Help me work out a weekly or fortnightly schedule.

[WebCookiesAreIntrusive]

Apologies if this is a cheeky question and I should go cough up for a personal trainer to do this for me, but here goes.

I used to do a lot of exercise and sport and let it go. I took up exercise in Lockdown 2 and then in 3 I upped my game. So, in the past 5 months, I have lost 9kg (about 20 lbs) and I have 7 1/2 pounds to go to my goal weight. I have been eating healthy and working out.

Right now my week consists of about 4-5 x 1 hourly session of exercise. It is a mixture of runs (2 or 3), body pump, body combat, and Core. I'll give some of the other classes a go e.g. HIIT but it is mainly the pump/ running and combat. This week I got my runs up to 10K, but they are slow e.g. 1 hour and 5 mins. Usually, I do a 5K run.

My aim is to lose weight/ improve my cardio fitness and tone up after my weight loss and decade of no weights.

I am a member of Les Mills on demand, which is flippin' ace, but don't enjoy Body Attack, Sha'bam, HIIT or Step but love the others.

Rather than winging what I am going to do that day I feel like I need a schedule to get the most out of my workouts and to achieve my goals, which are to get cardio fit and lose the remaining 7.5 lbs, and tone up. I have found that the running has made a big difference to my weight loss which plateaued but then fell off when I upped the runs.

How can I schedule my week to optimise my efforts?

Personally I would say what's missing is some strength sessions. If you want to tone up then you need to be lifting. If running is your thing then 2 runs, 1 class, 1 upper body session, 1 lower body session.

9kg is amazing, well done! I love LMOD and have been doing it for a few years (and did Les Mills classes before then).

It sounds like you're doing a good combo of things already and it must be working as it seems to be heading in the right direction. If you feel you're plateauing though there's a couple of thing you could do (I'm not a PT though!).

Body pump you don't want to do more than 2/3 times a week. If you're making progress are you still at the point of exhaustion at the end of each track? If not you could look to increase your weights in one or two tracks? Depending on how much time you have I often skip the pump core track and cooldown and tag the Core class to the end of it.

Running - could you swap one of your current runs for a shorter distance but with sprint intervals so it's harder work and really gets your heart rate up. It doesn't have to be too regimented, just sprint to the next lamppost etc then go at a much slower pace for a bit. I do body combat a couple of times a week (it's my absolute favourite!) but running like that gets my heart rate up a lot more.

Have you also seen that Les Mills have loads of free plans online too.

www.lesmills.com/ondemand/workout-plans/

It's all interchangeable so if they include Body Attack you could swap it for any other cardio - so running, body combat etc. I don't get on with that either! There's loads of different plans depending on how much time you have.

Good luck :-)