Circuit Training - What you need to know
By: Ben Kimstra

What You Need To Know About Circuit Training

One form of workout that you might want to give some consideration to as you go about striving to reach your fat loss goals is circuit training. Circuit training is a form of strength training that is going to focus on moving quickly throughout the workout, really getting the best metabolic response from the session as possible.


Some Equipment for Circuits

Before you go off adding circuit training into your workout routine though, there are a few important things that you should know.

Let’s go over what these are right now so that you can be sure that you get on the right track to success.

What Circuit Training Is

The very first thing that you should understand is what circuit training is. Circuit training is a form of training where rather than performing all your sets of one exercise and then moving on to the next, you’re going to perform one set of a single exercise and then move on to a set of the next exercise.

You’ll continue doing this until you’ve completed a series exercises, upon which you may decide to repeat the circuit or change to a new set of exercises.

By the time that you’ve finished the workout, you should have trained your entire body in as little as 20-30 minutes.

Steps To Successful Circuit Training Sessions

When performing circuit training sessions, there are a few things that you’ll want to keep in mind to make sure that you see the best results possible.

First, one big mistake some people make is selecting a number of isolation exercises to use with their circuit training program. While isolation exercises will be beneficial, they aren’t nearly as effective as compound movements will be.

For the absolute best results, focus on movements that work more than one muscle group at once. While you won’t use all compound movements, the foundation of the circuit should focus on them.

So for example you might perform a circuit of push-ups, squats, shoulder presses, lunges, bent over rows, step-ups, lateral raises, calf raises, and then the plank exercise OR exercises like Tire Flips, Wall Ball, Rope Slams, Push-up, Kettle Bell Swings etc

This includes both compound and isolation movements.

The second thing to note with circuit training workouts is that you don’t want to lighten the weight too much. Again, this is a big mistake that some people make. As soon as they start doing circuit training, they figure they should be doing 20 reps and using a much lighter weight.

This isn’t the case at all. You still want to be using a weight that’s going to challenge the muscles and promote strength gains.

Keep the weight to a level that challenges you in the 8-12 rep range instead. This will be far better for overall success.

Implementing Circuit Training Into Your Workout Routine

So if you’ve decided to implement circuit training in your workout routine, as it is a full body approach, you can do it a maximum of three times per week. It’ll be important to have that day off in between workouts to allow for recovery to take place before you hit the gym once again.

Also keep in mind that you don’t necessarily have to forgo your other lifting session as well – it would be perfectly acceptable to perform two regular style full body weight training workouts and one circuit workout in addition to that.

Mix and max your workout styles in a way that’s best suited to you.

So there you have the top factors to remember about circuit training. Used properly it’s definitely going to deliver you the end results that you’re looking for.

Added: 21-09-2011