A ten-minute workout will not get you in elite shape, but it keeps you on track on the days when a real session is impossible, and staying on track is everything. Travel, a wrestling tournament, a dance recital, a fishing day that runs long: miss once and it is easy to miss three or four days in a row, and that is a torpedo to your progress. In this Physical Friday I give you six workouts I keep in the back of my mind for exactly those days.
Watch now: press play on the video above and follow along.
My favorite is 100 burpees for time. You need zero equipment and about six feet of space, and it works almost everything: you flop down to your chest, push up, get to your feet, jump, and clap overhead. Time it, write the time down, and you have a fitness benchmark you can retest anywhere in the world. If 100 is too many right now, do 50 or 40 for time, or set a ten-minute clock and do as many as you can.
EMOM stands for every minute on the minute. You pick an exercise and a rep count, do the reps at the top of each minute, and rest whatever is left of the minute. For a ten-minute pushup EMOM, choose a number you can finish in about thirty seconds. My sixty-minute number is 20, so for ten minutes I bump it to 30, which gets me 300 pushups in ten minutes, in a hotel room, at the dock, or in a parking lot.
Tabata comes from a Japanese researcher who found the format that lets athletes produce maximum work: twenty seconds of all-out effort, ten seconds of rest, repeated eight times, which takes exactly four minutes. You can do Tabata burpees, pushups, sit ups, or squats. Stack two four-minute Tabatas back to back, say burpees then squats, and you have an eight-minute workout that is far tougher than it sounds if you genuinely go hard.
Cindy is a classic CrossFit benchmark: five pull ups, ten pushups, and fifteen squats equal one round, and you do as many rounds as possible. The official version is twenty minutes, but you can abbreviate it to ten minutes when that is all you have. It hits nearly your whole body with three fundamental movements, and all you need is a pull up bar or even a sturdy stair railing for body rows.
Use the stairwell. I do ten burpees at the bottom, run to the top, do ten pushups at the top, and repeat for as many rounds as possible in ten minutes. Whether you are in a Vegas tower or a roadside motel, there is almost always a stairwell, and it turns into a full-body conditioning piece instantly. Pair that with burpees, pushup EMOMs, and Tabata work and you never need a gym on the road.
Because of how the brain works. You miss one day for a legitimate reason, then the same thing happens the next day, and the day after that. By the fourth day nothing is even stopping you, you just miss it, because missing has become the pattern. Three, four, five days off in a row torpedoes momentum. A ten-minute workout exists to keep the pattern alive: something is better than nothing, way better.
These are the six quick workouts I keep written down for days when a full session is impossible. Warm up first, and scale every one of them to your current fitness.
I walk through each of these in the episode. Press play above.
These workouts are not designed to build elite fitness. They are designed so that on the day everything goes sideways, you still did something, and the streak survives. You can get in better shape than if you skipped them entirely, but the real value is momentum. I explain why protecting the streak matters more than any single session in the episode, so press play above.
Flopping down to the ground and getting back up is outstanding exercise, and there is research connecting your ability to get down and up off the floor with how long you live. The burpee trains exactly that, a hundred times in a row, with a built-in score. I get into why it is my favorite no-equipment benchmark in the episode, so press play above.
Follow these six exactly for a few weeks and something better happens: you internalize the formats, for time, EMOM, Tabata, AMRAP, and you start inventing your own ten-minute workouts to fit any room, schedule, or piece of equipment. Like the deck of cards I always travel with, the formats are the real tool. I show you how to mix and match them in the episode, so press play above.
You do not need an hour, a gym, or a plan. You need ten minutes and one of these six workouts, and the day stops being a zero.
Get something in today, stay on the path, and use it or lose it. Press play above for the full breakdown of all six.
burpees · EMOM (every minute on the minute) · Tabata protocol · Izumi Tabata · Cindy (CrossFit benchmark) · AMRAP · deck of cards workout · pull ups · hotel stairwell workout · 10,000 Pushup Challenge
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. Physical Friday is my weekly fitness series for fishing guides, anglers, hunters, and outdoorsmen, where I share the training, nutrition, and mindset that keep me ready to fish, hunt, and live hard for the rest of my life.
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