Five years ago, the journey began of blogging on the subject of being a Christian man with a healthy lifestyle. If you think about it, being a Christian should actually mean being as healthy as circumstantially possible, as it is part of our faith to take care of all that we receive from the Almighty. This most definitely includes our bodies.

The first ever article was about a daily routine a man can do to sustain a base level of physical fitness. This while also maintaining normal life responsibilities and functions such as; having a job and doing it to the best of your abilities, studying, being a parent or the caretaker for a family member. On top of this, everyone tries to maintain some semblance of a social life and hobbies.

With all this going on in your life as a guy, is it feasible to stay at a healthy weight, be fit and look good (come on now, we want this too)? And if this is possible, how can the average guy achieve this?

By the grace of God, it is possible, but to achieve the goal of a fit, good-looking body, which is therefor at a healthy weight, we need to do some serious planning. To start, reaching a healthy weight is more dependent on your diet than anything else. For that reason, we will not be diving into that part of the subject here.

What we will focus on is the goal of functional fitness.

The previous routine, beginning with squats and good mornings, used calisthenic movements in a way that is more akin to weight training. Now, that is not to say that using calisthenic movements with a specific amount of sets and reps does not yield results. It does. The question is, will an average guy with a cramped schedule be able to train like this indefinitely.

The answer for some is yes, but for most is probably no.

Athletes, models, influencers, people whose life is set up a bit different from the majority of us out here, can train and life like this. And they do reach impressive results (even when they do it without the help of enhancing supplementation). The thing is that the rest of us need to find a way to stay fit that works for us.

The bare minimum

The first routine consisted of body weight squats, good mornings, pull-ups, dips and eventually shoulder presses and chin-ups. You can check out the article containing the whole progression over here. In all fairness, that is a good selection to start with, even if push-ups are clearly an exercise that should have made the list as well.

An updated version of the list of minimum exercises looks more like the following:

• Body weight squats
• Glute bridges (we won’t tell anyone)
• Pull-ups
• Pike press up
• Push-ups
• Dips

Progression

For simplicity’s sake, we are assuming that you haven’t been training for some time or haven’t trained at all before this. In that case it is important for you to ease into it slowly. It is tempting to jump into training head first and start repping out exercises full throttle, but you probably will do that only once.

After that, the fatigue build up in your nervous system will be a great hurdle to overcome. To make this sustainable, it is wise to start slow but still at a pace that is somewhat challenging for you, yet manageable to recover from. The easiest way to do this, is the one hard set principle.

The one hard set principle (‘principle’ is a HCM addition) is, like the name suggest, based on the premise that one hard set is enough to sufficiently challenge your body to adapt if done consistently over time.

Do more sets help you change your body faster? Yes, most definitely. If you can recover from the workload. You also need to take into account that you can’t keep increasing the number of sets. The returns of each added set is diminishing and your recovery becomes compromised.

So the strategy here is to do one set of each exercise to failure and move on to the next exercise. If you need to rest between exercises (especially in the beginning) don’t hesitate to do so.

Programming

So you are a busy guy. During the week you have work, maybe you’re also studying to advance in your career. At home, there may already be Mrs. the wife and some bouncing bundles of mini you. During the weekend (on Saturday) you have stuff you would like to do around the house and some community work you’re doing. On Sunday, you try to take it easy, but going to church is important to you. How do you program training through all of this?

If you are part of the majority of guys in the regular workforce, you only have that window between diner and going to bed. The idea is to plan a workout of about 30 minutes in that window.

First thing to do, is to split your workouts in strength and cardio workouts. Three days of the week you do a strength based workout and the other three you do a more cardio focused workout. One day in the week, you just take it easy.

The second thing to do, is to split up the selection of exercises in two groups. As you have a limited amount of time to train, you don’t want to do all of them during every workout. The trick is to make sure both groups provide a full body workout. You could end up with two groups with a selection like this:

Group 1		Group 2
– Squats		– Glute bridges
– Push-ups		– Pull-ups
– Dips		– Pike press

The third thing to do, is to figure out what you’re going to do on the cardio days. Depending on your current physical shape and the facilities you have access to, you could swim laps, walk, ruck (walking with a load), jump rope, run, practice your boxing or grappling skills.

If you are overweight at the moment, swimming is an excellent option, as it doesn’t put stress on your weight baring joints. Jump rope and running should be avoided for that same reason, until your weight and the weight baring capacity of your joints are again in line with each other. In this article, this is explained more in-depth.

Now that you have your whole program figured out, you could end up with something looking like this:

The third thing to do, is to figure out what you’re going to do on the cardio days. Depending on your current physical shape and the facilities you have access to, you could swim laps, walk, ruck (walking with a load), jump rope, run, practice your boxing or grappling skills.

If you are overweight at the moment, swimming is an excellent option, as it doesn’t put stress on your weight baring joints. Jump rope and running should be avoided for that same reason, until your weight and the weight baring capacity of your joints are again in line with each other. In this article, this is explained more in-depth.

Now that you have your whole program figured out, you could end up with something looking like this:

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1	Group 1	Boxing	Group 2	Boxing	Group 1	Boxing	Rest
Week 2	Group 2	Boxing	Group 1	Boxing	Group 2	Boxing	Rest

How to start

When you first start out, it is important to realize this is a lifelong marathon. Consistency is the name of the game. So when you start training, it is a good idea to do so with easy sets. Yes, earlier in the article the benefits of sets going to failure or close to are mentioned, but that is after you have greased the groove.

In the beginning, you just want to get into the habit of working out. Not being able to move because you destroyed yourself in the first workout is counterproductive. So take the first two months of working out, just to get used to working out. Just sticking with it, will strengthen your motivation.

The fact that these two months to ease into working out, are part of your plan ensures, that you don’t get discouraged. This is a lifelong plan, and you know exactly (God willing) how you want to  execute on it.

Another thing you should be wary about when starting, is the selection of the proper variation of the exercises in your routine. A good example of this is the pull-up. Let’s be honest. Many men who have been training for years can’t pull themselves up if their life depended on it. It would be unfair to start your workout journey, with trying to do strict form pull-ups, if last time you tried them was when you were in kindergarten.

In the next article, we will be going over alternatives for the exercises mentioned above, which might be more accessible for you at your current fitness level. The key in all of this is not where you start, but that you keep at it consistently.

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