How To Create a Fitness Program

September 7, 2025

Are you ready to create a fitness program that works for you? This article covers the general outline for creating your own strength training and fitness programming. However, there’s a lot more that goes into programming. Additional resources from past podcast episodes and blogs to help you design your programming are listed at the end of this article.

The general outline you’ll use to create your programming includes these steps:

1 – Define your goals

2 – Define your frequency

3 – Understand options (re: frequency) and build your split

4 – Determine how you will track your progress

5 – Ensure you’re hitting the right intensity and recovery

6 – Make sure you’re progressing

7 – When you hit a Plateau, know what to do

Start With Your Why: Define Your Fitness Goals

It’s important to first define your fitness goals and your why for training in the first place. Are you training for something specific or are you training for general health, body recomposition, and/or strength?

If you feel external pressure to look a certain way or lose weight, your “why” is an extrinsic force that isn’t actually sustainable in the long-term, and might not feel empowering. If you’re training because you want to be healthier, feel stronger, etc. your “why” is an intrinsic pusher that will give you sustainable momentum.

Choose Your Workout Types: Strength, Cardio, Flexibility

This will determine the type of workout focus you want. If you’re training for a race or triathlon, you want to incorporate those particular activities as the key focus in your training. Strength, flexibility, and mobility should always be incorporated into programming.

No matter what you’re training for, you need strength training in your program, but your focus will allow you to get a sense of how many days a week you need to strength train vs do something else. For example, if you’re training for a race or competition that uses a cardio based skill (biking, running, swimming, etc.) strength training once a week to keep your joints strong and prevent injury, especially during your training season, is ideal. During the off season, you can incorporate more days of strength training a week.

If you’re planning a fitness program for strength, body composition changes, and/or overall health, strength training will be your focus. Aim for 2-4 days a week at the gym with strength and mobility work incorporated into your workouts, and a lot of walking every day. The benefits of walking are numerous, and it’s all you’ll need if your focus is strength training. Aim to get 10,000 steps a day. Depending on how much you’re training and how much rest your body needs, cardio can actually be detrimental to your progress.

Build a Weekly Fitness Routine You Can Stick To

This portion of creating your fitness programming is all about frequency – how many days a week you are going to workout. Don’t place lofty goals on yourself, instead be honest with what you can actually do right now. The best fitness routine you can create is one you can stick to, week after week. Year after year.

To create your frequency, look at your current capacity to train. Even if you only have 30 minutes available 2 days a week to train, that’s a great place to start. Life changes, so expect that the amount of days you train to go up and down over time. On average, people that are recreationally strength training only need to go to the gym 3-4 times a week. If you’re training for something specific, you’ll have more training days per week, but always make sure you have at least one rest day scheduled.

Your ability to commit to your workouts has a huge impact on your self worth. If you schedule yourself to train 6 days a week, but can only do 3, you’re going to perceive yourself as a failure, and might quit your programming altogether. If you’re able to be consistent with the amount of workouts you give yourself (even though you wish you could schedule yourself with more), you’re building confidence and adding to your self worth.

Build your Split

Creating your training split is specific to strength training as the primary focus.
If you’re training 2–3 days per week, you’ll generally use a full-body split, but you can emphasize a different foundational movement pattern each day. Here’s an example:

Day 1: Squat Focus – Squat is your first and heaviest lift.
Day 2: Press Focus – Bench or overhead press comes first.
Day 3: Hinge/Pull Focus – Deadlift or another pull variation is prioritized.

Even though each day has a focus, the workouts are still full-body. If you’re training 2-3 days a week, you also have the option to repeat the same workout each day.

If you’re working out four days a week or more, you have more options for your split, and can get more specific with your training and what you want to focus on building. However, your programming should have all the foundational movement patterns in a week’s worth of programming.

Here’s a quick list for building your split:

Beginner (2–3x/week): Full-body each session.

Intermediate (3–5x/week): Upper/lower split is nice for these.

Advanced (5–6x/week): Body part splits or performance-specific blocks.

Tracking Progress: The Key to Staying On Track

The key to staying on track is measuring your progress. This is because measuring your progress is extra motivation and part of creating SMART fitness goals for yourself. You’re progressing when you increase your weights for certain movements and increase your rep range with pushups, chin-ups, etc. You’ll also start to notice your ability to complete a movement with better/perfect form. If you’re filming your movements, you’ll be able to see that progress. Using a wearable device to track sleep, Heart rate variability, VO2max, and metabolic age can also show progress. Taking blood panels biannually or annually is recommended in general, but certain blood markers and their trends over time can also show progress with overall health.

Measuring progress with a scale is not recommended, because weight is not actually a good barometer of body composition or strength gains. If aesthetics are important to you, the best way to track that is through taking progress pictures.

How to Create a Fitness Program You’ll Actually Enjoy

Creating a program you truly enjoy starts with reframing what makes a workout “good.” It’s not about grinding yourself into exhaustion or indulging in punishing workouts. Sustainable fitness means enjoying your routine through engaging in consistent movement that energizes you and improves strength and mobility with longevity in mind. You don’t need to have strength training as your primary way to work out. Choose activities that you enjoy: Running, biking, swimming, dancing, hiking, etc. Weave in strength training 1-2 times a week to support your body doing those activities long-term. Prioritize gradual progress, ample recovery, and listen to your body.

What to Do When You Hit a Plateau

Make sure intensity and recovery are appropriate and written into your programming so you don’t plateau.

Strictly speaking to strength training in your programming, rep ranges are fairly simple for each movement. A hypertrophy rep range is about 8-12 reps, and is a great place to start. Rep ranges from 10-12 are important if you’re learning a new movement, as repetition is key.

To determine how much you should be lifting for your chosen reps, the RPE scale (rate of perceived exertion) is a great tool to use. If you’re a recreational lifter, lifting at an RPE of about an 8 is ideal, which means you have 2 more reps in the tank after a set. However, it feels like a little less than training to failure in real-time.

To make sure you’re progressing when strength training, you need to know how to progressively overload and add periodization training into your programming.

If you’re encountering a strength plateau, try a deload week and analyze your program to see if you need more volume somewhere or less volume somewhere. A usual scenario for strength plateaus is doing too much or too little.

If you’re in the middle of a muscle building plateau, consider the same advice and try adding tempo training, pause training, and varying rest periods (assuming you’re already varying your rep ranges every 4-6 weeks). You might just need to eat more calories to accommodate building more muscle too.

The most common reason for a fat burning plateau is linked to diet. You might need to eat at a caloric deficit (eating only 100-300 calories less a day than your maintenance calories for 3 months max). If you’re already eating at a deficit, you need to consider reverse dieting (slowing increasing calorie amounts so your metabolism can balance itself out). If you eat too few calories for too long, your body will slow its metabolism to adjust and stop burning fat. Cardio for fat loss is not beneficial as well, as your body doesn’t discern between burning fat and muscle during cardio workouts, and adding cardio can impact recovery, which adds stress to the body and prompts it to retain fat.

Ready to Start? Create a Fitness Program That Works for You

Diet is equally as important as your programming. Proper nutrition optimizes your goals, no matter what your programming looks like. There are nuances to this, based on your individual needs, however, eating a mostly whole foods diet full with lots of carbs through fruits,veggies, and whole grains, healthy fat, and prioritizing protein every meal is standard for everyone.

Now that you know the big picture outline of how to create your own fitness program, you also have free access to an entire library of resources to help you create an incredible program for yourself. Check out our blogs and Stronger Than Your boyfriend podcast episodes.There’s a curated list below to help you get started.

If you want to learn more about creating your own fitness program, listen to episode 250 of the Stronger Than Your Boyfriend Podcast: How to Create a Training Program.

Sources to Help You Create a Fitness Program: