Balanced and Imbalanced Training

Your goal in training should be balance between movements, muscles, and aerobic and anaerobic energy system. You want to train each of those in proportion to avoid injury and burnout.

Most of the time, you should train every movement (there are 5 or 6-depending on how you count) every strength workout. And train aerobic every day (go for a brisk walk) and train anaerobic (strength) every week.

But sometimes, you can have imbalance in your daily workouts but balance for the whole week.

For an imbalanced schedule, you might train

• Left-side
• Right-Side
• Upper Body
• Lower Body

Some of the benefits of this type of training

• Your body adapts differently to the different stress (one side at a time makes your muscles adapt very differently--one trainer says that you can handle much greater loads when you train each side seperately).
• The time for an individual workout is much lower. If you train upper body one day, then you can train your lower body the next and keep each workout short.
• This keeps you from a training rut and from getting bored.

How do you keep your training balanced? What other ideas do you have for staying out of a training rut?