Your Training Schedule

You’ll find all the exercises in this articles organized by Movement Categories: Pulling, Squatting, In-line Pushing, Perpendicular Pushing, and Bending. Within these categories, exercises progress gradually from easiest to hardest. Difficulty isn’t adjusted by adding a weight (as on a machine or with free weights) but rather by changing the intensity of movements through leverage, pauses, and single- or double-limb engagement.

HOOYA!

The Body by You program takes the guesswork out of training. You’ll know exactly what exercises to start with, how they’re executed, and when to move on to harder exercises. As I was taught in the military, “You need a system and a plan. That’s when you’re dangerous!” You’ll find yourself quickly conquering previously unreachable exercises and goals. The days of self-consciously moving between random machines with uncertainty are over.

LEVERAGE

Let’s take the Push-up. By elevating your hands on a surface, such as a countertop, a Push-up becomes relatively easy. By placing your hands on incrementally lower surfaces, the exercise becomes gradually more difficult, until the user ends up with her hands on the ground and her feet elevated.

PAUSES

An exercise becomes harder when you add short pauses at the most difficult portion of a movement. Pausing for two seconds at the bottom of a Squat makes it more difficult.

TWO-LIMB TO SINGLE-LIMB

Movements can be made harder by switching from a two-limb movement to a single-limb movement. A Squat can be made harder by switching to an assisted One-legged Squat.

On this site, you’ll find all the exercises, and their descriptions, organized by Movement Categories. Each exercise is numbered accordingly, and those are the numbers you will be plugging into your workout schedule. But before getting into all the exercises themselves, right now I want to introduce you to that schedule and the workout cycles.

The Five Components of Your Schedule

There are five simple components of your training: days, the Movement Categories, sets and reps, the exercises themselves, and intervals. At first glance, the workout charts may seem a little complex, but they’re actually easy to understand. Let me break it down:

1. TRAINING DAYS

You will always train three days a week, with one day of rest between workouts. How you decide to split up your training days is completely up to you. I like to train on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

When you are looking at a chart of your training schedule, the far-left column displays which day you are on.

2. MOVEMENT CATEGORIES

Remember that there are five Movement Categories in this workouts: Pulling, Squatting, In-line Pushing, Perpendicular Pushing, and Bending. On your schedule, the column to the right of the training day will tell you which Movement Categories to use and in what order.

3. SETS AND REPS

The column to the right of the Movement Categories will tell you how many sets and repetitions to do.

One complete movement of an exercise is a repetition or “rep.” A “set” is a series of repetitions done back-to-back.

The number of sets is displayed first, followed by a multiplication sign, and then the number of reps to perform for each set: 2 × 12 = two sets of twelve repetitions. That means you will do 12 reps, rest, and then finish with the second set of 12 reps.

4. EXERCISES

Here’s where you might need to pay a little more attention. The schedule will not tell you which specific exercises to use. Instead, under the “Exercise” column, you will input the numbers of the exercises appropriate for you from each Movement Category. The first two workouts of the program will be evaluations and will reveal to you which exercises are appropriate.

EXAMPLE OF WHAT YOU MIGHT WRITE IN:

5. INTERVALS

 The far-right column tells you the interval duration for each Movement Category. An interval is the amount of time allotted for each set.

So, in the schedule below, you will start exercising as soon as the time for the interval begins, attempt to do the prescribed number of repetitions, and then rest until the time for that interval has elapsed, at which point you will begin the next set. On a 2-minute interval, if the first Pulling set takes you one minute to complete, then you have another minute to rest before the second set begins. Assuming the second set also takes you one minute, you have another minute of rest before moving on to the next Movement Category and your third set.

EXAMPLE:

The second Movement Category will be Squatting, which has a 3-minute interval. You do one set, then rest for the remainder of the 3 minutes. For example, if that set takes you 45 seconds, you rest for 2 minutes and 15 seconds, then do your second and last set of Squatting.

 Then you move on to In-line Pushing: 2 sets at 2-minute intervals.

 And last you’ll do Bending: 2 sets at 3-minute intervals.

 It’s really pretty simple. All you need to do is pay attention to when to start each set. If you use the timer on your cellphone, for example, you’ll begin Pulling at 0:00 and 2:00, Squatting at 4:00 and 7:00, Pushing at 10:00 and 12:00, and Bending at 14:00 and 17:00.

 Similarly, if you go by a watch or clock, choose a time to begin, say 12:10. Do your first set, rest, then start your second set at 12:12 … and finish with your last set of Bending at 12:27.

 It takes only about 18 minutes, and then you’re done for the day!

 Making Progress

 Anytime you are able to do all prescribed reps in any particular Movement Category (with good form!), you’re ready to upgrade to the next exercise. Just place an up arrow next to the current exercise number—the one you kicked butt on—so that you’ll know to upgrade when that Movement Category is done again.

 The sample training day below calls for 2 sets of 12 reps (2 × 12) in all Movement Categories.

 For Pulling, if you do both sets of 12 reps with good form using exercise #3, you will place an up arrow next to the 3 after completing the second set. This is your indicator to upgrade to exercise #4 the next time you do a Pulling movement.

 Then you’ll continue to use exercise #4 until you can do all prescribed reps with good form, at which point you will upgrade once again.