Welcome to Workout Diaries, a series where we ask expert trainers to talk us through what a week of exercise looks like for them, helping you figure out how to develop and maintain an effective workout routine.
Monty Simmons is a personal trainer based in London.
With more than 13 years of experience and 15,000 personal training hours, he knows a thing or two about developing an exercise routine that works.
Despite this, he admits that he fell out of the habit of exercising recently. “I’ve got so many competing priorities,” Simmons tells Fit&Well. “Working out got pushed off the scale, which is strange because I’m a personal trainer, so it shouldn’t be like that. But when you get older you get busier and I wasn’t going to the gym because it was taking a whole hour after my day.”
The trainer quickly noticed the impact skipping the gym was having on him. “My back started hurting and I didn’t feel great,” he says.
Simmons decided the solution was prioritising shorter workouts and he now mostly completes 30-minute workouts. “That felt like the minimum time [I needed to spend in the gym] but also realistic,” he says.
Although he sometimes spends longer in the gym, his routine is more manageable without the pressure to spend an hour or more working out every session. That means it’s easier than ever for him to be consistent. Here’s what a week of workouts looks like for Simmons.
Monty Simmon’s weekly workout routine
Monday 5pm
45-minute upper-body gym-based workout.
Tuesday 12pm
45-minute lower-body gym-based workout.
Wednesday 1pm
30-minute cardio workout.
Thursday 12pm
30-minute upper-body gym-based workout.
Friday 3pm
30-minute core workout.
Saturday 10.30am
Short walk.
Sunday 2pm
Resting and stretching.
Monty Simmon’s tips for developing an exercise routine
Choose a time-efficient workout structure
Because Simmons often only works out for 30 minutes, making sure he gets the most out of these workouts is key. He uses supersets, which involve doing two exercises back-to-back with no rest in between.
“The secret to supersets is you typically don’t want to do two exercises that work the same muscle group in the same way, back to back,” he explains. “Ideally, you want to pair opposite muscle groups, like chest and back, or maybe you’re pushing overhead and then you’re pulling down.”
This means that you need to rest less, because one muscle group is resting while the other one is working.
Be mindful of how you feel when you don't exercise
To stay motivated, Simmons tries to maintain an awareness of how he feels when he does exercises, versus how he feels when he doesn’t.
“I don’t exercise for a couple of days, that’s okay, but by the time it gets to the third day of not exercising, I can feel that,” he says. “My head’s a bit more foggy, I’m a bit more irritable and my back feels stiff.”
“That’s the critical moment,” he continues. “If you catch it, then you continue where you were. If you ignore it, every day after that becomes harder and harder to start again.”
Pick your favourite exercises and commit to them
Rather than setting yourself specific guidelines around what you’re going to do each session, Simmons suggests picking between 10 to 20 exercises that you want to do every week.
“I track which exercises I do throughout the week, and then I make sure that across those exercises I’m hitting every muscle group,” he explains.
This means he has some flexibility with his training, and he can choose certain exercises that suit him that day.
It’s also a different way of looking at your exercise goals. This might help you commit to multiple workouts in a week, as they’re all part of a bigger goal to complete 10 exercises, instead of ticking one workout off and then having to motivate yourself for the next one.
