Body weight workout challenge

I like fitness… I talk about it probably more than I should for someone my weight (at the minute). I like to improve a lot and something I have noticed since I got back into running is that my body weight workouts have been none existent. So to help me to get back into going to the gym again and getting some workouts down post run or just in the house, I decided to give myself a little challenge for the summer…

What is in the challenge?

After gaining the weight I noticed that my stamina and strength had gone quite a bit and although I am running again and plan to get back into weights training. I do love a bodyweight workout. Just doing sit-ups and squats and lunges etc. really gets the heart going and yes some people see it as the warm up to the main workout, but if you increase the numbers and amount of exercises you are doing, why not make it THE workout?

Though in respect to that, I will be doing some other workouts too during this time, so it won’t be my primary workout for the day.

So what exercises will I be doing? I plan to split my days into upper body and lower body days with core exercises in both (got to have that strong core right?) Have a look below for an example of what a day will look like.

 

I should have the time to do these, but I don’t want to be silly and constantly do the same exercises every day and bore myself and one thing I want to make sure I am is motivated. If my legs are aching from yesterday’s leg workout then I don’t know how mentally able I would be to keep going and as the challenge is 90 (or more) days, I wouldn’t want to risk ending early because of it. By alternating the days I feel I can increase the progress I make… Hopefully I am right!

Why 90 days?

I always see challenges that are 30 days long etc. and I never feel that it is enough time to get involved in a challenge or new project. From tomorrow until the end of summer is 80 days, that to me is a lot better as then you can really see the big improvements you would have made in the near 3-month challenge.

If I am honest I would have made this 90 days, but I wanted to finish it on the last week or two of the summer, but if I am feeling good I may keep it going until the 100^th day just because those round numbers always look better than a random one.

The schedule

I plan to do complete 6 days a week to allow for one day of complete rest and this will be a midweek day as then I can pencil it in for all of my workouts and just let the body rest. For an example of what I plan to do for the rest of the month have a look below.

(Red is upper body and purple is lower!)

The main aim is to do a lot, but not enough to get injured. If I get injured then I have

been silly and I can’t really expect to improve if I keep being silly.

Reps for days

I know I will start slow with the challenge and probably aim low for the number of reps that I do. But the aim is to at least get to 80 nonstop of every exercise by the challenges end. Whether that is 80 reps or 80 seconds. 80 is the magic number for me on this one. I fully expect to be able to do more than 80 squats in one go by the end of the challenge so in the updates you may see that number go. But for the sake of knowing what I aim to do, I made a little table of the first week’s aims.

I hope I enjoy this, and not see it as a grind. I have confidence that this will be the case, but you never know with challenges such as this. I do have a feeling that I will want to keep the core portion of the workouts separate and have it for another day, but I will give an update next Sunday as to how this has gone and if I feel that it may be necessary as then I can add more  upper and lower body workouts in and allow an extra days rest for them during the challenge. Until next time!

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