Start where you are
When I’m focused on running, or I’m traveling, or I just need to move without thinking too hard, this is the bodyweight routine I come back to.
It’s simple, joint-friendly, and adaptable. You don’t need a gym. You don’t need to count reps. You just need to start — and trust your body to tell you when it’s had enough.
The Beginner Routine
Cycle through the following exercises in any order:
- Squats
- Reverse Lunges
- Up and Down Planks (I'm not sure whether this exercise is harder physically or mentally but for me, it trains both)
- Lateral Lunges
- Side Planks
- Jumping Jacks (I always end my routines with jumping jacks and take a break. It's created a Pavlovian response in my cat where she comes for pets when I do jumping jacks. Either that or she knows she has trained me to pet her after I do jumping jacks. If you have a cat, you'll understand not really being sure which one of you is having the Pavlov problem, or Pavlovlems as the hep and young call them nowadays. Where was I? Oh yeah, droning on and on and on.)
Do one round, take a break, and go again if you’re up for it. That break? It might be 120 seconds. It might be 10 minutes. It might be tomorrow or even three days from now. Give your body time to heal and trust yourself to keep it a routine. Because you can and you're going to.
This routine intentionally doesn’t load the back - not because it’s not important, but because back training with bodyweight is a minefield for joint health. If you’re heavier or just getting started, even hanging can feel like a shoulder surgery waiting to happen. Dumbbells are a better investment for that down the line because it's easier to correct an imbalance than a shoulder problem (says the guy who built Fitness Tracking while rehabbing a shoulder injury). If you'd like to save some money, March and September are great times to buy lightly used weights.
It wasn’t easy
When I started, just getting out the door felt like a war crime. In fact, I remember telling Twitter that I was sure one of the Geneva Conventions covered this kind of stuff. I needed something to make it doable. So I did what any rational person would do.
I pinned Ziploc baggies full of pure air to my running clothes.
They were fricking hilarious. They were dumb. They were mine. And they got me moving because a grown assed man filling up baggies full of air and sealing them to gulp down pure air during exertion was almost too insane not to act upon.
(And strangely, the whole ziploc baggie full of air trick is not my creation nor is it totally wacky. There's some precedent for it among marathon and ultramarathon athletes. The idea is that it's so outrageous it distracts you from the Dickensian sweat shop you signed up for. And even stranger, I don't mention a lot of brands because I find it distasteful, but Ziploc bags have a texture that make them much easier to grip when you're sweaty - it's like some product manager knows that we just want to breathe our pure air and hide the evidence as quickly as possible. Where was I? Oh yeah, droning on and on.)
A word about weight
I weighed 200 pounds more and had just gotten out of a cardiac ward when I started this routine. So this is me speaking from a place of one of those really crappy kinds of experiences.
If you're carrying extra weight, let me really blunt - you’re already doing resistance training when you move around. Existing in a larger body is more physically demanding than most fit people can imagine - you're doing work that very few fit people could even afford to inflict upon their bodies and a miniscule percentage could actually handle daily.
So if this routine feels hard? Good. That means it's working. That means you're working. However, you will have to start thinking through things like protein more like a football player than dieters are traditionally encouraged to. You will have to listen carefully to your body to hear the signs that hard is becoming dangerous. And you have to take breaks, not only because of all that blah blah blah that 'rest days are when you build muscle' but because you're puttinng serious strain on your nervous system. Don't take some weirdo on the internet's advice either, talk to a doctor.
Most importantly, I get how much this sucks. I get that traditionally fit people don't understand and I get that most fitness material isn't written for you. When I started this routine, an old lady with a walker had just smoked me on a walk home from coffee (I'm not kidding). And I could do zero up and downs (still not kidding).
As you go through your journey, you will have bad days, bad weeks and bad months. They will discourage you and you will feel like you gave back all your hard work. They only feel bad and discourage you because you know within yourself what a good day is. So silence the noise, trust yourself a lot and when you're going through hell, keep going because you don't wanna get stuck there.
And also, it was really easy for me because I had had a very recent reasonable death scare to push me into action. So if it doesn't work out for you, it just means that you don't have a heart problem to motivate you so you're still ahead. :)
What’s next?
This routine carried me through dozens of weeks and hundreds of miles. Eventually, I graduated to a more intense version that adds in burpees, push-ups, and - for purely self congratulatory reasons, park chin-ups at the end of a really long walk around Regina.
But that’s a story for another day.
For now - start somewhere. Move. Laugh. Breathe. Bring a baggie of air if it helps. And I hope you get to feel the thrill of self congratulatory chin-ups.
— GH