Courtney Black Workout - Free Home Workout Guide Download
Courtney Black is one of the UK’s most renowned fitness influencers. She’s built an incredibly large and loyal audience of followers across social media platforms, moving from personal training into fitness plans and the launch of an app in 2020 which has now amassed some 65,000 paying subscribers, which truly is incredible!
In this article, we’re going to be reviewing one of Courtney Black’s workout guides and giving it to you as a download. The version we’re giving you is one of the older guides, we can’t speak for the app and the content she shares there but will be giving our review of this downloadable guide so you can see what our thoughts are on it.
Who is Courtney Black
To quote the blurb from one of Courtney’s books;
“Courtney Black is the UK’s number one home workout coach. A fitness influencer and personal trainer, she has built an impressive and loyal following on Instagram of over 853k followers. Having battled with eating disorders in her teens, she understands what it is to have an unhealthy relationship with food and exercise. She is passionate about helping others to develop a positive fitness mindset and to embrace a healthy lifestyle.”
You can find more of Courtney here on her website and her instagram.
The Courtney Black Home Workout Guide
Courtney Black’s Home Workout Guide is a 90 page ebook which covers the following;
- Nutrition
- Example meal plans
- Dieting styles
- Recipes
- Training
- Example workouts
- Exercise index (showing you how to perform exercises)
This guide is aimed as an introduction to at home training, as such, it’s geared towards beginners with limited equipment and the caveat of that is there is only so much one can do from home. I will state that it is definitely going to be beneficial just to someone that could benefit from getting into exercise, or those struggling for motivation to just follow a plan, but definitely not for more advanced trainees.
Before we go into breaking down the contents further, if you’re looking for the guide, just click the image on the right to download or the button below.
Courtney Black Guide Nutrition
The nutrition elements of this guide are split into a few different sections but essentially just cover an overview of diet types and the rough idea of what one should do to achieve their goal.
She covers some information on different diet types without really weighing up the pros and cons of each, and discusses nutrient timing which in reality is a very minute element. The nutrition is really set up for those looking to lose weight and mainly discusses ways to enter a calorie deficit without informing how to calculate required calories through BMR and activity levels.
There’s a heap of recipes, probably the largest section of the book, these don’t break down macros or calories either, which whilst nice to give an idea, without knowing how it’ll impact your goals kind of makes it arbitrary.
Courtney Black Guide Training
The workout plans given are a 5 day per week training split, mainly focussed around HIIT workouts and all catered towards fitness goals in weight loss.
She gives theory behind rep ranges, which unfortunately what is stated is simply not true in the guide. An example is;
“Great for leaning out” discussing utilising higher rep ranges. Which isn’t true, the only way to lean out, is to be in a calorie deficit. We could go on to each individual element and break down the claims, but please just take with a pinch of salt and do your own research. We have a lot of great content on this site alone about rep ranges, training methodologies and nutrition which can point you in the right direction.
The Workouts
Courtney’s workouts in the guide vary depending on progress through the plan. There’s a mixture of Upper, Lower, “Booty” and core workouts.
The volume of exercises, sets and reps is HIGH. The focus of these workouts is effectively to increase heart rate and get a sweat on, and the guide is definitely geared towards the instagram-esque style of trainee as opposed to more advanced lifters.
Essentially, they all end up being circuit, HIIT and cardio like workouts. Which as stated, are okay if you’re just looking to get people active, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend this kind of programme to a client.
Exercise Glossary
Arguably the best part of this guide is the glossary, what a large amount of people new to training struggle with is getting used to training and performing exercises. This breaks down just that in a visual and easy to understand way.
(You can tell this was an early piece of work from her as the shots taken are definitely old and her content has moved on a lot since then).
But either way, if you’re just looking to learn how to do the exercises in the guide, this serves purpose and is a decent resource.
Review of the Courtney Black Home Workout Guide
As we’ve said throughout this article, this guide can be used by those that are looking to just start doing some exercise. There needs to be a focus on rest days, more information on structuring diets, and for those just starting out the volume of training is just a lot.
Courtney has moved on and her app is highly rated, I wouldn’t judge it or her based on this specific guide from years ago, but the guide itself isn’t great. It’s generic, (as it is meant to be) but if you’re looking for a way into training, or just to get active, hiring a coach would be a much better starting place.
The gym can be intimidating, and if you’d like to train at home, that can be done too, but more of a focus on progressive overload, nutrition around goals and helping individuals to reach those goals would be beneficial.
I, for one, just hope we’ve moved on from “booty” days now too.
