. If you do less than eight repetitions of an exercise, do less weight next time and work your way back up to 12 repetitions before you add more weight. It’s that simple!
If you are training your whole body in one exercise session, choose one or two exercises for each muscle group and perform one to three sets of each exercise. When you do a split routine, or do different muscle groups on different days, you can perform two to four exercises per muscle group and two to four sets of each exercise.
Please be cautious of doing too many sets and exercises. If you train your sets to muscular failure, there is no reason to do numerous sets to get results. You will see other people in the gym doing many sets at a sub-maximum intensity. This is inefficient and ineffective training. They will need to do many more sets to achieve the same training effect you will achieve with fewer sets at the proper training intensity!
Time
As a component of intensity and workload, time is important. If you are a beginner or intermediate trainer, your muscular endurance may not be well developed. Therefore training too quickly at the outset won’t allow you to handle reasonable weights; likewise, training too slowly will not give you an efficient, high intensity workout.
I recommend training initially at no more than two to three minutes in between sets of exercises. As you become more trained, you can try to achieve one minute between sets, and even 30 seconds on some of the assistance or lighter exercises.
Type
There are two types of exercises for muscle groups: main and assistance (minor).
Main exercises involve the most muscle mass; they usually involve more than one muscle group when exercising, and you can use the greatest weight resistance with these exercises. Assistance exercises isolate the muscle group by concentrating on the simple movement of that muscle group, and eliminating or minimizing the involvement of other muscle groups.
Be sure to include a variety in your choice of exercises: don’t do the same exercises the same way every time you train. Variety challenges the body, and keeps it from getting too used to the same exercises.
John Leonard, President of Markham-based Fit 4 Real Fitness, is an author, speaker and fitness professional.
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