The Workout For When You Just Don’t Care
The best workout to do when you just don’t care.
What I’m speaking about is when you want to contribute to your health goal of exercising, but you cannot for the life of you care what you actually do. You’re not just in it for a hot bod, but especially the chemical benefits. You would like to have them bestowed upon you without any thought or the stress of the perceived exertion. You want it quick and dirty.
I’m not talking about needing a break. That’s not it. There’s a difference between needing a week off of exercise and needing to keep it moving to that body ody-ody-ody. Sometimes your body and/or mind needs a week off that consists of what some people call cross training. It can be a week of hiking, dancing, swimming, recreational sports, etc… The point is you are still active but aren’t at the gym vigorously exercising. You have a flexible, interest dependent week. It can be a nice little regroup for folks who feel burnt out or extremely sore and fatigued, and their body requires it. Cross training is not what this is about.
When anti motivated feelings hit me I couldn't care about what I did at the gym, I was a gym zombie with no care of what I put myself through. Accomplishing fitness goals can be a long and quite boring process. I knew I wanted to keep my habit of going to the gym as well and I think I was at a point where I just needed the after feelings of exercising. I didn’t care what got me there. I still wanted to lose weight and achieve my goals, I just didn’t want to think. I am not a person who likes group exercise. I just really hate it for some reason. I actually know the reason, I just can’t say as it’s not nice.
I was lucky to have a friend in the trenches who was feeling the same way. I think this is a great thing folks can do to help them get over any humps in wanting to actually go to the gym. It can be a great motivator knowing your friend is meeting you and you can catch up and exercise at the same time.
My friend Jeni and I used to do this workout when we lost all motivation, but wanted to exercise as it was a form of survival for both of us at the time. We both consistently exercised, but found ourselves on dark times of not giving one fu#$ about what we did for exercise. It’s kind of hard to describe, it’s like fatigue of sorts, and we were both having it.
To combat this feeling we made an agreement to do this specific workout. We would do the majority of them together and the days we couldn’t meet up we still had to do it, and share with each other that we had done it. We decided how many days we would commit to it, we even signed it after the plan was written out.
Anyway here is the workout to get you through those dark times should they fall upon you..
It’s essentially 100 reps of a push (pushup), pull (bent row), and squats (it can be any lower body movement). For the life of me, I cannot recall if we made this up, or we found it somewhere. I hate to not give credit if we in fact did not create this masterpiece.
What’s great about this is you can break it down however you like. You can cater it to what you’re mentally up for that day. Sometimes I would do reps of 20, or reps of 5. I was crazy! The best way to do this workout is to go push, lower body, pull. It doesn’t matter what is first, just split the upper body between the push and pull. Also you can do this at home quite easily. If you want to know my favorite at home workout essentials just ask.
Here is what it would look like:
Five rounds
20 pushups
20 squats
20 seated rows
This is my favorite as for me it seemed to go by the quickest.
You can also do 10 rounds of 10 movements of the same thing.
I would also do this:
20 rounds - (yes we used to use a paper and pen to keep track - also with this many rounds we would switch movements up about half way through. Maybe switch the squats to a single leg movement like a Bulgarian split squats, the push to an incline press, and the pull to a bent row.)
5 pull ups
5 squats
5 bench press
(obviously these are heavy reps)
Again you can do whatever movements you want they just need to be a push, pull, and a lower body. Obviously this is meant to use compound movements. You aren’t going to do any isolation movements as we don’t care. Just do it and get out of there.