Every good training regimen involves a specific set of workout types that target different muscle groups and strengthen the entire body over time. Including these key elements in your fitness training will give you more strength and endurance throughout each of your muscle groups, instead of just several of them. This will also add variety to your sets, which helps with consistency and motivation.

1. BALANCE TRAINING

Balance training improves your stability and helps prevent injury. Increasing your stability is more of a preventative tool rather than one to build up muscle size and strength, but it’s still an important part of physical fitness. The more confident you are in your ability to balance, the more confident you will be to consistently increase your lifts and engage in a variety of activities.

Best balance training exercises:

• Yoga
• Leg swings
• One-legged squats
• Single leg deadlifts

2. CARDIOVASCULAR EXERCISES

Cardio, or aerobic exercise, includes anything that involves increasing your breathing and heart rate for an extended period of time. This kind of exercise makes both your heart and lungs work harder to distribute oxygen throughout your body and release carbon dioxide. During cardio workouts, you tend to exercise your large muscle groups, such as the muscles in your legs and back.

Best cardio workouts:

• Jogging
• Walking
• High intensity interval training (HIIT)
• Cycling
• Plyometrics
• Swimming
• Jumping rope

3. CORE EXERCISES

Strengthening your core requires working out the muscles around your lower back, pelvis and stomach. If you don’t include core workouts as part of your training regimen, you’ll have super strong, good-looking arms and legs, and that’s about it. Okay, so you don’t need a six-pack, but a strong upper body still needs a well-rounded core to finish it out.

Best core exercises:

• Planking
• Crunches
• Side bends
• Bridges
• Reverse lunges

4. STRENGTH TRAINING

Strength or resistance training involves using items like weights or resistance bands to give your arm, shoulder and leg muscles something to work against. Challenging your muscles to resist that weight is how they grow stronger. As your muscles get more used to bearing that weight, you need to consistently increase the amount of weight you are lifting in order to encourage your muscles to continue to grow and get stronger.

Best strength training exercises:

• Bench presses
• Wrist curls
• Deadlifts

5. FLEXIBILITY EXERCISES

Stretching may seem like nothing more than something you do after a workout to loosen up tight muscles, but you’re seriously limiting yourself if you don’t make flexibility training part of your weekly workout schedule. You need to extend your range of motion and continuously stretch your muscles to keep them strong.

Best flexibility exercises:

• Yoga
• Pilates
• Running
• Dance

Make all five of these types of workouts part of your regularly scheduled fitness routine to get the most out of your workouts over an extended period of time.

Source

http://www.healthline.com/health/variety-spice-fitness-diversify-your-workout#Overview1