My Experience With Physical Fitness (So Far)

I started regularly practicing calisthenics around this time two years ago. I was inspired by my workplace running a competition where teams totalled minutes spent on exercise each week. Thankfully I’ve kept calisthenics as part of my daily life in the weeks and months since, and wanted to look back on my experience with exercise so far and what I have learned.

Prologue

I did not have a lot of experience with exercise in my youth or early adulthood. I played youth soccer and baseball but conditioning was a kind of accessory to those programs. My heaviest lifts were 25 pound farmer carries of bags of garden supply, and I did run cross country in middle and high school. But from university onward it would be fair to say I was largely sedentary. I would still hike, skate, and snowshoe from time to time but most of my hours were spent standing in a classroom or sitting at a desk. Medication for bipolar disorder made me gain a lot of weight in my 20s, which I lost and then gained again drinking beer during COVID.

I developed an understanding of some basic exercise concepts from working with, in my estimation, one of the greatest physical education teachers of all time; shoutout Todd Nichols. He integrated reading and writing into his classes by having students study texts on progressive overload and write from the perspective of giving advice to others on programming. I learned a lot about exercise science by supporting students in his classes.

Building a Foundation

I would describe the first stage of my training as building fundamental strength. The bodyweight fitness subreddit’s recommended routine was my main resource.

Why bodyweight exercise? Gym memberships and home gym equipment are expensive. I was travelling somewhat frequently and didn’t want my consistency disrupted by a lack of access to equipment. My primary goal has always been “functional strength”, which aligns with mastering compound movements. And I have a vague interest in calisthenics skills like the handstand, planche, and front lever.

What I hoped to achieve was a respectable performance of basic bodyweight movements; pull-ups, dips, push-ups, rows, and squats and deadlifts.

Starting the recommended routine in 2024 was actually my second or third attempt after 2020 at the RR and developing an exercise habit. Previous attempts lasted at most one month, but something about feeling responsible to contribute minutes to my team was highly motivating. The competition ran for three months, and that period of time had a noticeable impact on my physique.

Starting out I was able to do most basic movements except the pull-up and dip. I started with regressions and could perform those movements by September, such that by the end of 2024 I had achieved my initial goal and acquired a humble baseline level of strength.

Now what?

Finding the Right Fit

Over the next year I floundered in my fitness pursuits. For one, I had a surgery which required me to take a few weeks off. And while the recommended routine was perfect for establishing a foundation of basic strength, I felt that long term it would not be viable.

For one, it was taking me more than the estimated 40-60 minutes. Worse, running a M-W-F schedule my experience was that the single rest day was not adequate, especially during weeks where I attempted a new progression for a movement. I found supporting my wife and daughter difficult while dedicating 90 minutes or more every other day to a workout and being wiped out the days in between.

I’m not David Goggins. I want to be strong for my family, not at their expense.

Partway through 2025 I found kboges on YouTube who provides advice for people in a similar situation; older, focused on bodyweight exercise, looking to train in a sustainable way. I switched to doing daily full-body workouts of six movements, two sets with about one rep in reserve.

This approach helped me maintain my level of strength but I did not see much progress, and yet from day to day I was still not fully recovering. I no longer felt pressured to do workouts as one block of time, and that helped. I would quickly do my two sets of a movement when I had an opportunity. But there were many days where I missed out on one or more of the exercises because I forgot or ran out of time.

Where things really came to a head for me was seeing shai’s video on tuck planche and realizing I had absolute no shoulder strength. I briefly trained pseudo-planche push-up while doing the recommended routine, and then, being confused about my goals, abandoned the pursuit to try to train high rep standard push-ups. The ensuing months of ignoring almost all shoulder dominant work left me in a place where I could not even complete a single pike push-up.

That led me to a video on progressions to handstand push-up, where even the pike floats looked so cool that I found myself dying to fix my over-heard press situation.

Current State

To address the issues I had with time, intensity, and balance, I changed from daily full-body exercise to a push, pull, legs split. The split has allowed me to cut the number of exercises I do each day in half, while still adding movements I had been missing like over-head press and bicep curls.

In terms of volume and intensity, I do 5 sets of roughly half my max reps for each movement with a strict one minute rest, hoping to add at least one rep to the set between sessions. The one minute rest keeps those sets from being too easy, and it also makes each exercise a predicable 10 minute time investment. Doing at most three exercises per day means the total time commitment is no more than half an hour.

Although the volume and intensity is greater than when I was doing two sets, rotating exercises in a split allows a full 48 hours of recovery between sessions. So far that has been just enough recovery time, and I’m seeing visible progress again.

Lessons Learned

Focus on consistency. It takes a lot more than a week or two of high effort to become fit. People only started asking me, “Have you been working out?”, after months of consistent efffort.

Do not worry about what’s optimal. Fitness content plays on anxiety about doing diet and exercise in the most effective way possible, but you’re probably not a model or bodybuilder. Being consistent is more important.

Respect your time. People on the other end of the pendulum reject all exercise science, pointing to “prisoner workouts” that ignore range of motion or the notion of junk volume. Fine if you’re incarcerated or unemployed, but the rest of us should understand how to balance frequency and intensity to get more out of our time.

Set goals. A last word on effective training is that, as is so often the case, the best course of action depends on what your goals are. What is effective for strength, hypertrophy, and endurance are very different. I struggled for a time not knowing what my goal was anymore, and centering on continued strength training helped me make better decisions and get unstuck.