While these are all excellent reasons to incorporate regular strength training into your lifestyle and fitness routine, there’s an even better way to approach exercise - one that promises an even greater array of benefits! Moving towards a holistic training routine, which includes a variety of resistance exercise, yoga and/or Pilates, functional movements, a mixture of high- and low-intensity movement modalities and recovery protocols, can help you achieve better results and health outcomes from your training. Let’s dive into exactly what a holistic training split looks like, the endless advantages it can achieve, and how to incorporate it into your lifestyle.

What is holistic training?

A holistic training routine is one which involves a well-balanced mixture of movement modalities and recovery protocols, aiming to prioritise both physical and mental health. It includes any and all of the following styles of movement: resistance and strength training, cardio, yoga or Pilates, accessory movements, mobility and balance work, and recovery protocols. It incorporates both high- and low-intensity styles of exercise, allowing you to achieve a greater variety of benefits from your training.

For example, someone who follows a holistic training approach might adopt the following workout split:

• Monday: resistance training (lower body)

• Tuesday: yoga

• Wednesday: mobility and fitness work (including activating and strengthening smaller muscles and accessory work)

• Thursday: resistance training (upper body)

• Friday: cardio or recovery

• Saturday: Pilates

• Sunday: rest and recovery.

Of course, this is just a suggested guideline. Part of a holistic training approach involves being flexible with your training - which includes being able to switch up your planned sessions to accommodate how your body feels that day, take more rest as needed, or add in more recovery if required. It’s about making sure you’re considering what’s best for your mind and body each day - even if that looks different to how you’d initially planned to workout that day or week.

As you can see, the inclusion of both higher and lower-intensity training styles allows the prioritisation of both physical and mental health and wellbeing in your workouts. It gives you the opportunity to tune into your body’s needs and how you’re feeling each day, and challenge yourself in more dynamic ways when you’re feeling ready and capable. As a result, you work to improve different metrics and indicators of your health by switching things up and adding variety and intention into your sessions.

The advantages of following a structure like this, instead of sticking purely to resistance training, are significant. Strength training is undeniably excellent for many aspects of both physical and mental health, but a more holistic approach adds variety to your routine, resulting in a greater range of benefits accordingly. While sticking to resistance training alone is often done to pursue physical changes, a holistic training routine prioritises health both inside and out, aiming to enhance your physical and mental fitness by emphasising stress reduction, pain management, injury prevention, recovery, immune health and sleep, alongside the more mainstream benefits of resistance training. By incorporating different types of movement and recovery protocols, you can work towards a variety of goals including improving energy levels and immune function, supporting sleep and emotional wellbeing, toning and building muscle, and reconnecting your mind and body.

Here’s why it’s important to include these various different styles of movement in your workout routine:

• Functional training: Helps you get stronger and faster, but also equips you to perform everyday movements required for daily life.

• Flexibility: Improves your range of motion, supports joint health and prevents injury.

• Core work: Your core is the foundation of your body, a key pillar of strength. If you’re not engaging your core in heavy strength work (or any exercise really!) you risk injury, and you won’t get the most benefit or results from each movement. Core work doesn’t just mean sit ups and crunches. Big compound lifts like squats should also work and engage your core, and you can also include plenty of movements such as planks, standing core work and core activation exercises.

• Balance: Without adequate balance training, you increase your risk of falls and injuries. Including balance training in your routine helps improve balance (obviously) but also enhances other activities like walking and running. It helps support your core and your posture too, and shouldn’t be neglected! Incorporating single-arm or single-leg movements, and challenging your planes of motion to include lateral exercises and balancing poses is an excellent way to improve balance.

• Resistance training: progressive overload, or continuing to challenge yourself to lift heavier or more reps gradually over time helps you see strength improvements and all the associated benefits. Make sure you’re changing up the muscle groups and movements you’re using in your training regularly to avoid a plateau in performance and in enjoyment of your sessions.

• Cardio: Including both high-intensity interval training, and longer endurance cardio training ensures you’re challenging both your aerobic and anaerobic cardiovascular systems. This helps improve your fitness and your heart health, as well as your general physical and mental wellbeing.

• Plyometrics: “Plyo” training is essentially explosive bodyweight training, and includes movements like jumping lunges, jumping squats and skipping. This style of movement improves your muscle power and strength, reaction speed, agility and functional capacity.

• Recovery protocols: Recovery includes things like stretching, foam rolling, ice baths and saunas, and helps improve performance and results, prevent injury, and optimise your enjoyment of your sessions.

Let’s consider some of the benefits of holistic training.

1. Holistic training uses more muscles in a coordinated approach to reduce weaknesses and prevent injury.

Instead of isolating one (or few) specific muscles or body parts as resistance sessions tend to do, holistic training works to strengthen all of the muscles throughout your body at once. In incorporating movement styles like Pilates, which works smaller muscles and muscle groups often neglected by the bigger compound lifts in resistance training, you’re covering all your bases and working each muscle group in your body. This helps improve your balance and stability, and allows you to overcome any disconnections or weaknesses between certain muscles or muscle groups you may have. For example, if one group of muscles in your body is much stronger than another, you might start to overcompensate for the weaker group by putting more pressure on the stronger one. For instance, if you’re squatting and your hamstrings are much stronger than your glutes, you may overuse your hamstrings in the movement, resulting in poorer technique and greater vulnerability to injury. Plus, your glutes are unlikely to become stronger if they’re not being activated or used properly.

Holistic training works to increase the strength of various muscles at once, and will also improve your coordination between muscle groups, allowing you to recruit and activate the correct and appropriate groups for each movement you’re performing.

In reducing any existing muscle weaknesses, you’re also minimising your injury risk. Weaknesses or imbalances can often lead to incorrect form or placing strain and pressure on muscles in ways they’re not intended to be used, which can readily cause injury or pain. Whereas, when you’re confident that all your key muscle groups are strong and well-conditioned, this risk is significantly reduced.

2. It provides motivation and challenge.

Holistic training adds variety to your fitness routine, making it more interesting and enjoyable. Instead of heading to the gym day after day to perform a variation of a select few resistance movements, you have an endless selection of training types and intensities to choose from on any given day. This can really help to keep you motivated in pursuing your fitness goals, as variety is the key to ongoing interest and enthusiasm in the gym!

Similarly, it adds challenge to your workout routine. When you’re working on multiple different movement styles, muscle groups and fitness systems all at once, your health goals are likely to be more diverse and varied. This means you’re challenging yourself in different ways and scenarios, which can again contribute to improved motivation and superior results. In working on your body’s muscles and fitness systems in a coordinated manner, you’re sure to have an abundance of new challenges and goals to focus on at any time.

3. It allows you to recognise and honour your body’s needs.

A holistic training regime allows you to better tune into your body and how you’re feeling on any particular day. Given you’re always incorporating different types of movement and intensities, you’ll learn to recognise and honour your body’s needs more willingly. For example, if you wake up one morning feeling sore or lethargic, if you’re used to including yoga, stretching or a lower-intensity style of training into your routine regularly, you’re more likely and able to opt for a session along those lines. Whereas if you’re only used to doing resistance training alone, you may be more inclined to push through the pain and complete your regular programmed strength session, despite the fact this can cause injuries, impair performance, and lessen your enthusiasm and energy levels in the gym.

When you adopt a varied approach to fitness, you can use each day as an opportunity to check in and assess how your body and mind are feeling. Do you need more intensity, or less? Do you need more challenge, or more recovery? In being able to embrace however you’re feeling without experiencing guilt or reluctance to do so, you’re able to greatly improve your relationship with exercise too. Exercise is no longer a way to punish or change your body, or a way to burn off or earn your food. It becomes something you do to connect with your body, to make you feel empowered, nourished and energised. You remove expectations around every session “looking” a certain way, and instead surrender to honouring your body’s needs and current state.

It also means you’re mixing up your high- and low-intensity sessions all the time. This is so important for preventing burnout and fatigue in your workouts, and actually contributes to better performance and results over time. Instead of forcing your body through exhausting, high-intensity or heavy weight sessions daily, you can mix things up to target different muscle groups and body systems. And you’re encouraged to add regular rest and recovery days into your routine (at least one day per week), teaching you that you don’t need to exercise every day at ridiculously high intensities to optimise your results.

This flexible, varied approach to your fitness is better for your body and mind, and helps you to improve and heal your relationship with exercise and your body.

4. It supports recovery and repair between sessions.

Following on from the last point, by regularly changing up the intensity of your sessions, focusing on different parts of your body, and incorporating rest and recovery often, your body is better able to recover and repair itself between your workouts. This again helps to avoid injury, but also facilitates enhanced results. Instead of fatiguing certain muscles and muscle groups by pushing them to their limit over and over again in strength sessions, you give your body the space it needs to properly repair. Each time you do a strength session, you create tiny micro tears in the muscles you’ve worked. And it’s by repairing these tears that your muscles actually get stronger. Yet if you’re working the same key muscles over and over, day after day, your body actually doesn’t have enough time or energy to properly repair these tears, so instead of getting stronger your muscles can actually weaken over time.

Whereas with a holistic training approach, you have more time between sessions that target the same muscle groups or body systems. This helps you get stronger and fitter, faster, as you’re giving your body what it needs to recover and prepare for your next session.

5. It improves functional capacity in your daily life.

Holistic training also incorporates more functional movements into your workouts, since you’re focusing on more than pure strength. By adding variety to your sessions and workout split, you’re able to include movements like farmer’s carries, walking lunges, lateral movements, pull and push movements, hinge and squat patterns, overhead movements, accessory exercises and so on. Traditional strength training emphasises only specific variations of these, like squats, deadlifts and bench press, meaning you’re not always optimising all of your functional movement patterns.

Yet, by focusing on different types and planes (including lateral or single arm/leg work) of movement, you work on improving your functional capacity as well as your strength. This helps to enhance your mobility and flexibility, and equips you for regular, everyday movements - things like carrying heavy groceries, lifting things off shelves, you name it. Functional movement patterns leave you better able to navigate the movements required in everyday life, which is especially important as you age.

6. It works on different fitness systems and health goals.

Beyond simply working to increase your strength like resistance training does, holistic training tests different fitness systems and functionalities in your body, for a more well-rounded approach to health and fitness. For example, including high- and low-intensity workouts, and varying longer bouts of cardio with shorter, more intense bursts of HIIT allows you to improve both your aerobic and anaerobic fitness systems. Both of these systems are incredibly important for your cardiovascular and heart health, so by working each of them you’re optimising the health benefits your training can achieve.

Similarly, functional training works to improve flexibility and mobility, balance and functional movement (as we’ve covered), meaning you can work on multiple health goals at once. There are more facets to health than pure strength and muscle mass. By considering different metrics or measures of health - things like endurance, coordination, whole-body strengthening, balance and mobility - you’re giving yourself the best chance at a healthy, happy body and mind. You’re preparing yourself for the challenges of everyday life, and working towards your maximum fitness potential. 

7. It improves your confidence and fitness ability.

A holistic exercise training routine has been shown to improve both physical literacy (or your ability and commitment to pursue a healthy, active lifestyle) and your self-confidence in your fitness and health. More so than those pursuing only strength training (or a singular type of exercise), people who followed holistic training routines were more able and confident in their own capabilities and fitness levels, making their workouts more enjoyable too.

This positivity and attitude shift is so important when it comes to maintaining enthusiasm and motivation for your workouts.

The Downsides to Solely Resistance Training 

There are also downsides if you don’t move towards holistic training, and stick to purely resistance-based workouts. The primary risk if you’re resistance training too regularly is overtraining syndrome. This condition occurs when you’re working your body too hard, without getting enough rest or recovery between sessions. You increase your risk of overtraining syndrome when you stick to one type of training, over and over, particularly if you’re mostly working the same muscle groups day in and day out.

If you’re overtraining, your performance will stop improving. Instead of noticing increases in your strength, you’ll likely experience a decline in the weight you can lift, and feel more exhausted and less enthusiastic in your sessions. Over time and without adequate rest, you’ll become less and less able to recover between workouts, which can lead to serious injuries and a loss of motivation in your workouts. You’ll likely find even “easier” sessions suddenly feel really challenging, and you may notice a persistent muscle soreness, which further detracts from your workouts.

Symptoms of overtraining include recurring injuries (or injuries which don’t resolve or heal over time - things like tendinopathies or sprains are a good indicator), ongoing fatigue and exhaustion, mood swings and irritability, trouble sleeping, digestive discomfort, and poor immune system function.

Ideally, most people benefit from doing resistance training around two to three days per week. Make sure you’re allowing at least 48 hours between training the same muscle groups, at a minimum. And remember, not every strength session has to include heavy weights! Accessory movements and single-arm/leg exercises offer an alternative way to challenge and work your body. 

On non-resistance training days, you now have an abundance of different movement modalities to choose from and enjoy, to help improve your performance and enjoyment of your sessions!

How to Transition to Holistic Training

If you’ve been a resistance training devotee for a long time, it might feel daunting to move towards a more holistic approach to your training. But try to get excited - soon, you’ll be able to enjoy a variety of different types of exercise and their associated benefits, and you’ll no longer find your workouts are feeling repetitive and mundane! 

Here are some ways to transition to a more holistic workout split.

• Start by consolidating your strength sessions. Instead of dedicating one day to squats, one to hamstrings, one to bench press (you get the picture), consider breaking your resistance work up into a heavier lower body day, and a second upper body day each week, or something along those lines.

• Then, schedule in at least one to two rest days each week. These days can be dedicated to active recovery - things like stretching, foam rolling, walking, recovery protocols - or they can simply be days on which you take it easy and rest.

• Around this, start to add in sessions you look forward to or feel would complement your goals the most. Are you working towards improving your functional capacity? Add in some balance and mobility work one day per week, and maybe a Pilates or yoga session another day. Are you focusing on improving your speed and agility? Add in a day or two of cardio each week (one focused on explosive interval work, and the second on endurance cardio) and some plyometric movements. Maybe your goals lie outside of fitness-based ones, and you’re working to reduce your stress levels and improve your sleep and mental health? If so, add in some more yoga, mobility work, and additional recovery, and pull back on the higher intensity sessions.

• Use your goals and the types of exercise you enjoy to help you structure a week of workouts that includes plenty of variety and rest. And get curious - try new things, see how they make your body feel, and adjust your workout split accordingly.

Now you know the endless benefits of adopting a holistic approach to your workouts, instead of solely sticking to resistance training. The world is your oyster - you can make your weekly exercise split look however you like, tailored towards your individual goals, preferences and availability. Embrace the opportunity to challenge your body in new, dynamic ways, and to experience health benefits beyond strength improvements. The possibilities are endless when you switch things up and take a holistic view of your health and fitness.