Train Smarter, Not Harder: How to Develop a Training Program That Works for You

Training smarter means aligning your training methods with your goal. Simple, right? In theory yes, but in practice many people deviate from the methods that will help them achieve their goals. Exercise has the power to change your physical and mental state and like drugs has an abuse potential. 

People get hooked easily, falling into the no pain no gain mentality that will eventually lead to pain and no gains or find themselves doing the same things, day in and day out. Not seeing any significant change over the course of months or even years. This is reality for many people who are just going through the motions and not coming up with a game plan for success. Their routine is a time investment with minimal returns. 

Are you working out and currently dealing with any of these symptoms: decreased performance, fatigue, altered hormonal states, poor sleeping patterns, decreased immunity, loss of appetite, mood disturbances, menstrual dysfunction, low bone mineral density, decreased metabolic rate, injury, loss of lean muscle, gastrointestinal disorders, brain fog, cognitive disorders, or anemia? If so, it’s a sign that your workout approach may not be serving you. You may have fallen into the training harder, not smarter trap.

Exercising has many benefits, but you have to apply it appropriately to yield the results. The concept of training smarter, not harder is based on the premise that there is a certain “dose” of exercise for the adaptation associated with your goals. There are diminishing returns that come from too much exercise, and also potentially not enough of a stimulus to warrant change on the other side of the spectrum. 

I want you to stop and take a moment to reflect and ask yourself what you are truly trying to get out of your workouts...Do you want to have energy throughout the day so you can show up for family, friends, or work? Do you want to have a six pack for the beach next summer? Do you have a 10k coming up that you’d like to complete? A smart program is specifically designed to help you reach your goals.

Today we are going to dive into training smarter, not harder so you can achieve your goals!

Training program 101 

A training program is a structured exercise routine. Effectively reaching your goals means applying volume, intensity, methods and exercises in the right dose over the training session, training week, and training block while also pairing your training with recovery methods. 

A training program in order to be effective should be specific, tailored to you and your goals, and place increased stress on your body over the course of the program.

SMART Training

A SMART training program has structure. It is periodized. Simply put, periodizing is structuring your activity into distinct phases, like skill development, high performance, and recovery.

This will help you avoid overtraining by cycling through different periods of focus, raising your capacity for progression. 

The acronym SMART can help you get started with how to periodize and discover what will go into successfully reaching your goals. You’ve probably heard that SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timebound, but there’s another way to break it down: Situation and current starting point, metrics and measuring progress, aligning actions, resources necessary, and trade-offs/costs. 

Assessing Your Starting Point and Measuring Progress

In the beginning of a program, it is important to assess where you are currently at.

There are many different assessments and a personalized assessment can be crafted that is specific to your needs and the nature of your goal. 

There are 3 broad categories of goals that someone may choose to focus on. These categories are aesthetics, performance, and wellness. Do not expect to have a peak physique, be a professional performer, and have an outstanding wellness profile. You won’t be having your cake and eating it too. Rank what matters most to you from 1-3 and spend more time putting your efforts into your primary goal. Examples of different kinds of assessments:

An aesthetic assessment could include a beginning photo, bodyweight, lean body mass, body fat percentage, and measurements of the chest, biceps, waist, hips, quads, calves, etc…

A performance assessment could include metrics like how long you can plank, max push ups, 500 meter row, heart rate variability, 5 rep squat or deadlift, a 1.5 mile run, or could be more specific like a max handstand.

A wellness assessment could include any of the following: body fat percentage, lean muscle mass, visceral fat, blood pressure, resting heart rate, and a movement screening. 

Your assessment will help you determine where you currently are and give you a foundation to measure your progress along whichever metrics you care most about and are being tracked for your goal. What gets measured gets managed and not measuring your progress could contribute to plateauing. 

Aligning Actions, Resources Necessary, and Trade-offs 

Aligning your actions for meeting your goals goes beyond the training session. How are you currently spending your time outside the gym? Could coming home and watching two hours of television rather than preparing your food be unaligned with your goals? Staying up late binge watching the latest show rather than getting a good night's sleep is also counterproductive. 

Time is the most valuable resource that you will be exchanging to reach your goals. Other resources may be necessary such as getting a gym membership, hiring a coach to help you reach your goals, a meal plan, or investing in equipment. You need to manage your time, realize that you are trading in behaviors that do not serve your goal for those that do. 

There are trade-offs when it comes to training. There is only so much time in the day and you only have so much energy to put towards achieving your goals. Perhaps you’ve been dabbling in learning the guitar, painting, learning a new language, or perhaps a combination of all three. You may have to make time for the gym and sacrifice one of these activities to reach your goal. A very real trade-off for people who are already in the gym is that they may have to reduce the amount of time they are in the gym. Especially if you are experiencing any of the symptoms from the beginning of this post. 

It’s easy to think that you are making sacrifices for your goals, but if your goals are more important than your current state, you are trading your current self for your future self. If you are content with where you are, read no further. 

Time Management and Organization

Once you have assessed where you currently are and set your training goals, it is time to organize your training. 

Your training is going to require a time investment. How much time are you going to commit to your program? The optimal amount of time committed to a program will vary depending on your goal, but we want to choose a realistic amount of time you can commit to a program. This will be the basis of your training schedule. If you can only dedicate 2.5 hours a week to training, there’s only going to be 2.5 hours of training programmed. This could look like five 30 minute sessions a week, two one hour sessions and one half hour session, or two 45 minute sessions paired with two half hour sessions. 

Do not beat yourself up for missing a session. Life happens, but realize that if you continue to miss your sessions, you need to assess why you are not able to stay committed to your plan. 

The organization framework is broken up into your training year, training blocks (seasons or phases), training weeks, and training days. 

The Training Year: Decide when is the most important time of the year for your goals. An example could be you plan on running a marathon in the fall, looking your best for a wedding, or being in peak shape for the ski/snowboard season. Reverse engineer your training from that most important date or time period.

The best athletes in the world aren’t in peak shape year around and don’t compete year around, don’t expect to be at your best year around. Expect to have times where you aren’t training as hard or are developing skills rather than focusing on intensity.

The beginning of training might only focus on skill development. A base skill could be just showing up on the days you commit to. If you’ve never worked out before, developing the skill of showing up for yourself when you say you are going to is where you can get a lot of momentum to help you reach your goals. The goal of skill development isn’t perfection. It’s about getting your reps in and becoming more efficient. It is cliche, but true that progress is greater than perfection.  

Training blocks can differ in length, but are focused on developing specific attributes. A training block could be anywhere from 4-12 weeks depending on the goal and how much time you are committing to your program. It should begin and end with an assessment. A good way to understand training blocks is with a sports analogy. Professional athletes for most sports have the off-season, pre-season, season, and postseason. 

The post-season is the least demanding, focusing on the body recovering from the demands of the season.

The off-season can begin once the body has recovered from the season. This is when you would start to address weak links in the body, start to mentally prepare for upcoming demands, and begin to form habits necessary to succeed in season and pre-season. 

The pre-season is when you refine the habits and skills needed to perform during the season. The pre-season is more demanding than both post and off seasons. 

In season is the most demanding time of the year. This is about executing skills and habits at a high level. Being in season is draining and you can’t be in season forever.

This seasonal model is just one way to look at different training blocks. It offers a baseline perspective of how to approach the demands of training. 

Training blocks are further broken down into the training week and individual training sessions. If you have allocated 2.5 hours to working out during the week, you may be spending an hour and a half on strength training and the remaining hour on cardio. Your training week will have development days, stimulation days, active recovery days, and rest days. 

A metric that helps us keep track of the differences between days is Rating of Perceived Exertion. RPE is a subjective rating of how hard you feel like an exercise set or session was. I use a 10 point scale, but there is another scale called the Borg scale which is a 6-20 RPE scale. 

Development days are the most challenging days of the week. They are high volume and have an RPE of 9 or 10. 

Stimulation days are moderate volume and moderate intensity, having a 7 or 8 for RPE. 

Active recovery days promote recovery and regeneration. The RPE will be 6 or less and the duration of training should be short compared to development and stimulation days. 30-45 minutes in length and should leave you feeling recharged rather than drained. Some methods of active recovery are yoga, walking, zone two cardio, low intensity tempo intervals, or even bodyweight circuits. 

The body can only handle so much stress from training. Have you ever had a week where it was all high intensity and by the weekend you felt crushed? Most people should not have more than two development days in their training week. Some people may be able to tolerate 3 development days in their training week, but it does take a toll on the body. We will dive into this more during the Program Management portion of this blog. 

In general, a training session will have a warm up, the workout, and a cool down. Your warm up and cool down should be specific to the workout and use different methods and exercises. It’s not necessary to have a 20 minute warm up and cool down. Your warm up and cool down should be short, sweet, and effective. 

Methods and Exercises

When it comes to developing your program, there is a very diverse selection of training methods and exercises you can choose from to personalize your program. Whatever your goal may be, it is important to be efficient with your time and choose what is going to work best for you. A lot of people gravitate towards what they know best or are already good at, and this can actually hold them back from achieving their goals.

Your program could use different modalities and methods such as training for stability, flexibility, mobility, strength, hypertrophy, power, speed, agility, quickness, strength endurance, coordination, or cardio-respiratory methods and exercises to help you reach your goal. You don’t have to limit yourself to a specific methodology because training programs tend to integrate different methods and exercises to reach your goals. 

One component of any program is resistance training. Resistance training is what helps develop your muscles through metabolic signaling, mechanical tension on the muscles, and muscle fiber damage.

There are two perspectives when it comes to resistance training. There is a muscle based perspective and a movement based perspective. Let’s start by looking at exercises through a movement pattern lens.

Kinesiology is the study of human movement. The human body is an integrated system of bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and fascia that operate in different directions and planes of motion. It is important to know how the body functions together as one unit when looking at training movements. 

Breathing and bracing are the Wellness Moves fundamentals of movement. According to Dr. Karl Lewit, “If breathing is not normalized, no other movement pattern can be.” 

Bracing your core means engaging the muscle system responsible for stabilizing forces through the body. Bracing is important to protect yourself while resistance training and also helps the body produce more force.

Other movement patterns can be simplified into squats, pushes, and pulls but the ways to categorize human movement are quite diverse. For example, I further classify into single leg movements, lateral movements, horizontal pushing/pulling, and vertical pushing/pulling. 

The muscle based lens focuses on isolated movements rather than compound movements. It is less demanding on the nervous system and more optimal for developing muscles. Hypertrophy training used by bodybuilders is a prime example of this. They are able to train more total volume because they have a narrow focus of where they are placing the training stress on their body during the training session.

Progressing Your Program

As the body adapts to the stresses you place on it during training, it requires more of a stimulus for continued adaptation. Progressive overload is the process of placing more of a training stress on your body to elicit these adaptations. There are multiple variables you can change to progress your program. You can do more reps and sets at a certain weight, increase the weight, or change the difficulty of the exercise. You could progress in a linear fashion or in a nonlinear fashion. The non linear progression is also known as variable overload or undulating periodization. 

A variable overload example that I incorporate into workouts is I differ the volume of my workouts by roughly 20%. This looks like doing 8 or 12 reps instead of 10 reps, 4 or 6 sets instead of 5, or manipulating 100 lbs to 80 lbs or 120 lbs and keeping reps and sets the same. If you were to chart your workout volume, you would see a wave rather than a straight line.  

Program Management

Designing and implementing your program is only going to be effective if you are recovering from the stress you put on your body during training. There are multiple factors to manage during a training program. Program management will help keep you on track, avoid burnout and/or injury, while keeping you progressing toward your goals. Training is a process of self-development and we must be aware of how we feel and how our body is reacting to our training. As I mentioned previously, most people can not handle more than two developmental days in their training week. That’s because training has a large energy cost and high intensity exercise affects more than just the muscles. Training affects nearly every system of the human body, which is why it is such a powerful form of medicine. 

The unsung hero of training is the nervous system. Training places a large amount of stress on the nervous system and your body will not function properly without giving it a break. Your muscles may be recovered from a previous workout, but if your nervous system has not recovered, you will find your performance not up to par or begin to diminish.

The best in the world don’t just train hard, they recover hard. You have not earned a hard workout if you are not placing just as much importance on recovery as the training session. 

Have you ever utilized or heard of biofeedback? Management of your program is enhanced by monitoring biofeedback. Some common biofeedback markers are fatigue, soreness, sleep quality, how you feel, and something called your Heart Rate Variability or HRV, which is associated with the amount of stress placed on our nervous system. If you have a low HRV, it’s indicative of too much stress. Tracking your HRV over the course of a training program can help you make adjustments to achieve long term success. 

When performance has been low or a plateau has been hit, deloading is a strategy of reducing volume and intensity for a period of time to allow the body to recover from the demands that have been placed on it. A deload could be one to two weeks in length, but if the body hasn’t been able to recover during the deload, a longer deload may be necessary. 

Recovery

Your program is only going to be effective if you are recovering from the stress you put on your body during training. Training and recovery are both energetically expensive. It takes a lot to regenerate and rebuild the tissues that we break down during the training process. 

When your training exceeds your ability to recover, you enter what is called recovery debt or overtraining. These states are a chronic imbalance between stress and recovery that leads to a decrease in the body’s ability to function effectively. The result is a persistent decrease in performance and health. When this happens, the body’s protective mechanisms are called into action. 

Two of the most important factors affecting your recovery are sleep and nutrition.

In a study of adolescent athletes, less than 8 hours of sleep was associated with a 170% increase in injury.¹

The International Olympic Committee and National Collegiate Athletes Association both recognize the importance of proper sleep for not just athletic performance, but mental health as well. Both agencies say 7 hours is of sufficient duration, but other metrics like quality and circadian alignment are key as well. 

Insufficient sleep duration can impact metabolism, endocrine function, athletic and cognitive outcomes, and, furthermore, increase perceived effort during exercise.²

Nutrition is giving your body the raw materials it needs to function properly. Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is the amount of energy your body needs on a daily basis and it is important to take in an adequate amount of calories to fuel your body. Chronically under consuming calories while training can lead to a serious medical condition called Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport which can impact your mental health, immune system, cardiovascular system and more. Do you know your Total Daily Energy Expenditure?

Fueling for success means consuming the right amount of proteins, carbs, fats, water, vitamins, and minerals. Alcohol also provides calories, but it is generally going to be a net negative for your body. Alcohol consumption is a hard trade off for some people to make and is ultimately up to you.

If you need help with nutrition, book a consultation with our Nutritional Coaching Institute Level One Applied Nutrition Coach Jason VanSickle.

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Putting It All Together

Training smarter, not harder is within your reach. Remember to listen to your body as overtraining and under recovering are real challenges to face when one gets into fitness.  It’s important to pay attention to your body’s stop signs by measuring biofeedback. Your biofeedback could indicate it’s time to make adjustments to your training. 

Incorporate recovery strategies into your program and plan on implementing active recovery strategies. You don’t have to take a day off from the gym for active recovery, you just need to be strategic with what strategies are necessary to charge you up, helping the adaptation process.

Assess your progress throughout your program. Use the same assessment to aid you in reaching your goals. Take pride in the advancements you have made and celebrate achieving shorter term goals like completing a training block. If you are not seeing improvements, but your biofeedback is good, it’s time to tweak the program and increase the volume and intensity of your next training block. 

Consider hiring a coach to help you reach your goals. Designing and managing a personalized program is a lot of work and having an expert alongside you will help you achieve your goals quicker while avoiding potential pitfalls. No matter what your training goal, having a professional offering encouragement, support, and guidance along the way can be a game changer for achieving long-term success. 

In conclusion, training smarter, not harder, is about understanding your body, being strategic with your workouts, incorporating adequate recovery, and following a structured, periodized plan that is aligned with your goals to help you avoid overtraining, keep you progressing, and ultimately get the results you're after. It's not about how much you can train. As Willam of Occam famously said “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. ” Training smarter is about how well you can train to support the mind and body,

achieving your goals, and not burning out in the process. 

Book a consultation if you're ready to start training smarter, not harder with Wellness Moves.

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1. Milewski MD, Skaggs DL, Bishop GA, Pace JL, Ibrahim DA, Wren TA, Barzdukas A. Chronic lack of sleep is associated with increased sports injuries in adolescent athletes. J Pediatr Orthop. 2014 Mar;34(2):129-33. doi: 10.1097/BPO.0000000000000151. PMID: 25028798.

2. Charest J, Grandner MA. Sleep and Athletic Performance: Impacts on Physical Performance, Mental Performance, Injury Risk and Recovery, and Mental Health. Sleep Med Clin. 2020 Mar;15(1):41-57. doi: 10.1016/j.jsmc.2019.11.005. PMID: 32005349; PMCID: PMC9960533.