The Bodyweight 8X8 plan in action, trial day 1

Keeping in line with the plan to pursue bodyweight exercises to achieve my fitness goals, I’d devised a training method called the Bodyweight 8X8 Program.

Yesterday was the first day of actual deployment. The program has been designed to take into account the status of the person’s expertise with exercise and physical conditioning. I personally have been off my mark for a while so I started with LEVEL 1.

The exercises were performed as a circuit and were all major compound movements. There were two circuits comprising of three movements in each. The exercises are chosen to target the major moving muscle groups and were performed in a 5X5 fashion until the entire circuit was completed 5 times.

The exercises selected were:

·         Inverted Row

·         Incline Push-Ups

·         Supported Squats

·         Straight Bridge

·         Bent Knee Hip Curls

·         Pike Press

The First circuit consisted of the first three exercises and the next circuit consisted of the last three. However, in the last circuit, I only did 3X5. This is a good thing to note considering all the major muscles and tissues involved in these exercises were actually worked to great degree in the first circuit itself.

The Workout therefore looked like this:

Inverted Row	5X5
Incline Push-Ups	5X5
Supported Squats	5X5
Straight Bridge	3X5
Flat Bent Knee Leg raises	3X5
Straight Bridge	3X5

The entire routine took close to 30 minutes to get done and this included the warm-up time. This was followed by some Inverted Rows for Reps (read Hypertrophy work), close grip inverted rows and finally some bodyweight exercises for biceps. The entire workout took close to 48 minutes with the warm-up. Not bad considering that it consisted to strength, hypertrophy and cardio all rolled into the same session.