SMART

Fitness defined – nutrition, body composition, Rest and relaxation, Endurance both muscular and cardiovascular, strength, Speed, Flexibility and well being. To become fit you must overload the body to force it to change and as the body changes and adapts to the physical stresses you put upon it. You must keep progressing your training to continue seeing improvements.

Depending on your training goal and intensity, programme changes are normally suggested every 4-6 weeks. As previously explained on the nutrition course, SMART stands for Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic and time effective.

When moving away from general fitness to a specific goal, SMART training keeps you motivated and focused on achieving what you have started. When making SMART goals it is advisable to seek assistance from a trained professional to make sure all factors of SMART training are addressed and realistic in how your body will adapt to the stresses put upon it.          

When making a specific goal, make sure it’s a single goal as its increasingly difficult to achieve multiple goals when it comes to health and fitness. Two examples of these are “I want to lose weight and build muscle”, “I want to run 10k while also toning my tummy”. Given these two statements, each with two goals will need different training techniques to achieve so focus on the primary goal and tailor your training around this goal. With the right assistance the secondary goal can be worked upon and prepared for to become the focus once the primary goal has been achieved.

If you don’t have any specific goals in mind, but feel you want to improve what you have started with LiVFit training, one focus could to be concentrate on any weaknesses you feel you have. This could be from a past injury or weakness which you feel holds you back in daily tasks or future activities you would like to undertake. When performing an exercise sessions it’s important to follow a specific order for the components of exercise,

• Warm Up – Raise heart rate, expand chest and improve blood flow to the muscles.

• Resistance Training – Exercises in overload the muscles and neuromuscular systems

• Cardiovascular training – Exercises to work the heart and lungs

• Warm Down – 5-10 minutes of gentle exercise to lower heart rate and remove waste products produced from intense training.

• Stretching – Stretch working muscles, holding each stretch between 20-30 seconds or until tension is released, moving slowing into and out of the stretch with no bouncing.