Even just doing sand sprints and pushups are great. Just do them well. Photo: Neat-nutrition.com
When it comes to working out, it seems like there are hundreds of magazines, blogs, and podcasts telling us that we need to be doing more. More volume, more intensity, more complexity. Soon enough you can find yourself teetering on the edge of a Bosu ball attempting to do a single leg squat while balancing a heavy dumbbell overhead in the other hand, before moving onto some crazy resistance band exercise that literally ties you in knots.
While there’s no harm in shaking things up and challenging yourself with variety, the fact remains that you can derive a lot of benefits from a simple routine that involves you continuing to improve your proficiency with basic yet effective exercises over time. If you trade complexity for simplicity, you will:
Get More Done in Less Time
There’s a reason that kettlebell pioneer Pavel Tsatsouline’s book Simple and Sinister continues to be a bestseller – and it’s not that he’s a former Russian special forces badass. Rather, it’s that his basic plan is so easy to follow. You can take the kettlebell swing plus get-up medicine he prescribes daily without burning yourself out or eating up hours at a time. Even including a warmup, cooldown and some mobility work, you can be in and out of the gym or your garage in 30 minutes or less. This means the “I don’t have time to work out” excuse is no longer valid.
Chase Mastery (Not Gimmickry)
There’s always going to be some workout fad involving a new exercise, piece of equipment or type of exercise class. Some of them might be here to stay, but most will get left behind once people figure out that they’re just gimmicks. Instead of jumping on the latest fitness bandwagon, stick with the exercises that are tried and true, like the kettlebell ones just mentioned along with squats, deadlifts, pullups and pushups. And forego the latest, and supposedly greatest, toys in favor of those tools that’ve stood the test of time like medicine balls, barbells and dumbbells. Doing so will allow you to keep getting more proficient and will give your daily routine the same element of mastery as a martial art. Need to mix things up? You can always alter the weight, speed, reps, and time between sets, exercise order and so on.
Boost Your Skill Level
Many of us get caught in the trap of thinking that we always need to get stronger and faster and build more endurance. But like work, relationships or anything else in life, progress isn’t linear and can’t be reduced to just a few factors. Likewise, the benefits we get from exercise don’t always manifest themselves in bigger muscles or, if we’re trying to lose weight, a smaller waist and more lean tissue. Every time we do an exercise it’s an opportunity to develop the skill of performing it, to better identify and correct movement faults and to improve our self-understanding. Keeping your workout simple is a way to start focusing on the intangibles more intently.
Achieve Your Goals
Novelty is all well and good and it’s good to throw ourselves a few curveballs from time to time so we stay interested and engaged. But if we’re always doing new exercises we’re making it difficult to chart our efforts over time and see how we’re progressing (and if we’re not). This doesn’t necessarily mean deadlifting or doing any other exercise every single day. But if you do an exercise twice a week, you’ll be able to more accurately assess your increasing proficiency and get the reward and satisfaction of setting new PRs. This can be particularly gratifying if you choose to hone in on an exercise that you’ve always found challenging and have largely avoided doing. Make sure you get your technique down, and then set yourself a realistic but challenging goal, whether that’s a new one-rep max, a time-related aim for a certain distance or recapturing full range of motion if you’re coming back from an injury. Then put the work in to achieve or exceed it.
