• If you are a professional athlete or your life is otherwise dependent on you being in shape, you should be training. This includes anyone shooting for some sort of athletic scholarship, and maybe people who just want to get really good at something – like, internationally-competitive-level good. Your competitive lifespan is (hopefully) going to be relatively short compared to your actual lifespan and the stakes are high, so every workout should be tailored to making you better at The Thing. That means doing exactly the amount of work that will make you optimally good at your sport: not throwing in an arms day every so often because you feel like it. Let’s face it: this probably doesn’t apply to you.
• If you’ve given training a genuine try and you hate it, you should just work out. This is where I part company with a lot of coaches, mainly because I’ve met men and women who are spectacularly good at what they do without ever having followed any sort of training plan. MovNat founder Erwan LeCorre, for instance, and many Parkour guys, will never follow any sort of training plan: they don’t need to, because they work hard and use a sensible variety of movements. This is tough to do though, so my advice is to at least try a few training plans before you swear off them forever, because for most people planned progression is better. Having a few indicator numbers to look for and improve, learning how to balance the basic movements, getting a sense of how to manage work and recovery – these things will make you better in the gym even if you aren’t training for anything specific. But if you hate following programmes, just move around and have some fun. Plenty of people go running or hit the weights three times a week without any sort of plan: they aren’t progressing like they could, but they’re still almost certainly better off than people who don’t go to the gym at all.
• If neither of the above apply, you should train and work out. This is me, and hopefully you, and honestly probably the best choice for most people. I know what my squat, deadlift, pullup max and 5k time are, and I’m usually trying to improve them, but I am usually up for sparring, going for a quick run, a pullup competition, trying some new tricks, having a go at a workout somebody else wants to try or just smashing out some tyre flips because it’s sunny in the car park. If I get the chance to do something fun, I’ll do it before I worry about how it’s going to affect my back squat. If I feel like doing some pressups because I’m watching Arrow and it makes me all aggressive, I’ll do that. Is that optimal for progress? No, but I’m not a professional athlete, so that doesn’t really matter: I’m strong enough that I’ve hit the point of diminishing returns, and life’s too short to think about strict presses the whole time. My advice? Have a few ‘indicator’ exercises and a general programme – three days a week is a good aim – and then do what you like the rest of the time.

Training is a good thing if you’re an athlete. But you probably aren’t an athlete. There’s nothing wrong with just working out once in a while.

When it comes to exercise, you’ll often hear trainers, well-wishers and those nice government information films tell you that doing anything is better than doing nothing. In the strictest sense of semantics that’s true: going on an elliptical for ten, five or two minutes will burn more calories than watching How I Met Your Mother for the same length of time. Going for a brisk walk is slightly better than not going for a brisk walk, and curling with pink dumbbells will make you fractionally stronger than lying completely motionless on the sofa.

The trouble, obviously, is that these minimal changes aren’t enough. Curling with tiny dumbbells gives you less of a workout than carrying your shopping or a baby around, jogging is much worse than most people think for fat loss, and brisk walks are only good if you don’t use them as an excuse to eat more Custard Creams. The result? The person who’s doing them doesn’t lose fat, or tone up, or whatever else they’re trying to do, so after two or three weeks they go back to sitting on the sofa, except that now they’re convinced that exercise somehow ‘doesn’t work’ on them, and so they’re actually worse off than before. And all the time, the problem is actually that they’re doing something that isn’t real training. Training is distinct from exercise, in that it has a point.

Famed quantum physicist and hobbyist safecracker Richard P. Feynman told this anecdote at Caltech in 1974:

‘In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.’

Of course we’re all cleverer than the Cargo Cults – except that plenty who ‘exercise’ are doing, or encouraging, exactly the same thing. Three sets of ten curls with a 2kg dumbbell, or doing triceps kickbacks with a tin of tomato soup during ad breaks, or running so slowly that you can talk about last night’s X-Factor, or just repeating the same chest workout with the same sets, reps and rests you’ve been doing forever, isn’t going to show any more results than making a traffic controller’s tower out of bamboo. To the casual observer, it looks right. It seems like exercise. But it isn’t. Not really.

There are lots of ways to escape the trap of Cargo Cult Fitness, but here’s just one: progression. Have three or four indicator exercises that you’re aiming to improve on: good examples might be the back squat, your max chinups, or your 5k time. Whatever else you do in your programme, aim to improve them. If they get better, you’re getting fitter, and the body composition results you’re looking for are likely to come. If they stay the same, then look at what you’re doing, and make sure you’re not the one wearing the coconut headphones.

HOMEWORK: Pick one exercise that you’d like to improve at – preferably a nice full-body one like pressups, squats or lunges. Find a reputable programme for getting better at them – there are loads. Improve.

‘I am so full of endorphins right now.’

There are many reasons to give your workout a name: some good, some terrible. Crossfitters, for example, give their signature workouts girls’ names so that they can make endless stupid jokes about ‘meeting’, ‘doing’ or ‘hating’ Fran, Linda, Elizabeth, Grace and so on. Gym Jones seem to relish giving their workouts names that complement the mental anguish that’s a hallmark of their training style – Tailpipe, for instance, is so called because it’s supposed to mimic the sensation of sucking on a car exhaust. Rob Shaul of Mountain Athlete seems to name workouts after whatever he’s thought of that morning (Fool Me Once? What?), and Go Primal Fitness simply pick a phrase out of their Big Thesaurus Of Things That Are Supposed To Sound Cool (Kill Or Be Killed, Smash). C- for effort.

Personally, I’m a fan of having a selection of ‘named’ workouts in the bag for two reasons:

a) It motivates me by giving me a benchmark to beat, whether that’s improved time, reps, weight or whatever. To be fair, this is the actual point of Fran and Elizabeth too, but the names still do nothing for me, because…

b) It helps me mentally gear up to train when I otherwise can’t be bothered.

For that reason, I like my workout names to act as sort of mental triggers that immediately inspire a sense of heroic badassery in me, without any additional face-slapping, chalk-eating or other nonsensical pump-up rituals. That’s why my workouts tend to be named after memorable quotes from manly films. Consider:

I can’t feel my legs, Keyser
24 lunges, 24 squats, 12 jumping lunges, 12 jump squats. If that doesn’t ruin you, rest for a minute and do another two rounds. I’ve actually stolen this one from JC Santana, but he calls it Super Legs, and it doesn’t make my legs feel very super. Renamed because it’s guaranteed to leave you slumped on the floor in the style of Keaton from The Usual Suspects when he finally encounters faceless monster Keyser Soze.

See you at the party, Richter
Pick up a couple of dumb-bells that, ideally, total roughly your bodyweight (so I’m 40kg in each hand), then walk with them for a respectable distance (I like 800m) and time it. So called because it feels like it might pull your arms off.

There is no tomorrow
A bunch of 400m sprints – I’d suggest four or five – with 90 seconds of rest in between them. Go for a total time. Named, as if you don’t know, after the most motivational quote of all time, delivered by Carl Weathers in Rocky III. Better if you can wear a vest and gallop through the California surf, but around the block is fine.

There you go: just typing those out makes me want to go and do pull-ups, but I doubt it’s the same for you. So pick your own, and go train.

HOMEWORK: Choose a quote from your favourite badass film, assign it a workout, post it in the comments, and then go do it. Record your score so you can come back to it. And no girls’ names.