When life gets chaotic, I feel better when I can maintain some of my healthy habits. This means that I have a minimalist workout routine that I bust out when I don’t have the capacity for anything more.
For a variety of reasons that sound like excuses as I try to write them down, I haven’t been doing my normal workout routine. Instead of throwing in the towel and forgoing exercise altogether, I decided to keep exercising but at a much lower volume.
While exercising even a little bit every week has great health benefits, my main goal with this mini workout routine is twofold:
to maintain the habit of working out
to keep the gains that I’ve made in my fitness in the past year
That said, it’s also completely fine to take time off from working out. If you’re like me and worried about losing all your gains (I’m a bro at heart), taking two weeks off from the gym doesn’t seem to cause muscle loss. Check out this video by Jeff Nippard for a good summary of the science.
If you’re curious, here’s what I’ve been doing every week for the past three weeks:
Workout 1
· Bench press - 3 sets of 10 reps
· Goblet squats - 3 sets of 8 reps
Workout 2
· Eccentric pull ups - 3 sets of 3 reps
· Lateral raises - 3 sets of 10 reps
Workout 3
· 12 minutes of cardio (which is usually this fun low impact workout video)
As I write this, my brain is telling me that I “should” be doing more – more cardio, more weight training, getting more steps in a day. But something is 100% better than nothing when it comes to exercise.
Overall, I love having a minimalist workout routine to implement when times are tough/busy but I still want to stay active. We have minimum effective doses of medications, so why not determine our minimum effective doses of exercise?
Stay well friends,
Dr. Kuhnow
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