Reaching your body, weight and fitness goals depend on a few things: giving nothing less than 100% with every training session, being intelligent and strategic with your nutrition, and getting enough sleep so your body can recover properly. These are the most common and probably most important elements of reaching success in your weight-loss or fitness journey. However, there is one element that is often overlooked and highly underrated – tracking your progress and adapting your efforts based on your findings. But where do you start? How do you know what you should track and focus on? What data do you use and how do you adapt? Answer? You need to become FITT.
The FITT principle is used across the globe by individuals with different goals wanting the same thing; a way to measure their effort in their training and thereby adapt their programs to get closer to their goals.
FITT is used to measure your exercise program and is an acronym for:
- Frequency: how often you exercise?
- Intensity: how hard you exercise?
- Time: how long does each training session last?
- Type: what kind of training are you be doing?
The FITT principle can be used for any kind of exercise program
For example cardiovascular and strength or weight training programmes.
It is important to remember that each FITT component is interdependent:
- The intensity of your session will depend on what type of training you will be doing.
- The frequency will depend on the intensity and the type of training.
It is important to consider all four components, and how they affect one another, when working out your FITT principle training plan to ensure that you follow a balanced training plan with just enough intensity, time and frequency to give your body enough time to rest and recover. Training too intensely, too often will not give your body enough time to recover, and this could lead to overtraining and injury.
Before working out your FITT principle-based workout program,e, there are a few things you need to take into consideration:
- Your goal. This will affect your type, frequency, time and intensity of your training sessions. If you are trying to lose weight, your type of training will need to be a balance between cardiovascular training, and weight training. Your intensity and time for these sessions will differ.
- Your fitness level. This will affect your frequency and intensity. If you are a beginner, you will probably need to start off with 3 – 4 session of moderate-intensity exercise a week until your body has adapted to the extra daily caloric expenditure and recovery period.
- Your lifestyle. This will determine your frequency. Some people only have time to work in three sessions a week, where others will be able to exercise six times a week.
So, before you start working toward your fitness goal, take a few hours and plan your action step. Take into consideration your goal, lifestyle and fitness level. Ensure that you do not over-commit which could lead to overtraining, injury and burning out. But also make sure that your sessions are structured and intense enough to yield results. Don’t take shots in the dark, the surest way to get to your goal is to plan ahead and relook, research, track your progress and adapt your FITT programme regularly.
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