Try the FITT Principle to Maximize Your Workouts

The FITT principle is a set of guidelines for structuring your exercise and tracking your progress to help reach your fitness goals. FITT stands for frequency, intensity, time, and type of exercise. 

Whether new to exercising or a professional bodybuilder or athlete, you need to consider these four elements to create workouts that fit your goals and fitness level. For instance, working out 3 to 5 days a week with a mixture of low-, medium-, and high-intensity exercise for 30 to 60 minutes per session, and performing cardio and strength training. Working out these details and progressing them over time helps create an effective fitness program.

Frequency

The first thing to set up with your workout plan is frequency—how often you exercise. Frequency often depends on various factors, including the type of workout, how hard you're working, your fitness level, and exercise goals.

In general, the exercise guidelines set by the American College of Sports Medicine give you a place to start when figuring out how often to work out for cardio and strength training.

Cardio Workouts

Cardio workouts are usually scheduled more frequently. Depending on your fitness goals, guidelines recommend moderate cardio exercise five or more days a week or intense cardio three days a week to improve your health. If you want to lose weight, you may want to work up to more frequent workouts, up to six or more days a week. Just remember that more is not always better, and recovery time is essential.

Strength Training

The recommended frequency for strength training is two to three non-consecutive days a week. You should have at least one to two days between sessions.

Your frequency, however, will often depend on the type of training sessions you perform as well as your goals. You want to work each muscle group at least two times a week if your goal is to build bigger muscles. If you do split training, like upper body one day and lower body the next, your workouts can be more frequent than total body workouts.

Intensity

Intensity has to do with how hard you work during exercise. How you increase or decrease intensity depends on the type of workout you're doing.

Cardio Workouts

For cardio, you will usually monitor workout intensity by heart rate, perceived exertion, the talk test, a heart rate monitor, or a combination.

The general recommendation is to work at a moderate intensity for steady-state workouts. Interval training is done at a higher intensity for a shorter period. It's a good idea to have a mixture of low-, medium-, and high-intensity cardio exercises to stimulate different energy systems and avoid overtraining.

Strength Training

Monitoring the intensity of strength training involves a different set of parameters. Your intensity comprises the amount of weight you lift, and the number of reps and sets you do. Intensity can change based on your goals.

• If you are a beginner looking to build muscle, stability, and endurance, use a lighter weight and do fewer sets with high repetitions: two or three sets of 12 to 20 reps.
• To grow muscle, do more sets with moderate repetitions (for instance, four sets of 10 to 12 reps each). You can build muscle with a wide range of repetitions and weights, but the volume (total number of repetitions), is often higher than for other goals.
• Building strength requires using heavy weights to do more sets with fewer reps (five sets of three reps each, for example).

Time

The next element of your workout plan is how long you exercise during each session. There isn't one set rule for how long you should exercise, and it will typically depend on your fitness level and the type of workout you're doing.

Cardio Workouts

The exercise guidelines suggest 30 to 60 minutes of cardio, but the duration of your workout will depend on your fitness level and what type of exercise you're doing.

If you're a beginner, start with a 15- to 20-minute workout. Experienced exercisers can go for a run or use a cardio machine for 30 to 60 minutes. If you're doing interval training and working at high intensity, your workout will be shorter, around 10 to 15 minutes for all-out-effort interval training.

Having a variety of cardio workouts of different intensities and durations will give you a solid, balanced cardio program.

Strength Training

How long you lift weights will also depend on the type of workout you're doing and your schedule. For example, a total body workout could take more than one hour, whereas a split routine could take less time because you're working fewer muscle groups in one session.

Type

The type of exercise you do is the last part of the FITT principle. It is easy to manipulate to avoid overuse injuries or weight-loss plateaus.

Cardio Workouts

Cardio is easy to change since any activity that raises your heart rate counts. Running, walking, cycling, dancing, swimming, and the elliptical trainer are some of the wide variety of activities you can choose. Having more than one go-to cardio activity is the best way to reduce boredom and increase variability.

Strength Training

Strength training workouts can also offer variety. They include any exercise using resistance (bands, dumbbells, machines, etc.) to work your muscles. Bodyweight exercises can also be considered a form of strength training.

You can easily change strength workouts from total body training to moves like supersets or pyramid training to liven things up. Incorporating new exercises for each body part is another way to vary workouts.

You can spend a few weeks working on functional strength-based movements, then move to hypertrophy or strength-based programming. Each of these modalities includes various alternative types of strength-based exercises to try.

How to Use FITT

The FITT principle outlines how to manipulate your program to get in shape and achieve better results. It also helps you figure out how to change your workouts to avoid boredom, overuse injuries, and plateaus.

For example, walking three times a week for 30 minutes at a moderate pace might be a great place for a beginner to start. After a few weeks, however, your body adapts to these workouts and you will notice you burn fewer calories, you're bored, or your weight management efforts stall. It's at this point you want to adhere to one or more of the FITT principles. For example, you might:

• Change frequency by adding another day of walking
• Change intensity by walking faster or adding hills or running intervals
• Change time by walking for a longer time each workout day
• Change the type of workout by swapping one or more of your walks for swimming or cycling

Even changing one of these elements can make a big difference in your workout and in how your body responds to exercise. Change things regularly to keep your body healthy and your mind engaged.

FITT Principle and Injury Prevention

One of the best things about using the FITT principle is that it allows you to monitor the length and intensity of your workouts. When you are working out too frequently or not getting enough rest, you run the risk of overuse injuries, burnout, and muscle strains.

Additionally, the FITT principle encourages you to add variety to your workouts. When you do this, you allow your body to rest and recover. Plus, you are not working the same muscle groups over and over again, which in the end will produce better results.

If you notice you are starting to have less energy, experience more aches and pains, or feel fatigued, make changes to your exercise regimen. If your symptoms persist, consult your healthcare provider. They can help pinpoint the root cause of your symptoms.

A Word From Verywell

The FITT principle is a well-established way of modifying and adapting exercise programming to fit your unique goals, lifestyle, preferences, and progress. You can change and modify each of the factors to suit these needs. Incorporating changes to frequency, intensity, time, and type of exercise helps to stave off boredom while also providing a framework for continued progress.