Why Personalized Fitness Makes Sense for Young Professionals

Young professionals are some of the busiest people in the world. They work in highly demanding fields that demand a lot of time. Further, as they’re young, they need to prove themselves – if they don’t do the work, someone else will. This doesn’t leave much time for fitness, causing many to forgo it altogether. However, maintaining a fitness routine greatly impacts the energy levels and success of young fitness professionals, so what to do? We’re going to help give some guidelines for personalized fitness for young professionals to make the most out of their fitness and success.

Key Components Of A Fitness Program For Young Professionals

We will now discuss some of the primary key components of a successful fitness program for young professionals. To be clear, the following information is for those who are crazy busy and have limited time to train. 

If you’re a young professional whose situation does not have you strapped for time, you could follow any program. Now, you could still follow this information if you wanted to, but if time isn’t an issue, there’s no reason you have to.

With that said, here are the basics of what a personalized program for young professionals should look like.

Short In Duration

Young professionals don’t have a lot of time on their hands, so their workouts need to be short and efficient if they’re going to stay consistent. There are several ways to do this, but the goal is to get in an awesome workout and get out.

Ideally, this means 30 minutes or less. And yes, this is 100% a possibility.  Some different methods you could use are;

HIT (With Rest-Pause)
Supersets
Cluster Sets
Circuit

All of these can work great. For strength and muscle mass, we would recommend either HIT (no, that’s not a misspelling) or Supersets. For more cardio, a circuit would be a better pick, but again, you can choose loads and a rep scheme to make all of them work.

We’ll explain these in more detail below and give some examples.

Ideally, A Home Workout

If possible, home workouts are the best choice for a young professional for the obvious reason of convenience. Now, it’s also possible their workspace may have a gym, but assuming it doesn’t, home workouts save a ton of time.

Many people assume this means you either need an entire rack or you need to stick to calisthenics. If possible, a cost-effective rack with a barbell is your best bet. 

However, there is another option that can work really well: a simple landmine setup. Anyone can easily add a landmine setup in their house with minimal preparation. This provides an awesome training center that can help you stay consistent with your workout.

High Frequency Or Low Frequency

In this context, “frequency” refers to how many days a person trains during the week.  The busy young professional really has two options: low frequency or high frequency.

If you don’t have easy access to a gym, you probably want to use low-frequency training so you don’t waste time going and coming from the gym 5-days a week. Now, this will probably result in slightly longer sessions to get more work done in less sessions.

There are plenty of variables, but a young professional could get away with doing two gym workouts and then maybe add two at-home workouts with some simple dumbbells or body-weight.

On the other hand, having easy access could allow a high frequency of shorter workouts. For example, if you had a home setup, you could easily do 20-30 minutes every 5-6 days a week. 

This is likely the ideal situation for most people.

No Fluff (Prioritize Your Primary Movements)

This leads to the general idea of a minimalist training program. When professionals do have time to hit the gym, they need to make every second count. This means only using the exercises that give them the most bang for the buck.

As such, you want to use big, compound exercises. 

If you have time, you could throw in a circuit of isolation movements. However, this should only be done once you satisfy your other primary movements. This includes 6 main movements;

Vertical push, i.e., Overhead press

Horizontal push, i.e., Bench press

Vertical pull, i.e., Chin-up
Horizontal pull, i.e., Row

Hip-Hinge i.e. Deadlift

Squat, i.e., Back squat

Plan To Increase Physical Activity 

This can vary depending on the individual, but many young professionals suffer from a lack of physical activity. They’re usually stuck to a computer screen, in meetings, or on the phone. 

This is an independent factor apart from the actual exercise component. We now know that sitting time and lack of physical activity (you can just think of daily steps) are independent factors that can influence an individual’s overall health.¹

For this, it’s imperative that a young professional incorporate a plan to get this low-intensity exercise in. 

The easiest solution involves a bit of an investment: a treadmill. You could get either a more professional treadmill or a simple walking treadmill. Both could work.

Basically, the idea is that you do so while on the treadmill when you get up in the morning and take care of all of the usual tasks, such as returning emails or analyzing data. This is why you technically don’t need a really high-performance treadmill if you don’t want one.

Regardless, aim to hit a minimum of 7,500 steps a day with more being better.

Personalized Fitness Plans For Young Professionals

We will review some possible workout plans that a young professional could use.

Again, while these aren’t “personalized” for a specific person, they are crafted to satisfy the needs of a busy young professional.

HIT Workout For A Young Professional

HIT stands for High-Intensity Training, but it isn’t HIIT! It’s a form of training made famous by Mike Mentzer that utilizes one ultra-high-intensity set to train a muscle group. To do this, it uses something known as “rest-pause.” 

To perform rest-pause training, you’ll warm up until your working set. There are several variations, but for the professional, a 6-8 rep range would work great. Therefore, you’d warm up to a weight with which you approach failure around the 6-8 rep range. 

After a rest, you will perform a set until 90-95% failure (again, this can vary depending on your goal). You’ll rack the weight for 10-15 seconds from here and perform a few more reps. Rack the weight, rest for 10-15 seconds, and repeat. 

You can perform these “rest-pause” sets as many times as you want, but usually 4-5 are used after your working set. Yes, that’s brutal and should be, as the point is to bring your muscle to complete failure.

For this, maybe you’d just use three exercises per session while using one rest-pause set.

Superset Workout For A Young Professional

A superset workout can be a really good option for the young professional. This pairs two opposing exercises together to maximize your time in the gym. This means you could get six exercises in the time it would take you to do 3.

For example, a full-body exercise could look like this;

Deadlift + Overhead Press
Bench Press + Bent Over Row
Squat + Chin-Up

You get all six primary movements done in 3 supersets. You could do 3 sets of 6 reps for each exercise. Rest 45-60 seconds in between the exercises, which would look like this;

Exercise 1
60-sec rest
Exercise 2
60-sec rest
Exercise 1
60-sec rest
Carry on.

If you wanted, you could throw in a couple of rest-pause sets after your final set as well. Either way, you could run this similar protocol 3 to 4 times a week.

Again, providing exact exercises is difficult as accessibility plays a huge role. However, let’s assume you have access to a bunch of equipment. You could alter the exercises. If this were the case, we’d have two sessions that you cycle through during the week.

Superset #1

Deadlift + Dumbbell Shoulder Press
Bench Press + Bent Over Row
Leg Press + Chin-Up

Superset #2

Hip Thrust + Military Press
Bench Press + Dumbbell Row
Squat + Lat Pulldown

Cluster Set Workout For A Young Professional

Cluster sets are when you break down the total number of reps in a set into little “clusters.”  For example, let’s say you will do six reps of bench press. Rather than use six straight reps, you may use;

3 cluster sets of 2 reps
2 cluster sets of 3 reps

Let’s say you want to perform 3 cluster sets of 2 reps, this is how it may look;

2 reps
Rest 10-sec
2 reps
Rest 10-sec
2 reps

This allows you to;

Use slightly more weight
Perform a couple more reps
Help break through plateaus (Maybe you jumped in weight but can’t perform 6 straight reps)

Now, we can use this basic idea but then modify it so you do one big set. 

For example, let’s do a large set of 25-30 reps. Use a weight you might use for a 5X5 or 3X6.

You would then perform 10 cluster sets of 3 reps. If you rest 15 seconds between each cluster, one set would take around 4 minutes total with rest and work. It would look like this;

Set 1- 3 reps
Rest 15-sec
Set 2- 3 reps
Rest 15-sec
Set 3- 3 reps
Continue

Use this rep scheme for your exercises again, using 3-4 exercises per session spending on how many times you’re making it to the gym. 

The specific exercises could vary depending on your own personal training level which is why speaking with a professional trainer is still a good idea. With that said, you could use this simple upper/lower split and rotate through 4-5 times a week.

Upper Body 

Bench Press
Bent Over Row
Military Press

Lower Body

Squat
Leg Press
Romanian Deadlift

Training As A Young Professional

Being a young professional in the modern world is fast-paced and stressful. That’s why you want a fitness program that’s as simple and effective as possible. The good thing is that training doesn’t need to be complicated; you just need to be consistent. That’s why you need a time-efficient and effective way to train. 

We gave several effective methods that any young professional can begin to use to get their personalized fitness headed in the wrong direction.

References

Task Force on Community Preventive Services. “Recommendations to Increase Physical Activity in Communities.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, vol. 22, no. 4, May 2002, pp. 67–72, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0749-3797(02)00433-6.