One of the biggest problems people have is that they don’t know what to do. They want to workout, but they aren’t sure what to do. This is why I created that 35-minute, follow along, Yoga for Posture video that focused on flow and flexibility.
As for strength training, if someone doesn’t have access to a gym, or wants to workout at home, or workout at a park, a great choice is the “Recommended Routine” from /r/bodyweightfitness. This is a free, full-body strength-training routine that can be done 3x a week which has helped countless people build muscle, lose fat and gain new physical abilities. The text of it may be a little dense or overwhelming for people to read which turns off a lot of people and people have been clamoring for a comprehensive video that explains the whole thing. Well, explain I did! Without further ado, here it is:
Synopsis of the Recommended Routine:
- Warm Up
- Warm up with these dynamic stretches.
- Finish the warm up with these 5 bodyline drills
- Skill Work
- Support Hold
- Wall Handstand
- Skin the Cat (if you have rings)
- Strength Work (Choose a progression you can do 5 reps of, but not more than 8 reps, and do 3 sets)
- First Pair
- Pull up progression (skip these if you can’t do 3×8 horizontal rows)
- Scapular Pulls
- Arching Active Hang
- Pullup Negatives
- Pullups
- Dip progression (skip these if you can’t do 3×8 diamond pushups)
- Negative Dips
- Parallel Bar Dips
- Ring Dips
- Pull up progression (skip these if you can’t do 3×8 horizontal rows)
- Second Pair
- L-sit progression
- Foot Supported
- One Foot Supported
- Tucked L-sit
- Full L-sit
- Squat
- Bodyweight Squat
- Step-Ups
- L-sit progression
- Third Pair
- First Pair
If you have any questions, watch my embedded video above for the COMPLETE explanation!
- Links to Resources mentioned in the video:
- The follow-along videos for the warm-up, that I mention in the video are found in this YouTube playlist.
- The full official text of the Recommended Routine is here. Use that as the reference manual in case you need help beyond what I mention in the video. If you have any questions, check the FAQ for the answer. If it’s not there, find the Daily Discussion thread on /r/bodyweightfitness for that day and ask the question in there.
Well, I posted it on /r/bodyweightfitness and it took off. Then I posted it on /r/fitness at the same time so I won’t have to deal with answering reddit comments on different days. By this time it had already received 130 upvotes on r/bwf within the first hour, which I thought was shockingly high.
(Btw, On January 1 and 2 there were elevated traffic numbers of 400-500 users on /r/bwf at any one time, definitely from New-Year Resolutioners. But I noticed a massive drop off in traffic by the time it was the evening of January 2. By the morning of January 3, I posted the thread and there were only 190-200 users on at that time, which was kind of low, actually for that hour. But regardless, it took off like the dickens.)
And then I looked at other top threads in /r/bwf and noticed that the #1 most upvoted thing was an advertisement for the RR by /u/tykato. And in that thread he had edited it and put a link at the end of that video saying he also x-posted to /r/videos. Undoubtedly, this would help that post take off moreso than if that was not there.
And for /r/videos, a massive subreddit of 13 million people (with 13,000 people on at any one time), making it one of the most competitive out there. So I did the same thing as /u/tykato. I edited my posts and x-posted the link to r/videos. And it worked. It takes thousands of upvotes just to get anywhere near the top. But, it got a lot of traction. I mean a lot of traction. Probably because of all the buzz that was happening from the other subs and traffic funneling in. (And because the content was probably good. :P)
So here is the way it went for /r/videos. It jumped to spot #15 within the first half hour and then in the next half hour after that it went to 12, then all of a sudden #5. In the second hour it hit #3 and finally peaked at the #2 position… for 5 hours. :O By the mid afternoon, it moved from 2nd place to 3rd place with 7,500 upvotes and a 91% upvote rate which is great.
- It eventually became the #1 most upvoted thing on /r/bodyweightfitness with 11,000 upvotes, the 2nd most thing (tykatos video, remember?) with 3,300 upvotes.
- It became the #24th most upvoted thing on /r/fitness.
- And it stayed on the /r/videos front page for over 24 hours.
The risk of putting your content on subreddits that don’t have familiar audiences is that people will always criticize you or troll you. Some people are straight up assholes. In exchange for putting myself out there on a huge sub like r/videos and getting massive traffic, I open myself up to having to read a lot of shitty comments that make assumptions or are full of misconceptions. Some people are straight up assholes, but most are OK. I remember on /r/fitness, people would always give me shit with the DYEL (do you even lift?) comments. Now, it’s not so bad. There’s usually a lot of humor and people help defend my position or try to convey an answer for me. But, alas, with so much attention and an overload of comments coming it, it quickly becomes overwhelming.
I ended up being overwhelmed eventually by all the attention on reddit and the internet in general, between facebook comments, youtube comments, reddit comments and entire comment-chains and spin-offs from 3 different threads, and personal messages and e-mails I started receiving. I had been answering comments until noon so I decided to step away and celebrate by going to the beach. I ended up having an amazing day. I’ll post some videos of how well it went really soon but here was the sunset anyway:
After I had a blast at the beach, it was getting chilly out and I went to have ramen (without the noodles, cause I’m stil on the keto-diet-lifestyle, with extra poached eggs and chashu and garlic oil instead of noodles). After dinner, I went home and got my mind ready to deal with the comments.
It wasn’t so bad though. They were mostly congratulatory remarks and I glossed over anything that was asinine (cause ain’t nobody got time for dat).
I woke up the next morning to find this particularly unique message:
The Reddit admins awarded me a “ComboLinker” trophy 
It means I made the most combined-karma for all of reddit in 24 hours. 
And now this morning r/bodyweightfitness was a trending sub. (My bad! Haha)
I also woke up to find that a fellow redditor-friend who is a huge fan of my dog Medax, made this great little logo.
