I’m full of it, or that’s what people who know me tell me. 
I’ll take that as a compliment because (I’m assuming) the context is in regards to training (gosh I hope so anyway!).
I love to train and always manage to come up with a fun idea for my workouts. I guess that’s why so many ask me what the heck I’m doing in the gym. I also have a laundry list of people that ask me to be their ‘accountability partner’. I think they see me training day in and day out and they want to do the same.
My secret to staying fresh and getting results with training is to never do the same thing for training twice. I’ll always change up one variable in my workouts. Oh, I may circle around to the same workout, but I’ll never do the same workout twice ‘in a row’.
In this post I’ll give you some samples of what sort of workouts I’ve been doing and then I’ll link to other posts with some of my favorites.
Cool? Glad we agree.
Generally, my training schedule looks something like this:
- Push
- Complex style workout
- Pull
- Legs
- Full body (like Challenge Jump Rope, Challenge Fat Loss, Challenge Burpee style)
- Repeat
I often get the question as to whether I take a ‘day off’ from training. I’ll be straight up with you: my head needs training as much as my body does (I save a lot of money on therapy by moving! 😉 ). I don’t have a ‘scheduled’ day off weekly,
I love to train, my workouts are NEVER over 40 minutes, in fact most times they’re 25 minutes or less daily.
This doesn’t mean that you sho
uldn’t take a day off. I’ve been doing this long enough and I know my body enough to know when it’s time to rest and I will. Also, some days my workouts aren’t as intense as others. Over time, I’ve gotten pretty intuitive with my training and you will too as you get training experience.
So, here was a super fun workout for my ‘push’ day yesterday. I’m going to be creating a program for the Challenge series called ‘Body Part Blitz’ and you can be sure that this one will show up in that.
Everything in this workout is done with a dumb bell and single arm. Start on the WEAK side and finish with the strong. Do 5 reps of each move, make quick transitions to the next:
- incline chest press
- lateral raise
- push press
- push up (For one arm push ups, I had to drop to my knees, do a full push up if you can’t do this with good form.)
- tricep over head press
- repeat 5 exercises on the other arm
- one minute of jump rope
Repeat this for 5 sets
I like to do dumb bell work, particularly one arm work as it addresses muscle imbalances and I can really focus on form.
Here’s another one of my favorite ‘go to’ push workouts. I’ll circle round to this as a bench mark of strength every month or so.
You should probably know that I’ve been doing lots of complexes and wondering how my strength would hold out (since in a complex workout you’ll lighten the load considerably for the entire workout). The good news is that for the workout in the original post my starting weight was 135 lbs on the bench and when doing it the other day, I was up to 145 lbs for my first set. This is a good weight for me at about 117 lbs body weight.
I’ve written a great deal about the complex workouts that I’ve been doing, you can read more about complexes and how I create them here. I was really pleased with my last complex workout that I did. Remember the goal of the complex workout is to increase load, not speed. This workout still only took about 20 minutes and I was able to work up to 75 lbs on the bar for 5 reps of each:
- RDL (Romanian deadlift)
- high pull
- front squat
- push press
- overhead squat
- bent over row
- ab roll out
- rest one minute
Repeat 5 times
I love training back. (Well, it’s only rivaled by training chest, legs and full body stuff ;)) This was a great ‘RIST & FUW’ workout. RIST means ‘reps in specific time’ and FUW means ‘finish up with’. I put 1 minute/15 seconds on my Gymboss timer. This is what I did:
- 5 pull ups (you can do assisted or alternatives, check this video for great alternatives to the pull up)
- FUW renegade rows
I did 10 sets, I rested the 15 seconds between sets.
Here are some of my favorite pulling workouts to help you increase your pull up strength.
So many hate to train their legs. Not me. I usually go park myself at a squat rack and never leave on a leg day. I can always find a fun workout to blast my legs there. Lately I’ve been experimenting with pistol squats so I incorporated those into this workout:
- 8 bodyweight pistol squat to reverse lunge weak side
- 8 bodyweight pistol squat to reverse lunge strong side
- 8 barbell RDL (Romanian dead lift)
- 8 barbell 1.5 squats (go to full depth, come up half way, return to full depth, stand completely up)
- 1 minute wall sit
Repeat 5 sets
*Apologies that I didn’t video or take a picture of the pistol squat to reverse lunge, (Sev was being stubborn and wouldn’t handle the camera that day), but here’s what you’ll do:
- stand on the weak leg and extend the strong leg out in front
- squat down as deeply as you can without touching the extended leg to the floor
- set up a bench beside you to help with the wobbles if needed
- once standing and without touching your strong leg down, go directly into a reverse lunge by bringing it to the back
- do a reverse lunge then bring the strong leg back to the front to extend it again for another pistol squat
- as you fatigue, you may need to touch the strong leg down in the middle between the pistol and the lunge
Here’s a bodyweight leg workout for you.
As for a full body workout, if you know anything about my Challenge Fat Loss workouts and follow along videos, you’ll know that they’re hot sweaty and metabolism boosting short workouts. Take a look at this video for a sample:
5 rounds of 40 seconds work with a 8 second transition
-Burpee pull ups (OR do a set of burpees followed by a set of band assisted pull ups or other pull up alternative)
-Renegade rows (with push up optional)
-Front DB 1.5 squat
-Alternate single leg RDL recovery
This is just a sample of a few days of training for me. As you can probably see, I AM full of it when it comes to training ideas that I love to share with you.
You’ll find ALL the Challenge Workouts series on THIS PAGE if you want more workouts like these.
I didn’t even get much into jump rope, burpee or pull up workouts in this post. Man, I could go on forever 😉
I hope you got some ideas for YOUR workout today.