Circuit Training Exercises, Design Your Own Program

Circuit training (CT) exercises are a great way to keep your training moving and fast paced. Your circuits should help improve all 5 components of physical fitness if done regularly and with good energy. It's important to have a goal and to measure your progress.

The 5 components are not only a good standard of fitness, they're also a good way to evaluate the changes that will happen in your body.

The 5 components include:
-Cardio-Respiratory Endurance - Your body's efficiency at both delivering oxygen and nutrients to the working muscles and transporting waste products from the cells.
-Muscular Strength -The greatest amount of force your muscle can exert in a single effort.
-Muscle Endurance - Your muscle`s ability to perform a repeated movement for an extended period of time.
-Flexibility -Range of motion a joint is capable of moving.
-Body Composition -Your percentage of body fat.

Whether you're an athlete, weekend warrior, or just serious about your training, you can benefit from adding this kind of regiment to your routine. All CT really involves is taking a group of exercises and doing them one after the other and keeping your heart rate elevated.

This kind of training is also great if you don`t have a lot of space; you can design something that can be done in your hotel room, office, or living room.

Circuits that switch from one part of the body to the next are extremely beneficial because they require the body to move blood to different parts, thereby improving circulation.

You can take just about any group of exercises and make a circuit out of it. Circuits can easily have varying degrees of difficulty just by adjusting the length of your repetitions and rest periods, and you can always add exercises or replace altogether them after a couple of weeks, just to keep things fresh.

The basic components of a circuit are:
-Exercises - What kind of exercises will you include that will improve the 5 components of physical fitness?
-Repetitions -Usually circuits will use high repetitions in order to work endurance, strength, and cardiovascular fitness.
-Rest and Recovery -Usually kept short because the focus is on muscular strength, endurance and aerobic/anaerobic fitness.

When circuit training, one of the most important things to consider is your rest. Depending on how you design your workout your rest intervals can make
the circuit more or less fatiguing, and they can alter the quality of the circuit. Too much rest and your heart rate will be below its optimal zone, too high and the aerobic system will be neglected.

So, by following a few simple guidelines you to can start building your own circuit training workouts today and change it up from week to week as you see fit.