How to Create Your Own Exercise Plan as a Beginner
Starting exercise sounds quite straightforward until you actually try to work out what you’re supposed to do. You decide you want to get fitter, perhaps lose some weight or simply move more, and suddenly you’re faced with workout splits, sets, reps, heart-rate zones and people on social media apparently exercising six days a week before you’ve even worked out what you’re doing on Monday.
I’ve started exercise from a very unfit place before, and one thing I’ve learned is that the perfect exercise programme on paper isn’t necessarily the best exercise plan for you. If it requires five trips to the gym every week when you hate gyms, or an hour of exercise every evening when you realistically have twenty minutes, it probably isn’t going to last very long.
A good exercise plan should fit around your life rather than requiring you to rearrange your entire life around exercise.
You also don’t need to be particularly knowledgeable about fitness to start. If you’re a complete beginner, your first plan can actually be incredibly simple.
Start with what you want exercise to do for you
Before choosing workouts, think about why you want to exercise in the first place.
Perhaps you want to become less breathless when you’re walking, build your strength, improve your mobility or be able to walk further. Maybe you want to start running, feel more confident exercising or become generally more active as part of trying to lose weight.
Your reason matters because different goals naturally lead to different types of activity.
If your dream is completing a 5K, for example, gradually increasing the amount you’re able to walk and run makes much more sense than spending all your exercise time lifting weights. If you want everyday tasks to feel easier, a combination of walking, strength work and activities that improve balance and mobility might be more useful.
Weight loss can absolutely be one reason you want to exercise too, but I wouldn’t build an entire fitness plan around trying to burn as many calories as physically possible.
I’ve been there with thinking about exercise in terms of calories, and it can turn movement into something you do to compensate for food rather than something that helps your body become fitter and stronger.
If weight loss is one of your goals, exercise can be part of the bigger picture without every workout needing to earn or cancel out something you’ve eaten.
Be realistic about where you’re starting
This is probably the bit I’d put above almost everything else.
It’s incredibly easy to make an exercise plan for the person you intend to become rather than the person you are today.
You imagine yourself going to the gym five times a week, walking every lunchtime and doing yoga every evening, despite currently doing virtually no exercise. By Wednesday you’re exhausted, Thursday’s workout doesn’t happen and by the weekend the whole plan feels as though it’s failed.
Starting smaller isn’t taking the easy option. It gives your body and your routine time to adapt.
If you’re currently very inactive, your first goal might simply be walking for ten minutes several times a week. Someone who’s already reasonably active could start with considerably more.
I’ve learned this with running too. When I started running, I couldn’t simply decide I wanted to run several miles and then do it. I had to build up gradually, and some of my earliest goals involved running between things I could see in front of me rather than worrying about kilometres, pace or what somebody else could manage.
Your starting point isn’t embarrassing. It’s just your starting point.
Choose exercise you can realistically do
There’s no point creating a programme full of equipment you don’t own or activities you hate.
Think about where you’re going to exercise, how much time you genuinely have and what you’re actually prepared to do.
If you enjoy walking, use walking. If you’d rather exercise at home because you feel self-conscious in a gym, there are plenty of things you can do at home. If you have mobility difficulties or find standing exercise difficult, seated exercise can still help you become more active.
The best plan is rarely the one containing the theoretically perfect collection of exercises. It’s the one you can repeat often enough for it to make a difference.
This is also where I’d think about variety. Aerobic activity such as brisk walking, cycling or swimming can help improve cardiovascular fitness, while strength exercises help maintain and build muscle strength. Activities involving balance and flexibility can be useful too, particularly as we get older.
That doesn’t mean every exercise session needs to contain a little bit of everything. You can spread different types of activity throughout your week in whatever way works for you.
Decide how many days you can actually exercise
I’d much rather plan three realistic sessions and complete them than plan six and constantly feel guilty about the ones I missed.
Look at an ordinary week rather than an imaginary perfect week.
If Monday is always hectic, don’t put your longest workout on Monday simply because every new fitness regime seems obliged to start then. If you have more time at weekends, use that. If mornings make you miserable, you don’t need to become a 6am exercise person just because somebody on Instagram is one.
Your plan might look something like walking on Tuesday, doing a short strength workout on Thursday and having a longer walk or swim at the weekend. Someone else might prefer ten or fifteen minutes most days.
Both can be perfectly sensible starting points.
UK physical activity guidance recommends that adults aim to be active every day, accumulate at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week (or 75 minutes of vigorous activity) and do strengthening activities on at least two days. That can sound like a lot when you’re starting from virtually nothing, though, so don’t interpret the guideline as meaning anything less isn’t worth doing.
Doing more than you do now is a perfectly reasonable place to begin.
What should you actually put in your exercise plan?
For a beginner, I would keep this much simpler than most fitness websites make it sound.
Think about having some activity that gets you moving and slightly more breathless, some activity that helps maintain or improve your strength, and opportunities to work on things such as mobility and balance where appropriate.
Walking is probably one of the easiest places to start because it doesn’t require much equipment and can be adapted quite easily. You could gradually walk for longer, choose a slightly hillier route or increase your pace as your fitness improves.
Strength work doesn’t necessarily require a gym either. Depending on your ability, exercises might use your own body weight, resistance bands, dumbbells or gym machines. If you’re completely new to strength training and aren’t confident about technique, getting some initial guidance can be worthwhile rather than copying random exercises from dozens of different online videos.
You don’t have to create complicated body-part workouts or know how many sets somebody trying to become a bodybuilder would use. You’re trying to create a beginner exercise routine, not prepare for the Olympics.
Don’t forget recovery
Rest is part of an exercise plan too. When people are enthusiastic about getting fitter, it’s tempting to think more must always be better. If three workouts are good, surely six are twice as good?
Your body needs time to recover, particularly from activities it isn’t accustomed to. You may have some muscle soreness after trying something new, although exercise shouldn’t routinely leave you unable to function for days afterwards.
You can also have active recovery days where you still move without doing another demanding workout. A gentle walk, for example, might feel lovely between harder sessions.
Sleep, food and hydration all matter as well. You don’t need a complicated collection of sports supplements simply because you’ve started exercising; eating a reasonably balanced diet and drinking according to your needs is perfectly adequate for most ordinary beginner workouts.
How to make your exercise plan harder as you get fitter
Progress doesn’t automatically mean exercising more days every week. That’s something I wish more beginner fitness advice made clear.
If you start walking for fifteen minutes and eventually find it easy, you might walk for twenty minutes. You could walk slightly faster or choose a route with a hill. With strength exercises, progression might involve gradually increasing the resistance, doing another repetition or using a slightly more challenging variation when you’re ready.
Sometimes progress isn’t making an exercise harder at all. It might be noticing that you no longer need to stop halfway up a hill, that getting off the floor has become easier or that you can walk around the shops without needing to sit down. Those improvements count.
Your exercise plan doesn’t have to continually become longer and more punishing to prove that it’s working.
What if you miss a workout?
You haven’t ruined the plan. This sounds obvious, but I know how easy it is to fall into the I’ve messed it up now, so I’ll start again on Monday mindset.
Exercise plans need some flexibility because real life doesn’t care what’s written in your diary. You might be ill, have appointments, go away, sleep badly or simply have a day when exercising isn’t happening.
If you miss Tuesday’s workout, you can do it another day if that works, or simply continue with your next planned session.
You don’t need to squeeze two workouts into Wednesday as punishment.
Over several months, consistency matters far more than whether you completed every single session exactly when you’d planned it.
A simple beginner exercise plan
If you’re reading all this and thinking, “That’s lovely, Jen, but what am I actually supposed to do?”, start very simply.
Someone who is currently fairly inactive might decide to begin with three planned activity sessions each week. One could be a comfortable walk, another could combine a short walk with a few beginner strength exercises, and the third could be whichever activity they enjoy most, perhaps swimming, cycling, another walk or a beginner exercise video.
On the days between those sessions, normal movement still counts. Walking around the shops, doing housework, gardening, taking the stairs or getting up from your desk regularly are all part of being more active.
After a few weeks, look at how the plan feels.
If you’re struggling to complete it, make it easier rather than deciding you’ve failed. If everything feels comfortable, choose one small thing to progress. You might make one walk longer, add another strength exercise or introduce another short activity session.
Then reassess again.
That’s essentially what a fitness programme needs to do: give you enough structure to know what you’re doing without becoming another set of rules you’re constantly breaking.
When should you get professional advice?
Most people can benefit from becoming more active, but there are situations where it’s sensible to get individual advice before dramatically changing what you’re doing.
If you have a medical condition, significant pain, an injury, mobility problems, unexplained symptoms during exercise or you’ve been advised to limit particular activities, speak to an appropriate healthcare professional about what’s suitable for you.
Likewise, stop exercising and seek appropriate medical advice if you develop concerning symptoms rather than trying to push through because your plan says you have another twenty minutes to do.
A qualified fitness professional can also be useful if you want help designing a more advanced programme, learning strength exercises safely or working towards a particular performance goal.
There’s absolutely no shame in needing help. Creating your own exercise plan is useful when your needs are relatively straightforward; it doesn’t mean you have to become your own physiotherapist and personal trainer as well.
Make the plan work for you
If there’s one thing I’d want you to take from this, it’s that your exercise plan doesn’t need to look impressive.
It needs to work.
I’ve had periods where I’ve exercised much more regularly and periods where I’ve done considerably less, and I’ve learned that making huge plans because I’m suddenly feeling motivated rarely works as well as starting with something I can genuinely imagine myself continuing.
Choose activities you don’t hate, fit them around the life you actually have and start at the fitness level you’re actually at. Give yourself rest days, expect occasional missed workouts and make things gradually more challenging when they genuinely become easier.
You can always change the plan. In fact, you probably will, your fitness, circumstances and interests will change over time, and a good exercise routine should be able to change with them rather than making you feel you’ve failed whenever life doesn’t follow the programme.
Create Your Own Beginner Exercise Plan
Here is my beginner exercise plan template, scroll down for a prinatble version.
My main reason for wanting to exercise is:
Right now, I would describe my activity level as:
☐ Mostly inactive
☐ A little active
☐ Fairly active
☐ Already exercising regularly
Activities I enjoy (or wouldn’t mind trying!):
☐ Walking
☐ Swimming
☐ Cycling
☐ Chair exercises
☐ Strength exercises
☐ Home workouts
☐ Running / Couch to 5K
☐ Dancing
☐ Gym
☐ Other: _________________________________________________
How many days a week can I REALISTICALLY exercise?
☐ 1 day ☐ 2 days ☐ 3 days ☐ 4 days ☐ 5+ days
How much time can I usually manage?
☐ 10 minutes ☐ 20 minutes ☐ 30 minutes ☐ 45+ minutes
My Exercise Plan This Week
| Day | What I’m planning | How long? | Done ✓ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | ☐ | ||
| Tuesday | ☐ | ||
| Wednesday | ☐ | ||
| Thursday | ☐ | ||
| Friday | ☐ | ||
| Saturday | ☐ | ||
| Sunday | ☐ |
At the End of the Week
What went well?
Was anything unrealistic or difficult?
What will I change next week?
One small way I could progress when I’m ready:
☐ Exercise a little longer
☐ Walk a little further
☐ Add a little resistance
☐ Try something new
☐ Add another short session
☐ Keep doing exactly what I’m doing for now!
A reminder from Jen
Your exercise plan doesn’t need to look impressive. It needs to work for you.
Missing a workout doesn’t mean you’ve failed, and doing ten minutes instead of thirty still counts. Start where you are, make your plan realistic and change it as your fitness and circumstances change.
Download the JAJ Beginner Exercise Plan PDF
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