A workout is intentional, vigorous, pre-planned exercise generally taking place in a controlled environment.
There are a lot of different activities that can be performed as a workout, but here is a short list of some of the more popular and effective options for improving performance, aesthetics and maintaining health.
Exercise Options
- Resistance Training
- Cardio Conditioning
- Ground-Based or Natural Movement
- Mobility
- Flexibility
👉 For clarification, resistance training can be moving your body against gravity or moving/lifting external weight.
This course is focused on bodyweight fitness, so let’s look at a really simple way to organize a complete workout.
Daily Workout Template:
If you had 60 minutes for a workout, it could look something like this:
Step 1: Warm-Up (10 minutes)
Step 2: Bodyweight Resistance Training (30 minutes)
Step 3: Cardio or Workout Finisher/Mobility/Flexibility (15-20 minutes)
With this format, you can accomplish A LOT OF WORK in a reasonable amount of time.
Finding 60 minutes for a workout is not always going to be possible.
Life gets in the way. Studying gets in the way. Work gets in the way. There are a lot of things throughout each day that suck up our time.
My advice to you is this: protect your workout time and make it sacred.
Mark it a priority, a non-negotiable.
However many days you choose to partake in a dedicated workout, fight for that time.
Fitness is a lot like investing. The earlier you start, the better things tend to be later in life. This is not implying you’re guaranteed to live longer or anything like that (though you might 🤔), but might be closer related with adopting the good habits associated with exercise and being regimented.
Imperfect Workout Time
This is almost an oxymoron for me, because if you get into workout mode even though you’re extremely tight on time, I applaud you for doing it anyways.
And you should.
Fact: Some days just aren’t going to allow for the ideal workout.
Again, life gets in the way.
But, if you get a free 20 minutes, you could:
- Warm up (5 minutes)
- Workout (15 minutes)
The workout could include: push ups, squat, lunges, a pulling exercise and a core exercise. Cycle through each exercise until you’re out of time.
Boom.
You just checked ✔️ an important movement box for the day.
Now, just think. If you can make adjustments to work with a 20 minute window of free time, 30+ minutes is a cakewalk. 40 minutes, a non-issue. 50+ minutes? Breeze.
Be a solutionist with exercise.
Refocus your eyes on what you do have, not what you don’t have. Looking at it this way, opportunities arise, regardless of how imperfect it might be.
Imperfect Training Spaces and Equipment
Bodyweight training is amazing for tiny, cramped spaces.
I took the opportunity to shoot a workout video from the comfort of my bathroom floor just to make my point.
It’s amazing how much progress you can make in a living room or bedroom.
Chairs, floors, coffee tables, kitchen counters, couches and a backpack loaded up with textbooks suddenly become effective workout equipment.
Most of my workout videos were filmed with you guys in mind.
NEAT
NEAT stands for: Non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
NEAT is the energy expended for anything you do that is not eating, sleeping or exercise.
Again, just to be clear, a workout is NOT part of NEAT.
It’s ESSENTIAL to have plenty of NEAT in your life.
Walking is an amazing way to ramp up your NEAT throughout the day, week, month and year.
Here’s an amazing article on THE POWER OF WALKING.
Lastly, here’s an interesting article on the calorie burn related to walking.
Activity
No workout today.
In the next module we will begin the physical activity section of this course.
- Today’s activity is more of a CHALLENGE for the remainder of this course and beyond 👇👇👇
- Accumulate 10,000 steps per day
Home Bodyweight Fitness 