At-Home Beginner Workout Routine Day 6 - Only Bodyweight Exercises
1. Warm-up
Follow along with this 10-minute Yoga-ish Warm-up
2. Movement Lesson
Beginners almost always ignore it because it takes so much additional effort and attention to learn, but learning how to brace and stabilize your core properly is probably the #1 thing that matters most. The core is tied into everything, technique, performance, aesthetics, joint, and tissues health. The people who figure it out and put the time and attention into it are the ones who get the best results. When I get athletes in from other gym, even seemingly advanced athletes, 99 times out of 100, they have been stalled out on their progress for years because they are not properly engaging their core and not paying hardly any attention to it. I know if feels like something that doesn’t matter right now and I know you may be assuming that what you are doing is fine, but learning to brace your core correctly will supercharge your progress! Put that effort into your core and it will pay you back more than anything else! Here’s how it relates to running…
3. Workout Prep
2 Rounds Increasing Your Intensity As You Go
200m Run
5 Burpees
4. Workout
TESTING
3 Rounds for Time
400m Run
21-15-9 Burpees
F.I.T. = For Intensity and Technique - Training: Go as hard as you can with very good form to develop fitness and technique.
For Time - Testing: Using the techniques you know, go as hard as you can.
Among others, I use both of these types of workouts, FIT and For Time and the differences are subtle, but very important. 80% of our workouts should be training where we are actively working on improving many different layers: technique, mobility/stability/movement patterns, all aspects of fitness. For workouts to make our fitness better and to improve technique, we must put the priority on going hard, but only as hard as we can with very good technique. Every now and then, about once a week or 20% of the time, we want to test your fitness and technique. We want to see where your technique and fitness is and we want you to go as hard as you can using the techniques you’ve developed. This mixture allows us to consistently develop technique and get fitter and fitter while every now and then peaking our intensity in a workout to 1) make us more usable and 2) to develop our peak intensity. The more usable part is the one I care most about. If you can perform exercises with perfect technique slowly, that does not mean you are capable of performing them under stress, when you’re tired, or when you need to move faster or harder. Real life demands to be capable in unknowable situations. We need to challenge our technique with controlled stress, see what breaks down, and use that information to guide us in our training moving forward. For example, if your burpee is great in your workouts, but when I ask you to do a workout as fast as you can and when you get tired, your elbows flair out to the sides, then we know we have an issue and we know what we are going to have to work on. If there is an issue in the push-up section of the burpees, the issue will be in every movement pattern linked to the push-up…which is all of them. We need to train and then test to help guide our training.
In this workout, you will do 3 rounds of running 400m and then doing burpees. In round 1 you will do 21 burpees after your run, in round 2 you will do 15 burpees after your run, and in round 3 you will finish with 9 burpees after your run. This is a testing workout, so your goal is to get the fastest time you can using the techniques you’ve learned.
These TESTING workouts can be great because we can re-test them. If you record your score, 1 month, 3 months, 3 years from now, we can recreate this workout exactly to test if you are better or worse at it. The key though is to hold yourself to movement standards, so we know that he workout is the same. If you do burpees differently every time, we can’t compare anything. The standard for running is simple, did you run 400m, Yes/No? For burpees, you should make sure your chest and thighs go all the way to the ground at the bottom of the burpee and you should clap your hands behind your ears while you feet are off the ground and your body is completely vertical (so you’re not bent over forward). If you hold yourself to this standard on ever rep, then we can recreate this test in the future and have data points to compare.
5. Cool-down
5.1
3-Minutes of Slow Cardio
5.2
Pigeon Pose
2-Minutes on Each Side
Scaled-Down Pigeon Pose with your Foot on a Couch, Box, or Chair
5.3
Cossack Squats
10 Alternating Sides Staying As Low As Possible Through the Transition
