A small apartment workout uses your bodyweight, your stairs, and at most a single dumbbell or heavy household object to deliver a complete training session with no gym at all. We are all quarantined, some of us in tiny spaces, but we all still need to train, and for me exercise is better for my head than it is for my body. In this Physical Friday I share three workouts, a burpee and sit up ladder from UFC fighter Gregor Gillespie, a stair workout, and Ross Enamait's Magic 50. This is an audio episode, so press play and follow along.
Listen now: press play in the player above and follow along.
It is a descending ladder of burpees with sit ups in between every set. You do 20 burpees, then 10 sit ups, 19 burpees, 10 sit ups, 18 burpees, 10 sit ups, all the way down to one burpee and a final 10 sit ups. The totals come to 210 burpees and 200 sit ups. Gregor Gillespie, the NCAA national champion wrestler and UFC fighter, posted it on his Instagram. My time was 19:29, and his was 19:10.
Do 10 push ups at the bottom of the stairs, run or walk up, do 10 push ups at the top, and come back down. Repeat that for about 10 rounds and you finish with 100 push ups plus all the stair climbing. If your staircase is short, turn each round into a shuttle, up and down twice before the push ups. You can make it harder with clap push ups. Any apartment stairwell or house staircase works.
The Magic 50 comes from boxing trainer Ross Enamait. With one dumbbell, you do five one-arm snatches per arm, five one-arm swings per arm, and 10 burpees, and you repeat that five rounds as fast as you can. I use a 45 or 50 pound dumbbell, but any weight works. Keep a stopwatch on it and try to beat your time. If your weight is light, run the Magic 100 instead, 10 snatches per arm, 10 swings per arm, 10 burpees, for 10 rounds.
Almost anything heavy with a grip. A two gallon jug of laundry detergent, a loaded cooler, or a waterproof box filled with sand all work for swings and snatches. The movement matters more than the implement. That said, used dumbbells show up at garage sales all the time and they are worth grabbing, because one dumbbell unlocks workouts like the Magic 50 anywhere you go, including the sad little hotel gym with three broken treadmills.
Ross Enamait is a boxing trainer and, in my opinion, the king of home workouts. He wrote a book called Never Gymless, which at the time of this episode he was selling from his website for a dollar, and he is full of creative ways to train hard with almost nothing. The Magic 50 is his workout. He was scheduled to come on the podcast as a future guest when I recorded this episode.
For me, exercise is better for my head than it is for my body. A hard workout clears my mind, settles uncertainty, and gives the day a win no matter what else is going on. During a lockdown, when routines are gone and stress is high, a daily workout you can do in your living room is one of the most reliable mental health tools available. That is the real reason there is no excuse worth accepting.
Physical Friday during the lockdown has been fun for me, because I get to dig through workouts I have collected over decades and pull out the ones that work absolutely anywhere. Some people are stuck in small apartments, some in houses, but we all need to move. In the episode I explain why these three made the cut. Press play in the player above.
Here are the three workouts I walk through in this Physical Friday. I cover the details and stories in the episode.
I unpack each of these in the episode. Press play in the player above.
Burpees scare people off, but stick with me, because the descending ladder format makes 210 of them genuinely doable. Every set gets one rep shorter, so the workout psychologically gets easier as your body gets more tired. Gregor Gillespie is an extraordinary athlete, and finishing nineteen seconds behind him made my week. Hear the full story in the episode.
The Magic 50 is the workout I carry with me everywhere. When I walk into a hotel gym with three broken treadmills and nothing heavier than a 30 pound dumbbell, I run the Magic 100 with that 30 and I am done fast, fully worked. I break down exactly how I adjust the reps to the weight in the episode, so press play in the player above.
Three workouts, one optional dumbbell, and a stairwell, that is a complete training week in a small apartment. There is no excuse whatsoever.
When I recorded this I was also trying my first ever live home workout across my Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube pages, an experiment from the lockdown days. Stay positive and stay on the path. Press play in the player above to hear the full episode.
Gregor Gillespie · UFC · NCAA wrestling · Ross Enamait · Never Gymless · Magic 50 workout · burpee ladder · stair workouts · dumbbell snatches · dumbbell swings · quarantine training · home workouts · Physical Friday · Tom Rowland Podcast
Physical Friday is my weekly fitness series for fishing guides, anglers, hunters, and outdoorsmen — the training, nutrition, and mindset to stay in the game for life. Watch and listen to every Physical Friday episode from Tom Rowland.
I'm Tom Rowland, a professional fishing guide based in the Florida Keys, host of the Tom Rowland Podcast, and the longtime host of the Saltwater Experience television show. On the podcast's Physical Friday series I share the training, nutrition, and recovery practices that keep fishing guides, anglers, hunters, and outdoorsmen strong and healthy for life, in short, focused episodes you can put to use right away.
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