Free Muscle Medicine: The Revolutionary Approach to Maintaining, Strengthening, and Repairing Your Muscles and Joints by Rob Destefano, Joseph Hooper

that follow, we’ll tackle those physical vulnerabilities head-on. What we present here is a general framework for developing and maintaining lifelong fitness.
    In the beginning, slow and steady wins every time. Consistency will get you greater fitness gains, with less chance of injury, than will a burst of activity one week and then none the next. You can’t make up for lost time by simply doing more—the body can only adapt to so much before it breaks down. Remember, strength and flexibility must be balanced. For example, if you’re flexible but your muscles aren’t strong, that increased range of motion won’t have much practical benefit and could lead to injury. By the same token, strength without flexibility is also of limited use. Some weight lifters can barely lift their arms over their head because they have failed to distribute that strength over a “functional” range of motion. All that strength, and they still can’t put a box of light cereal away on the top shelf.
    Any exercise program boils down to what you do and how you do it. The what of our plan is a combination of warm-up/balance, strength, cardio. The how is measured by three variables: frequency, or how often you work out; duration, or how long you work out; and intensity, or how hard you work out. At the beginning,be as consistent as you can be, four to six workouts a week if that’s possible. But as you get familiar with this new routine, we want you to become mindful of those three hows—frequency, duration, intensity—so you can adapt your workouts to the requirements of your body and the demands of your life. Maybe you’re feeling washed out at work. Then it’s time to reduce one or two of those variables. On the other hand, maybe your energy is good but you’ve got a tough week coming up at the office that will limit the time you can spend working out. That’s your cue to raise the intensity. If you can only spend twenty minutes in the gym or on the track, make them count, within the limits of safety and good sense.
    With time and experience, you’ll mix up the variables of your workouts not just because you need to but because you want to challenge your body in different ways. An unvarying routine is the enemy of improvement and a sure way to get bored or even injured. For instance, if you’re a runner, instead of running the same medium-tempo five miles every day, you might want to devote one day a week to a longer run (duration), or one day to some sprints (intensity). If you do squats as a part of your strength-training regimen, one day you can do fewer repetitions with a heavier weight, and on another you can do a greater number of body-weight squats. Whether you’re working on cardio, strength, or flexibility, don’t overload your body in too many ways at once.
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    EXERCISE ON A TIME BUDGET
Even if you have limited time, you can still manage a concise, varied, successful exercise program, with both cardio and strength components. For instance, five minutes of warm-up/dynamic stretch, twenty minutes of cardio, twenty minutes of strength, and ten minutes of cooldown and dynamic or movement stretching. With just three to four days a week, for forty-five minutes to an hour, you can make some real progress. However, when you combine cardio and strength, you should do both with moderate intensity (55–70 percent of your maximum effort, for example). In an ideal world it is better to separate cardio and strength. Especially if you have specific performance goals, it may be harder to reach them with the intensity/duration limitations of a combined program. But you can definitely achieve overall fitness and balance.
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    THE ALL-PURPOSE FITNESS PLAN
    Getting Started: Warm-up/stretching/balance/skill drills, five to twenty minutes, every day or as often as you can manage, and always before strength or cardio workouts.
    Warm-up
    Remember the time-honored advice to stretch before working out. Well, scratch that. What’s more