How You Can Design a Balanced Weekly Workout Routine

So you have just started training, or maybe you have been training for some time and are struggling to keep up with it all.

Work, partner, family, friends, and now fitness. It's almost too much to handle.

This thing in your life that is supposed to benefit you, becomes this task on a checklist of things to do that starts to stress you out, until one day it all becomes a bit too much and you think to yourself, why even bother?

But you are smart, and you know that keeping up your newfound (or not-so-new) fitness routine is good for you, so you decide to go out and find the answer…

In an attempt to figure it out, you desperately ask friends and family how they seamlessly manage it all, because you are struggling to keep up. Then when all seems bleak, it seems that everyone you know keeps repeating this one word to you. Balance. Balance. Balance.

After this ordeal, you sit there and think to yourself, "Maybe I need to get some of this balance that everyone is talking about."

What is balance? How do I achieve this balance? How does fitness work into my life balance?

This and more will be discussed in this essay below.

Balance.

Firstly, well done for either looking up how to manage a fitness regime or for deciding to get the tools necessary to keep one up. This is perhaps the best decision you could make in trying to find a way to make it work within your life.

Now when we say balance, what does that mean?

Balance has a few definitions according to Merriam Webster which can be applied in varying contexts. The verb readily could be replaced with other synonyms such as equilibrium or stability depending on the context.

Although some of them would be applicable in this context, it doesn’t change the mental representation that comes to mind when we hear the word balance.

The typical connotation (and one of the Merriam-Webster definitions) that usually follows when your friends parade the word balance is a relatively equal share or equal distribution between opposing or contrasting elements. Other definitions on Merriam-Webster also contain words/phrases which support this idea such as ‘even distribution’, ‘equality’, and ‘equipoise between contrast(ing) elements’. Or it mentions something to do with being in a state of balance leading to a circular argument which does not help us understand what the act of balance is at all.

In the context of our lives, the ‘elements’ are time or energy spent between varying interests and demands placed upon us in regard to our lifestyle.

Now the initial problem with this definition is that you literally couldn't spend an equal share among all of your varying hobbies, interests, or demands of life in a given day. Even logistically, there are 16 hours a day (assuming you get 8 hours of sleep), and most people work 9-5 jobs which is a total of 8 hours per day, this already eats up 50% of your day. So the ability to allocate an equal share between any of your interests and demands of life in the name of balance is already flawed.

So to fix this definition, there is an assumption that some areas of life require more or less time than other areas to be ‘fulfilled’ in our lives.

So we need to look at the verb balance which describes it to ‘bring (something) into harmony or proportion’.

It makes you wonder why we don’t just use these words instead of balance. But nonetheless. These words seem more appropriate because both words refer to the relation between parts rather than just their equality.

Not to just get stuck up on words, but this is a better definition as then we can propose that certain areas of life require more time and/or effort than others. Such as the 50% of your day that is spent working day to day is probably more appropriately allocated than if you spend 4 hours working, and 4 hours training to achieve the former noun definition.

Although this is a better working definition of balance, and we should always strive towards this in our lives, there still is a flaw with this idea.

There is an assumption that all of the hobbies, demands, and requirements in our life are static and do not change across our lifetime and thus leave us always struggling to achieve the so-called balance we are always looking for.

So what is the answer?

Introducing periodisation.

Periodisation

It is foolish to assume that the demands and requirements of life will not change over time. At certain points in your life, you might have to focus more on working. At other points, you might focus more on family. This fact demonstrates that our lives are dynamic and fluctuate.

So how do we solve this issue?

Enter a concept in exercise science known as periodisation.

Periodisation is the idea that certain ‘periods’ of a training program focus on specific areas of training development.

For example, during one period of your training life, you might want to focus on building specifically the bicep muscle. This would then involve more time needing to be spent on working the biceps muscle in that period or block of time.

In another period of the training cycle, you might want to work on increasing your running ability (aerobic capacity). So then you would spend that time focusing on running to achieve that desired outcome.

Periodisation is a significant principle in exercise programming and applies to training for the effectiveness of achieving specific results.

However, this principle also applies to life.

You need to consider your life as a whole, and fitness as one aspect of that whole.

During certain phases of life, you might want to prioritise your health and fitness to optimise achieving results in this one area. Because at certain periods, your health and fitness are going to need more of your time to actually progress.

Then during other times of life, you might want to focus on working, family, or any other amount of passions or hobbies that you engage in during your everyday life because they too might require your time.

We used a training example before for the bicep, but a very real example would be if you just had a newborn which would require more time and effort and demonstrates different demands placed upon an individual during periods of life.

During these periods, you should prioritise the efforts in that one area to maximise the progress, development, or maintenance of that area of life.

But you see, we always want progress and we can continuously invest time into any one area of life in an attempt to keep improving it. Fortunately, though there is eventually a point at which you continue to invest more time to get less progress in that one area.

This is a principle known as Diminishing returns, and it may be the one principle that can help you in the juggling act of life.

Diminishing Returns.

So what is diminishing returns exactly and how does it apply to my life and finding a balanced weekly routine?

Let's continue to use the example of fitness.

Volume (sets x reps) is the biggest predictor of muscle hypertrophy (muscle gain), which means with time, you will need to spend more time to accrue more volume to get more gains. This just shows the moreish nature of progress in one area of life.

For example, depending on your current fitness level, you may need to allocate 1 session a week to see progress in your health and fitness, or you might need to invest 2 to 6 sessions per week to see some progress.

It is a graph where the y-axis is performance or outcomes, and the x-axis is time invested or time necessary to invest.

The progress gets slower and the time investment required is more.

This is very relevant with training but it can be applied in work, with family, or any other facet you can think of.

Let's take learning a skill for example to make it simple.

If you wanted to learn piano, you could allocate every hour trying to learn how to play the instrument. You would likely get the quickest progress and become very very good. But, you would eat into the finite time you have to invest in other areas.

So really you have to ask yourself the question of, how far do I want to take this? How much do I want to allocate to getting the results I'm looking for?

This comes down to importance.

Importance

You act in life according to a hierarchy of importance.

Some things are more important to you, and some things are less important.

There is no fixed scheme about what should be relevant to you in your life and what should be relevant to someone else.

This is why I had a previous problem with the usual connotation of balance mentioned earlier.

What one person needs to allocate time to is vastly different from another.

Now it could be said in some psychology research I am sure that there could be a general observable hour that a population would allocate in different areas of their life to feel fulfilled, but this is not a strict set of standards as we are all unique individuals.

The way a high schooler, a world-class pianist, or a mother of 4 children will allocate their time very very differently based on their life circumstances and vision of their life.

One is not right, one is not wrong, it is just people living their lives as they see fit.

So we have danced around the idea for a while now about what a balanced weekly workout routine looks like, and the answer comes down to,

it depends.

It depends on how important training is to you.

How far do you want to take it?

How much time do you have to allocate to training in comparison to other areas of your life?

These are questions you have to ask yourself when starting this endeavor.

One person might be okay with just getting stronger and generally improving their overall aesthetic, while others may want to become professional bodybuilders.

The time investment is different between the importance of the activity to the individual.

The beautiful thing about the principle of diminishing returns and periodisation is that you could just prioritise the progress of one area of life for some time to see the progress of that thing and then ride the wave of that progress as you begin to spend less time on it because the next levels of progress will require more time than you are willing to commit.

You do not need to be the best at everything, you can get away with just being proficient.

So when it comes down to how you can design a balanced weekly workout routine, what you should ask yourself is, what can I commit to training at this point in my life?

This is a good question to ask yourself and one I often ask my clients so this way you can stick to a proper training regime and see progress across time.

This could look very different based on the type of training you want to do, and how far along your training life you are also. But ideally, you would choose an activity that you want to do and make sure you stick to that commitment to do it despite what comes up in the week to stop you.

If you then have more time to allocate towards it during any given day or week, then you can allocate more time by adding more.

I think a simple good indicator of what time investment you are allocating to that area of life is sufficient is if you are progressing in that domain of life or at least maintaining. But this might be because it is important to you at this phase of your life, and this might not always be the case.

This is relevant in training but also in life.

However, to bring it home, It doesn’t have to be too complex, it just needs to be something that pushes you, that you can commit to, and that you improve with over time.

If you struggle to figure out what that might look like specifically for you, then you can hire a coach to help organise the training side of things for your life to get the progress you are seeking.

Conclusion.

Your life is dynamic. It is not static.

You will always have varying demands placed upon you in your life, in addition to the things that you actually want to do. Deciding to break up your life into segments of time where you want to work on certain things is a good way to be able to progress drastically in any given area, while also being able to make sure that no negative consequences occur for the pullback in effort or time in other areas of life.

Ultimately, we are all trying to do our best, and understanding this concept of dynamic life and choosing to allocate our lives to certain periods to focus on a specific thing is how you will get ahead in your domains of life.

So the idea of a balanced weekly workout routine is specific for the individual and is based on how important physical health is to you the individual.