3 bodyweight training routines to help you get back in shape

Let’s say we have a busy professional looking to get back in shape. This means that you were once fit, but fell off the wagon, perhaps due to a busy new lifestyle. This may mean that our hypothetical learner is intermediate.

With 2 hours to train, our trainee will exercise 3 days a week and rest 2 minutes between each set. Each session will last 40 minutes with a rep range of 8 to 12 reps per set.

Here are three examples of intermediate bodyweight workouts:

Training n. 1:

• Squat jump
• Hindu push-ups
• Lift your chin

Workout # 2

• Heel stomps
• Narrow-grip push-ups
• Mixed grip chinups

Workout # 3

• One leg deadlift
• T-bends
• Inverted rows

I tried to use movements that a learner with at least a few years of experience could perform 8-12 reps with some difficulty. Remember, the idea when choosing movements is that you will feel pain while working on your rep range. It’s not a good idea to choose bodyweight squats in the 8-12 rep range, unless you’re a total beginner.

Find out sets

• To find out how many sets to do in each workout, you would need to perform all the exercises for a set, time them, and find the average time it takes to complete that set. Instead of doing all the exercises, you can choose three exercises to save time.
• Let’s say it takes 30 seconds to perform a series of squat jumps, 35 seconds to perform a series of Hindu push-ups, and 48 seconds to perform a series of pull-ups. The average is 37.66 or 38.
• With the 2 minute rest period, each set will take us 158 seconds. We divide that into a 40 minute session, or 2400 seconds, and we get 15.19. This means that we have space to perform 15 sets in 40 minutes, or 5 sets per exercise.

Going from here

You will most likely find that some workouts can be completed in less than 40 minutes and others take more than 40 minutes. I am simply giving you the tools to create a preliminary design. What will give you the most success is carefully monitoring your results and gradually adjusting your workouts for greater efficiency.