Looking For The Perfect Fitness Programme?

Another week done at the gym and no progress made on the previous weeks. No strength gains, no noticeable muscle gains and no changes to your weight.

Whatever your goal, lack of progress happens to us all at some point, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

I’ve spent around 14 years trying out different kinds of workout plans, some with greater success than others, but all of them have a limited shelf life and I either grew out of them or got bored along the way very quickly.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll like your workouts to feel interesting, with plenty of variation and feel like a challenge. As both a bodybuilder and powerlifter, I grew used to my friends rolling their eyes at me when I wanted to work close to my maximum every time I set foot in the gym and never leave feeling like I had a lot left in the tank.

Over the years, I’ve realised that there is no perfect workout plan to cross the borders between different types of sport, but there is one that I found which came agonisingly close.

In this article, I’ll tell you why the Candito training programme might just be the best template to use for almost any sport and why it can be used time and time again, with unrelenting progress

Introduction to the Programme

If you read the words “bodybuilder” and “powerlifter” above and immediately switched off, switch yourself back on.

Even though they were my focus in the gym, I’ve also played football, kickboxed and been a sprinter for the same 14 years that I’ve been working out. Regardless of your goal in the gym, Canditos training plan can be moulded and perfected for you.

The plan itself is focused on developing strength but it can be adapted easily to focus on efficiency, speed, movement and muscle building, or all the above simultaneously.

Effectively, you will input your current, conservative max weights lifted in a particular exercise and a clever spreadsheet will lay out a 6 week plan for you, detailed every rep of every set.

What keeps the plan interesting is that no two weeks are the same. You move between endurance and strength phases, which prevents sessions from feeling stale and will leave you with a sense of achievement each week. The best part for me was the end of the plan, which asks for a test of max lifts, allowing you to work up to one rep maxes, so you are constantly testing your progression,

Below is a snippet of the programme:

Courtesy of Canditotraininghq.com

A Programme That Never Ages

A common problem with workout plans is diminishing levels of return over time.

What might start out as a great workout programme will soon become dry as you’re repeating the same exercises, with the same repetition and set ranges over and over, week in and week out. For a beginner, or for a short period of time, this is fine, but you will need some variation in order to keep progressing.

Another issue I found with most workout plans is the wide ranging choice on what weights your should lift. As I’ve spent my career working 9+ hour days, I’d sometimes walk into the gym in no mood to push myself hard; which left me irritated at myself when I left the gym without working myself effectively.

With pre determined weights, the Candito programme doesn’t allow you to get into that frame of mind. It meant that I’d walk in knowing exactly what I needed to do.

Strange how the human body will just get through things if you put your mind to it.

You’ll find that the variation in the plan over time and the pre-determined repetitions will help to keep you focused on the task at hand and almost go through the motions, as you get used to what you’re doing. More so, it’ll always be a test of your body.

Candito has managed to create a programme that allows you just enough rest to recover before testing yourself again, which makes some weeks brutal, yet incredibly satisfying to work through.

My Growth with the Programme

Walking up to a deadlift, I’d never been so confident, yet nervous of lifting a set weight. They’d always been my best lift, but I’d hit a plateau and sat on the same weight for around a year.

My previous best stood at 250kg, which I only just managed to pull from the floor and lockout.

Fast forward a year and, after numerous back to back cycles of the Candito training plan, I walked up to the bar and pulled the best set of deadlifts in my life; I hit 250kg for a set of 3.

To this day, I’ve not managed to find a programme that has given me progression this good, in such a short space of time.

Conclusion

Finding the perfect training programme can be tough, especially if you’re looking for a programme that gives progression and doesn’t get stale over time.

It’s a common misconception that a programme designed for one type of gym goer can’t be adapted to suit another, even if the two users have different end goals.

Although the magic pill doesn’t exist, there is a programme that has been designed to stay interesting and will develop strength, endurance and musculature over time.

Through all my years of experience in the gym, the workout that I’ve used more than any other and always find my way back to is Candito’s 6 week programme.

If you’re interested in downloading the workout spreadsheet, click on this link to go to the website. The spreadsheet will tell you everything you need to get yourself started