EXERCISE PRESCRIPTION
● Every workout routine needs to be expressly planned for your fitness status, goals, skills,
and desires. A qualified trainer may help combine all these parts into a structured
program that can be followed and modified as necessary.
11 ELEMENTS OF AN EXERCISE PRESCRIPTION
● A general exercise prescription will take into consideration the principles of conditioning
and include the following basics:
1. Health Status Questionnaire / Physical Exam
● Your doctor will administer a general physical examination. You will be asked to
complete a questionnaire to decide whether you have any health conditions that may
hinder your ability to exercise or make improvements to the schedule. Most personal
trainers need approval from a specialist before developing the program.
2. Fitness Assessment and Evaluation
● Sometimes, the examination involves basic blood pressure and heart rate scales, size,
stability, body shape, and aerobic capacity, history of exercise, and priorities and
interests. Various assessment methods are used, and they are often performed at
routine intervals to assess the improvement.
3. Exercise Type
● A big part of your fitness treatment is the sort of workout you are pursuing. Proper
medication should involve different workouts and a healthy regimen to develop core
strength, agility, endurance, and general health and then get even more tailored to your
health objectives.
4. Cardiovascular Fitness
● This exercise method leads to changes in the heart's ability to pump blood to the
functioning muscles across the body, which increases general cardiovascular health.
● Cardiovascular exercise is also linked to many health changes, including a reduced risk
of many cancers, decreases in total cholesterol, blood pressure, and body fat levels.
5. Strength Training
● A successful plan should involve the heart and all the main muscle groups fighting
toward resistance and developing strength, stamina, and endurance in different
combinations.
● The resistance may be your own body from weights or friction.
● A capable trainer will find the right combination. However, the most basic routine
involves 1 to 3 sets of 10 to 12 repetitions for building strength.
6. Frequency of Exercise
● How much you exercise is an essential aspect of fitness to make progress healthy but
consistent. This prescription mostly starts two or three days a week and progresses or
four or five days a week.
7. Duration of Exercise
● Based on your current level of fitness and exercise history, you can start your exercise
prescription with as little as ten minutes of steady exercise and develop from there.
● Ideally, you'll aim about three days a week for 20 to 60 minutes of daily exercise.
8. Intensity of Exercise
● Perhaps the most crucial element of an active, healthy, and enjoyable program is your
exercise prescription's strength. This is where the expert or trainer's abilities are tested.
Each person responds to exercise differently; it is essential to find the right intensity and
a balance between effort and rest. Trainers use heart rate as a basic measure of
exercise intensity guidelines.
● Professionals will determine the most suitable heart rate range for many protocols,
which will help you progress but not overdo it. Additionally, the trainer will monitor your
heart rate and other vital signs when you're exercising.
● A beginner may start at a maximum heart rate range of 50 percent. On the other hand, a
professional athlete will work at approximately 90 percent of 40 their optimum heart rate
during intensive training.
9. Exercise Session Order
● Your exercise program will usually follow a similar order, but this varies depending upon
your training goals.
● All programs will begin with a warm-up and end with a cool-down and stretching.
10. Exercise Progression
● This is how your doctor or trainer keeps you on track and attaining your target of fitness.
Moreover, you and your teacher need daily input and open contact.
● Some coaches can keep the training details recorded, but it's smart to keep the training
log. Write down notes about your exercise style, time, distance, weight, reps, and how
you feel.
● The rates of progression for new exercisers are generally broken into three separate
6-week phases: (1) initial conditioning, (2) fitness improvement, and (3) fitness
maintenance.
11. Exercise Modifications
● A successful workout plan is versatile and adaptable and can be changed regularly and
easily when moving you toward your goals. Adjustments are a regular and continuous
medication part of the workout for the rest of your life. You'll find you need to adjust your
routine regularly, try new things, take breaks, and increase your time and intensity over
the years and decrease.
● Periodic visits to your physician and personal trainer will help keep the routine healthy.
However, by this time, you'll have enough expertise and experience to go it alone,
develop your own fitness regimen, and achieve a personal best if that's what you want.
TRAINING PRINCIPLES
● We know that the body must respond and adjust to the next response to the same or
greater stress and workload by being stronger in order to accommodate the new load
when we evaluate the muscle systems with workloads. The following are the five training
principles.
5 ELEMENTS OF TRAINING PRINCIPLES
1. Overload
● Repeated practice of a skill or a series of moves beyond necessary performance
is a method of overloading where quality and quantity are used to master specific
capacity or series of moves and resolve and eliminate errors. Skills and
movements are of higher quality when fatigue doesn't impair the trainee's ability
to sequence movements properly.
2. Progression
● To ensure that outcomes continue to improve over time, the training intensity's
degree needs to increase continuously above the adapted workload. The most
common and most applicable form of progression is increasing weight; however,
progression can also be accomplished by adjusting pace, number of exercises,
the difficulty of exercises, number of sets, and in any combination.
3. Specificity
● Exercise is stress, and as the body acclimatizes to stress effectively, precision
regularly and in several ways imposes a particular form of stress on the body.
The Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands (SAID) affirms that the body will
improve its performance of a specific exercise over time.
4. Variation
● Exposing the body to an entirely new stimulus provides regular performance
improvements. It decreases the likelihood of over-use injuries, over-training,
lessening fatigue, and sustaining exercise strength. Altering the load, length,
duration, variety of exercise and rest periods can also boost efficiency.
5. Reversibility
The gains of training are lost without training, with long periods. At the otherside, this also
means that if the preparation is resumed, the detraining effect can be reversed. Extended rest
periods minimize performance, and the physiological effects decline with time, which restores
the body to its pre-training state. Quality improvements may be lost in as little as two weeks or
lesser. Interestingly, training has a lingering effect even when discontinued in that detraining
strength levels are seldom lower than pre-training levels. Homeostasis is the body's
physiological response to overall equilibrium, stability, and internal/external comfort. Most of all,
any movement that disrupts the body's homeostatic state will cause a series of acts within our
interconnected muscle system: increased heart rate, blood pressure, intake of oxygen, etc.
Therefore, to make an improvement and muscle hypertrophy-even a less drastic aim of merely
growing cardio-health, homeostasis would be broken. The body likes homeostasis ... it will fight
to maintain homeostasis; this is normal, barring any pre-existing healthier.
FITNESS AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY ASSESSMENTS
1. The Karvonen Formula
● The formula factors in your resting heart rate, therefore, you' Il need to
determine your resting heart rate by doing the following:
● Prior to getting out of bed in the morning, take your pulse on your wrist
(radial pulse) or on the side of your neck (carotid pulse).
● Count the number of beats, starting with zero, for one minute.
● To help assure accuracy, take your resting heart rate three mornings in a
row and average the 3 heart rates together.
● Another element in finding your training heart rate zone is determining the
intensity level at which you should exercise. As a general rule, you should
exercise at an intensity between 50% - 85% of your heart rate reserve.
Your individual level of fitness will ultimately determine where you fall
within this range. Use the following table as a guide for determining your
intensity level:
a. Beginner or low fitness level...50% - 60%
b. Average fitness level………….60%-70%
c. High fitness level………………75%-85%
● Now that we've determined and gathered the information needed, we can
pull the information together in the Karvonen Formula:
220 - Age = Maximum Heart Rate
Max Heart Rate - Rest. Heart Rate x Intensity + Rest. Heart Rate =
Training Heart Rate
Example:
Cherry is 22 yrs. old, has a resting heart rate of 75 and she's just
beginning her exercise program (her intensity level will be 50% - 60%.)
Sally's training heart rate zone will be 136.5-148.8 beats per minute:
Cherry's Minimum Training Heart Rate:
220-22 (Age) = 198
198-75 (Rest. HR) = 123
123 x.50 (Min. Intensity) + 75 (Rest. HR) = 136.5 Beats/Minute
Cherry's Maximum Training Heart Rate:
220-22 (Age) = 198
198-75 (Rest. HR) = 123
123 x.60 (Max. Intensity) + 75 (Rest. HR) = 148.8 Beats/Minutes
2. Ratings of Perceived Exertion (Borg Scale)
● Another method that can be used in conjunction with taking your pulse is the Ratings of
Perceived Exertion (RPE). RPE can be the primary means of measuring exercise
intensity if you do not have typical heart rate responses to graded exercise.
● On a scale of 0 - 10, rate how you're feeling in terms of exercise fatigue, including how
you feel both physically and mentally. You should be exercising between an RPE of 4
(somewhat strong) and an RPE of 5 or 6 (strong). Use the following table to determine
the intensity level:
1-10 Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion Scale
0 - Rest Nothing At All
0.5 Very, Very Weak
1 - Really Easy Very Weak
2 - Easy Weak Strong (Maximal)
3 - Moderate Moderate
4 - Sort Of Hard Somewhat Strong
5 - Hard Strong
6 - Hard Strong
7 - Really Hard Very Strong
8 - Really Hard Very Strong
9 - Really, Really Hard Very Strong
10 - Maximal: just like my hardest race Very, Very Strong
3. The Talk-Test Method
● The talk test is quite useful in determining your comfort zone of aerobic intensity,
especially if you are just beginning an exercise program. If you are able to talk during
your workout without a great deal of strain, you're most likely in your appropriate heart
rate zone. Work at an intensity that allows you to breathe comfortably and rhythmically
throughout all phases of your workout. This will ensure a safe and comfortable level of
exercise.
