All of us are on our own fitness exercise journey. That looks different for all of us based upon our interests, growing up, the families we are in, whether or not we did sports or did something like drama instead. As we go through life, weaving our way into it, it really shapes what we do. Then we get into adulthood, right and, and suddenly, you know, the sports or the exercise activities, or the urge to become, you know, super fit to attract somebody to you, those things can go out the window as you move into being a married adult.
What's been interesting to me is on my journey, when I first started into fitness and exercise, I learned from my brother. He was really my role model. It was a great entry, but not everything was always scientifically based. But I had a very strong drive to be very athletically fit and to perform well in competition. And so I put in a lot of time on my body, a lot of time exercising, and getting myself to the place where I wanted to be.
That's fantastic until you keep that same mentality when you transition into different phases of life. See, I still had that mentality, even into college, even past College, of where, you know, "I need to be a top level athlete." And I was feeling frustrated, because the reality is the life path I chose wasn't in line with that. Right? See, I went on to develop a career. I spent a massive amount of time in school. I wasn't really on any teams or in any competitions at that point in my life. But I still had this mindset that I needed to be training, like the higher level athletes. And so I got into this cycle of really pushing my body for short periods of time, and then having the demands of life swamp and overwhelm me, because I've been neglecting them for so long. And so I'd gotten the cycle of being very consistent for about three to four weeks stints, and then having a couple of weeks, sometimes up to a month off, and then trying to be consistent.
You can imagine how hard it is to make very sustainable progress in that way. That's not how the body works. Especially as an adult with responsibilities as a husband responsibilities. In my career as a physical therapist, as a homeowner, there's not as much time available for training, there's not as much time available for putting into my body. I quite frankly, may not even want to put that amount of time into my fitness. And so I really had to tweak and change what I thought about fitness. I had to go from the side of, "Yeah, let's go hard, you know, we're gonna try to lift as much as we can!", and maybe get hurt. We're going to try to put as much cardio into our body, and maybe be too exhausted for some of the other important things in life. It was just taxing to me. I'd get into this rhythm of "do hard for a while" and then fall completely off the wagon and feel very discouraged and down about myself.
You might be able to relate to that,. Exercise can be something kind of hard. So what I've done is in this project on the year of wellness, for my exercise, I've gone with a very much a very minimalist approach. I needed to have my equipment be stuff that I could have at home to use, I needed it to be something simple.
And I wanted to follow the American College of Sports Medicine guidelines for adults, mostly for health, which is basically five days of cardio of about 30 minutes, or if it's more intense, 20 minutes. Then also having two days a week to work on strengthening all the major muscles of the body. The cardio side is pretty, pretty straightforward. You go out for a run, get on the spin bike, going for a walk actually technically counts under that. Go for a half hour walk. And so it's very easy to just do. It doesn't take a lot of concentration or thought for me. Now on the side of exercising all the major muscles of your body. Now this is a bit more complex. There's different movements that need to be done, there's different resistances
"How do you set this up at home, if you're trying to be very minimal on equipment are very cost effective on equipment?" I think many of us run into the issue of "programs need to look complicated", or "they need to look really challenging and hard and have all these crazy variations." But the reality is people who have good well developed musculature, really just rely upon staple movements. I would argue that there's about seven or eight staple movements of resistance training to develop musculature. Four of those, upper body, three lower body and a total body exercise. The cool thing about this is you can scale this up anywhere. And so to kind of break it down into pieces, if we look at the upper body, first, we have an upper body push movement, where you're pressing something overhead. We also have an upper body vertical pull movement, where we pull something down to us. We have an upper body horizontal push where we're pushing something away from us. And you could guess it! A pull movement where we're pulling something to us. Now that will cover the majority of muscles for the upper body. Majority. There might be a couple, you know, supplemental exercises to do to make sure your rotator cuff stays healthy, neck stays healthy. But if you're just purely looking at muscle development, and good muscular health and strength, you only need those four exercises for the upper body.
Now for the lower body, you're looking at basically, three different movements. And so we call these movements in my world as a physical therapist, a hinging movement, a triple extension movement and a bridge movement. So what do those actually look like? Well, a hinging movement will be something like a deadlift, or a Romanian deadlift with a small bend in the knees, where you're working on the functional task of bending over, picking something up without squatting down. So that will be one of the three primary movements.
The other one per triple extension movements, will be some variation of a squat type movement. "Triple extension" basically means that you start from a bent leg position, like this, and you extend through the ankles, through the knee, through the hip, and you get triple extension through the leg. Those two alone will get the majority of the muscles fairly well in the lower body.
Now, I also include the bridge movement, which you know, lay on your back, squeeze your butt, lift your hips up, rise up onto your shoulders, while you keep your feet on the ground. And the reason I include it is because the research shows that this is basically the number one exercise movement, I should say, not necessarily an exercise, but the number one movement for engaging the glutes. As we know, glutes are the biggest freaking muscle in the entire body. And they're also very important for low back, mid back, knee, neck even, health. And so that's why I include that.
So that'll be our three lower body movements. So triple extension patterns work mostly on the quads, and the frontline of the body. Hinging patterns tend to work more through the hamstrings and backline of the body. Then we have glutes being trained to the bridge movement.
A last movement, which is considered a whole body movement is a "carry movement." Either a farmers carry, or a suitcase carry, where you you pick something up and you walk with it. I like this because it works the legs, right? But it also works the entire core and the arms everything together, super functional task for anything that you might be doing.
So when it comes to a good fitness program, in terms of making the program maybe as small as possible in number of exercises. You can set all this up with minimal equipment, using, you know, a curtain, not a curtain, sorry, but a closet rod, and then also some cinder blocks, and then a place for push ups. You can do all of this pretty easily just using a combination of your own bodyweight, cinder blocks and a closet rod. What I'm getting at here is that, you know, that's a pretty simple, there's only eight exercises, there's ways to progress and regress each of those eight exercises or eight primary movements, but it's not 22 movements.
I've done some exercise programs where I literally probably have done 40 different exercises in the span of about an hour. But the majority of them are just combinations of those movements, doing one side versus the other, maybe doing some core specific work. The reason why like a core or absspecific workout really isn't included into this movement series is because when you push something overhead, when you push something, pull something, squat something your core has to engage, especially if you're loading it adequately with enough weight.
That is the foundation of how to put together a good home resistance program. Like I said American College of Sports Medicine would recommend twice a week. Now I've done this workout program and my program takes about 20 to 30 minutes including setup and takedown So it shouldn't be something super exhausting or super taxing on your time. It should be something that hits everything and helps you maintain your physical health the way you want it to.
Thanks for tuning in. I hope that this this tip helps and you'll see some videos of me doing some of these exercises and workouts in the future.
And till then, stay wealthy and healthy.
Catch you later.