How to Make a Fitness Plan Based on Your Goals

The basic building blocks of any workout program are cardio, resistance training, and mobility.

This is true whether you want to play pickleball or roll with your jiu-jitsu pals, hit the yoga mat or head to the lifting platform, or safely conquer household chores or lift a squirming toddler.

But the balance of those foundational elements will be unique to your specific interests, fitness level, and goals. Creating and following a plan with the appropriate ratios and level of detail might sound complicated and time-consuming — but it doesn’t have to be.

To prove it, we asked a team of experts to create four training templates that take the guesswork out of how to spend your limited and valuable time.

Each template prioritizes a goal — building strength, boosting endurance, improving mobility, or supporting general health and longevity. Each one also lays out a well-rounded protocol that guarantees the rest of your fitness won’t suffer as a result of your focus.

1. So you want to get really strong . . .

• Primary goal: Strength
• Secondary goals: Endurance and Mobility

Muscular strength is often prized for athletics and aesthetics, but the benefits go deeper. Being strong makes you better able to handle everyday tasks: Climbing stairs, carrying groceries, and even navigating uneven sidewalks all require strength. Muscle mass keeps you in the game of life.

“There’s a direct link between longevity and muscle mass,” says Angelo Poli, ISSA elite trainer, strength coach, and neuromuscular specialist.

Without strength training, he explains, we lose a portion of our total muscle mass each decade after age 30 — a slow erosion in function that can have serious consequences by the time we hit 60 or 70.

Regular workout sessions may not only stop age-related muscle loss in its tracks but can also prevent minor falls and mishaps. Plus, they keep you functional and strong enough to stay adventurous and active your whole life.

So, what does a strength-focused fitness program look like? Your body has more than 600 muscles, but you don’t need to worry about training each one individually. A well-rounded full-body strength program incorporates the following five movement types:

1. Core exercises work the front, sides, and back of the waist. Examples include planks, side planks, and rotational movements.
2. Lower-body pulling exercises work the legs, especially the hamstrings (back of the thighs) and glutes (butt muscles), and the lower back. Think deadlifts and Swiss-ball leg curls.
3. Upper-body pulling exercises work the back, biceps (front of upper arms), and gripping muscles. These include pull-downs, rows, and pull-ups.
4. Lower-body pushing exercises work the legs, especially the quadri­ceps (front of the thighs) and the glutes. That means squats, leg presses, and lunges.
5. Upper-body pushing exercises work the chest, shoulders, and triceps (back of your upper arms). Some examples are pushups, bench presses, ­incline presses, and overhead presses.

The simplest approach to strength training is to perform one move from each category — thus hitting all your major muscles — every time you work out.

“[For] full-body workouts, three times a week is plenty for the vast majority of people,” says Poli. “Once or twice a week is better than nothing, but three is where the magic happens.”

Because muscles take about 48 hours to recover from a moderately difficult strength-training session, it’s best to perform these workouts on nonconsecutive days.

If you’re just starting out, perform one or two sets per exercise, and focus on learning excellent form for each move. As you progress, you can increase the number of sets to as many as five.

The number of reps you perform in each set matters less than how hard you work on each set. “We used to think that you had to perform at least eight reps if you wanted your muscles to grow,” says Poli. “The newest research suggests that you can perform as few as five reps and as many as 30 reps of each set; as long as those last few reps are close to maximal effort, you’ll make progress.”

“The newest research suggests that you can perform as few as five reps and as many as 30 reps of each set; as long as those last few reps are close to maximal effort, you’ll make progress.”

For this template, fit in 10 minutes of mobility work before or after each strength workout. Additionally, complete two or three sessions of cardio per week: Start with one shorter session and one longer session of lower-intensity cardio. Add a short, higher-intensity cardio finisher to the end of a strength session, as time and energy allow.

2. So you want to boost your cardio . . .

• Primary goal: Endurance
• Secondary goals: Strength and Mobility

Endurance is the ability to continue moving for long periods. When you train for endurance, you do activities with a high oxygen demand — such as running, cycling, swimming, stair-climbing, or rowing — and keep it up at an intensity that allows you to converse (but not sing) easily, for at least 20 minutes.

“Endurance is present in all facets of our life,” says distance-running coach Frankie Ruiz, Life Time’s chief running officer and cofounder of the Life Time Miami Marathon. “[It’s] anything you want to continue for long periods without slowing down.”

Though endurance training requires lots of work from the biggest muscles in your arms, legs, and torso, it primarily exercises your heart and lungs. The more oxygen you can process, and the more oxygen-rich blood your heart can pump to your working muscles, the longer and harder you can continue your chosen activity.

If you’re new to endurance training, says Ruiz, “your first milestone is the 20-minute mark.”

“If you can jog for a minute before you have to walk or stop, that’s what you do,” he suggests. Catch your breath, start again, and repeat until you’ve been going for a total of 20 minutes, resting and running combined. Take a day off, come back, and repeat the process, gradually trying to reduce the amount of time spent resting.

Avoid the common pitfall of doing too much too fast, Ruiz advises. Be patient and stick to that conversational pace.

Do these brief workouts three nonconsecutive days a week until you can perform your activity of choice for 20 minutes nonstop. Don’t push too hard: Aim for an effort level of six or seven out of 10. Even your longest session should feel relatively easy.

From there, work your way to 30 minutes per workout in the same manner, alternately walking and jogging (or cycling and resting, or swimming and standing) for 60 seconds each, before gradually reducing the rest periods.

Once 30 minutes becomes doable, experiment with a few additional training techniques:

1. Hills improve your running or cycling form and offer a greater cardiovascular challenge than moving along flat ground. Run or ride up an incline for one to two minutes at a medium-hard pace, then descend for the same duration. Repeat for up to 10 reps. (Try this hill-run workout.)
2. Long sessions give you additional physical and psychological stamina, training you to stay focused for longer periods. Roughly every two weeks, do a session that’s 30 percent longer in duration than your typical weekly long workout.
3. A high-volume program exposes your heart, lungs, and muscles to more frequent stimulation, increasing your fitness at a faster rate. So instead of three cardio sessions per week, go for four or five. Ruiz advises work­ing out multiple days in a row (say, Monday through Thursday) before taking the rest of the week off to facilitate recovery.
4. Intervals or sprints in which you work at a higher intensity for several short bursts, each followed by a rest period that lasts as long as or longer than the high-intensity portion, help improve your form and increase your top-end speed. If you’re a beginner, Ruiz suggests, see a coach before you start working with intervals.

For this template, fit in 10 minutes of mobility work prior to each workout and five minutes after it. Also complete two or three sessions of full-body strength training per week. ­Because your primary goal is endurance, rather than strength, perform just one or two sets per strength exercise.

3. So you want to move with ease . . .

• Primary goal: Mobility
• Secondary goals: Strength and Endurance

Mobility is the capacity to move through your full range of ­motion without pain — to raise your arms comfortably overhead, touch your toes easily, and extend, bend, and flex your spine in all directions. It’s also the capacity to coordinate your movements efficiently, creating flowing, balanced, and ­integrated movement.

Without regular practice, mobility can erode over time, says personal trainer and movement coach Jolie Kobrinsky, CPT, RKC. “If you don’t mobilize your joints a little bit most days, you’ll get creaky.”

As with muscle loss, joint stiffness can creep up over time, gradually reducing your ability — and motiva­tion — to perform all types of move­­ment, including lifting, cardio exercises, and activities of daily living.

Mobility training can take many forms: simple and traditional, like with an overhead reach or a toe touch; meditative and slow, as with restorative yoga; or sweaty and dynamic, like during a high-knee jog or improvised dance. The only constraints are that the movement is low intensity (relative to your current level of fitness) and that it takes at least one of your joints through a significant range of motion.

Mobility work may be easiest to incorporate prior to or directly after a strength or cardio session.

Before a workout, Kobrinsky says, “I’ll use dynamic mobility drills to prime my body for the movements I’m going to do.” If you plan to jog, for ­example, you might perform high-knee marches, high leg kicks, calf stretches, and a few arm swings beforehand.

Extended, deep stretches are best saved for after a workout, when meditative movement and long, deep breaths can activate the parasympathetic nervous system.

If you’re looking for a mobility activity, yoga is the most popular. And don’t worry if you aren’t very flexible — start where you are. “There are a lot of hardcore ideas about yoga, but it’s really just stretching, moving, bending — moving your body around,” Kobrinsky says. “Yoga is the OG mobility practice.”

In yoga class, you’ll hold stretched positions, sometimes for longer periods, shifting attention to different areas and developing new levels of appreciation for the intricacies of movement.

A simple way to emphasize mobility in your workout program is to extend the duration of your pre- and postworkout stretch sessions and reduce the time you spend on cardio and strength. So instead of stretching for 10 minutes at the beginning of your workout and five at the end, double it to 20 at the beginning and 10 at the end, reducing the duration of the session in between accordingly. And consider attending a yoga class one or two days a week.

4. So you want to sustain an active life . . .

• Primary goal: Longevity
•  Secondary goals: Cardio, Strength, and Mobility

Exercise is a huge contributor to longevity and long-term health. A study involving 122,007 adults, published in JAMA Network Open in 2018, found that as cardiorespiratory fitness increased, longevity did too. There was no upper limit to this correlation: Fit people had better outcomes than unfit people, and the fittest people had better outcomes than people with average fitness.

When you’re just starting out, what you do matters less than doing something and doing it consistently. So choose a physical activity that interests you and gets you moving continuously for a sustained period: walking, gardening, hiking, golfing, tennis, cycling, or anything else you enjoy.

You don’t have to do the same thing every day; some people change activities seasonally or as the weather permits. But if you make regular physical activity a habit for an hour or more most days of the week, you’ll take a huge step toward increasing your longevity.

Once you’ve developed the habit of moving regularly, you can start to slot in activities that directly fight some of the effects of aging:

• Gentle stretches, performed before and after a workout and throughout the day
• Balance exercises, such as standing on one leg and walking heel to toe in a straight line (see “How to Build Your Balance“)
• Strength training and lower-impact cardio, with one or two sessions of each per week

Depending on your age, you may need to modify your approach to these activities, especially if you’re taking them up later in life. Recovery from hard exercise and even minor injury takes longer once you pass middle age, so you might have to take more time to prepare for and recover from workouts than you once did.

That doesn’t mean you should stay away from intensity altogether. Change requires fairly hard work no matter your age.

Since you’re not trying to maxi­mize any particular trait, there’s no need to specialize in any one activity. Instead, spread your focus out to cover every aspect of fitness while keeping moti­vation high and your nervous system engaged with new challenges.

5. So, you want to be a hybrid athlete . . .

• Primary goals: Strength and Endurance
• Secondary goal: Mobility

Looking for a performance goal to give your fitness program focus and structure? Fitness racing — competitions that encompass movements you often encounter in the gym — is an accessible, safe, and exciting option.

And these hybrid fitness races are having a moment in the spotlight. Events like LT Games, HYROX, and DEKA combine bouts of running with functional movements that require strength and technical skill.

“Hybrid racing is appealing because it covers all the bases when it comes to fitness,” says HYROX Elite 15 Athlete and coach Rich Ryan. “Plus, racing gives you a carrot. It keeps you focused on something besides just showing up in the gym.”

How to design a program that ticks so many boxes? The first step, says Ryan, is to build your endurance. He advises progressing to the point where you can comfortably do 90 minutes of cardio, like running (or biking or skiing or rowing — even fast walking), at a deliberate pace. Don’t rush this process.

After that, Ryan suggests, dedicate one or, ideally, two days a week to longer workouts (75 to 90 minutes each). “They can be running workouts or a mix of running, rowing, biking, or using the SkiErg.”

The point is to keep your heart rate up for a long duration and get used to working continuously for extended periods. Keep the effort low to moderate, and do these long workouts after a rest day so you can go into them fresh.

Additionally, complete two or three full-body strength sessions, including event-specific movements. Fit in 10 minutes of mobility work before or after each strength workout.