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Roatan, Honduras.....by dunebuggy

September 2007

Fall is upon us and its time to spice up our fitness routine. The more I read, learn, and experience for myself, the more I become convinced that the best fitness routine involves a combination of routines. Many people focus too much time on cardiovascular exercise to the demise of their strength training. Then there are those with the opposite problem, the gym rats who only lift weights and ignore calisthenics and cardio. The fact is that our body needs a combination of routines and exercises to stay fit.

Fitness in my mind is being healthy and able to do whatever I want in life. If I choose to go scuba diving in the Galapagos or mountain climbing in the Himalayas, I keep myself in good enough shape that with a small amount of specific preparation I could do it. Rarely do we as humans need to run more than a couple miles or lift more that 2x our body weight. So how do we create a routine that involves all aspects of fitness? I have recently built such a routine to use for myself and I am going to share it with you.

I have divided my week into six days for working out and one day of rest. Each day consists of a 20-45 minute workout but never longer than that. The idea is to increase the intensity of the workout not the time. This is further divided into two three day work outs. Day one is cardiovascular, day two is fitness training, and the third day is weight lifting. In addition, I try to change up what I do on each of these days.

Here is the workout that I did last week. On Monday I ran one mile followed by five 100 yard sprints and then finished by stretching. That was my cardio workout. On Tuesday I did what I call the ranch work out. It consisted of pushing a round hay bale holder up a hill which uses all muscle groups, followed by rope climbing x 2, standing jumps onto a tractor tire, hitting the heavy bag, followed by swimming in my lake. The entire workout took 30 minutes and I was exhausted. Wednesday was my lifting day which consisted of biceps and triceps for 40 minutes. Thursday was more cardio with biking followed by kayaking in my lake. Friday was total body doing the 300 work out from the movie 300 which can be found on the internet at Men Health site. I cut the workout from 50 reps per exercise to 30 reps and it took a total of 15:30 to do. Finally Saturday was lifting back and chest for a total of 40 minutes. Each day involved stretching and a warm up routine.

I like this variety because each day is something different and then I can also change up each routine so that 1) I don’t get bored and 2) my body doesn’t get tired of the same routine and plateau that happens so many times if you consistently do the same work out.

In addition, this allows you to work all muscle groups, stretch consistently and have short work outs. I like short intense work outs because I am busy and don’t have all day to spend at the gym.

This routine works well for me but it comes from many years of study and working out. I will keep you informed how it is going. In the mean time, you may want to try it or a variation of it and see if it works for you. Let me know.

Tim Reynolds, MD