Feb. 27, 2023
0101 - Drop Your Excuses: Work Out from Home with Calisthenics Workout Splits
When challenged with limited resources, a determined protagonist sets out on a mission to conquer their workout goals by harnessing the power of the Four Holy Grail exercises, pushing through their physical limits to uncover a surprising result.
I learned about calisthenics and how the seemingly most straightforward moves can yield amazing results. I talk about the different workout splits available for calisthenics, such as PPL (push-pull legs), UL (upper-lower), and FB (full body). This episode explained that the four Holy Grail exercises of calisthenics are push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and squats, and gave advice on how to be creative and use items around the house such as a book or a gallon jug of water in place of weights. It further explained the different workout splits in detail, such as how PPL allows you to work for each muscle group twice a week, and how with UL and FB, you can get three times of hitting each
"Stick to your Four Holy Grail exercises of calisthenics: Push-ups, Pull-ups, Dips, and Squats."
In this episode, you will learn the following:
1. Discover the four "Holy Grail" exercises of calisthenics and how to do them from home with minimal equipment.
2. Learn about the three main workout splits - PPL, UL, and FB - and what exercises to do for each.
3. Explore the different types of cardio - LISS and HIT - and which one is best for your goals.
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Other episodes you'll enjoy:
The Power of Perspective: How James Heppner Uses Tension to Create Transformation:
https://www.motivategrindsucceed.com/the-power-of-perspective-how-james-heppner-uses-tension-to-create-transformation/
How to Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking with Brendan from MasterTalk:
https://www.motivategrindsucceed.com/how-to-overcome-your-fear-of-public-speaking-with-brendan-from-master-talk/
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Transcript
If you can't do chin ups, grab some resistance bands. If you can't even do those either, then what you're going to want to do is then maybe do some bicep curls with literally you can just grab a book. You can literally grab a book or do what other people do and just grab a water jug. Grab a gallon water jug and just curl that for weights. Like, seriously, I'm telling you, that's how creative you can be with these things.
00:00:23
Just curl that. Able to track it as easily? Probably not, but you're still going to be able to make some progress with that. Welcome, everybody, to the Motivate grind. Succeed, podcast.
00:00:33
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00:01:05
All the links to everything that I just mentioned are going to be down in this episode's description, so go ahead and check that out for all the information of what I just said. But meanwhile, guys, until we get to there, we're going to be talking about your excuses. And I know I've made a couple of episodes in the past about your excuses and how those excuses need to be dropped and excuses are tools of incompetent fools and all these other kind of great things, but this one's going to be specifically tuned for fitness. And a lot of people say, well, I don't have a gym close to me or I'm too scared to go to the gym, or whatever. You may say, guys, work out from home.
00:01:42
All you need is just a floor and a little bit of space. That's it. That's the end of the episode. I'm joking. We cannot get any episode there.
00:01:50
I couldn't do you all like that. But we're going to be talking mainly about the three different workout splits that you can do. There's a couple other ones that are out there as well, but I'm going to be sticking to the really popular main three that you're usually here floating around a lot of times, but all these are all different that you can in fact do from home. You just got to get a little bit creative and just have a little bit more of that knowledge. That lamborghini knowledge.
00:02:16
Old meme. I know, I'm sorry, old meme. But first thing you want to do is you want to pick a workout split. There are a couple of different workout splits that I'm going to be talking about specifically, and that's going to be the Ppl or push pull legs, the Ul, which is upper, lower, and FB, which is full body. Those are usually the main different types of workouts.
00:02:37
So, right, if you're working out from home, chances are you don't have dumbbells, you probably don't have barbells, you don't have resistance bands, you don't have any of that. So you're like, what do I do? Well, what you want to do is if you're working out from home, you're going to want to at least buy one piece of equipment. You're going to want to buy at least a pull up bar, walmart, Target, Amazon, whatever. Go online, just find an over the door pull up bar and go ahead and get one because you're going to need one of those.
00:03:02
Other than that, you're going to want to stick to your four Holy Grail exercises. Stick to your Four Holy Grail exercise. One of the four Holy Grail exercises of calisthenics. Rachel well, I'm glad you asked me because they are the push ups, the pull ups, the dips, the squats. Why?
00:03:21
Are these the Holy Grail exercises? Well, push ups, they work your chest, your shoulders, triceps, and, of course, indirectly as well, your core. What about pull ups? They also work a little bit of your shoulders. They work your triceps, primarily your lats, aka your back, and again, also, of course, your core.
00:03:39
What about dips? Those work depending on which on a slight bit of lean, they can work your chest as well. They also work your triceps, they also work your core because you need some stability. And then, of course, because again, we all love legs. So you got to hit the squats, which are key for your legs.
00:03:58
Now, are there other things you can do? Yes, but most things are some sort of subsidiary or derivative of what I just said a couple of episodes back. You probably remember things that I said, like when I first started off and went into my stage. Now, for example, I can still do Archer pushups, I can do one arm push ups, I can do clapping pushups. I can do all those kind of things, but they all branch off of the main push up.
00:04:21
When it comes to squats, I could do Sissy squats, I can do Hindu squats, I can do Bulgarian split squats. And all these things are probably going way over your head. But all the points that I'm saying is that there's a lot of different exercises out there that you can do for calisthenics that all try to emphasize a little bit more of something. But they all branch from the Holy Four Grail of exercises of push ups, pull ups, dips and squats. And so with that information right there, we're going to go through the three different workout splits that I mentioned before, and we're going to start off with Ppl or push pull legs.
00:04:58
This one is one that I did for a few years. And what you're going to do is you're going to essentially work each muscle group twice a week, as research shows that at least twice a week is what you need to stimulate the muscles to allow for muscle growth. Once a week is not enough. Anything more than three times, you're kind of not even giving your muscles enough time to recover. So between two to tops like three times a week, you want to hit that muscle group.
00:05:24
So push pull legs allows you to do that very, very well. Basically, day one, whatever day that is, let's just say it's a Monday, you're going to hit the pushing muscles. Then day two, you're going to hit the pulling muscles. Then day three, you're going to hit the legs, then your rest. Then the next day push.
00:05:39
Then the next day pull, and the next day legs, then your rest. So you'll see in a seven day period, you had six days of working out with one day of rest. So within a week's time, you also got at least two days worth of the exercise in free muscle group. So it kind of falls in with the research. Now what exercises did you do?
00:06:02
Well, again, let's just keep it simple. Stick to the Holy Grail exercises for push muscles. You're going to want to work your chest, your triceps and your shoulders. The best way to work those is with two of those Holy Grail ones, push ups and the dips. You're going to want to just do a bunch of push ups and dips.
00:06:18
Of course you're going to want to do some different variations. Maybe you want to do pipe push ups for emphasizing more of the shoulders. Maybe you want to do clapping push ups to help emphasize the explosiveness of the chest. Maybe you want to do hand release pushups to really focus on the mind muscle connection. Whatever you want to do, you do those things.
00:06:35
Dips. If you want to go out and do like I did and go buy some dip bars for like $80 to $100, you can go go ahead and do that. But if you don't have any Dip bars, all you need is two chairs, two identical chairs. Put your hands on them and just do dips on the chairs. Or just take some outdoor chairs that are relatively strong and you can just put your hand on the seat and then just do dips on those.
00:06:54
Again, get creative. Think outside the box here. That's all what calisthenics is all about. You just got to get creative with these things. On pull day, you need to work the pulling muscles.
00:07:03
Those are going to be things like your backs, your backs, if you have more than one back, your back, your traps, and your biceps. And those are going to be definitely hit with pull up slash chinups, which is again, there's a difference between the two pull ups versus chinups. And a big one is, if you can do it, pseudoplanch push ups. If you can't do a pseudo planch push up, which is basically, again, a put, it's a variation of a push up, obviously, but it's a push up where you will invert your hand position from a normal push up position, you'll invert your hand 180 degrees. Now your fingers aren't facing forward, they're facing behind you.
00:07:37
And your hand, instead of being right at your shoulder length, is right about your waist. And you'll do those and that'll work your bicep. But if you can't do those, just stick with chin ups. If you can't do chin ups, grab some resistance bands. If you can't even do those either, then what you're going to want to do is then maybe do some bicep curls with literally you can just grab a book.
00:08:00
You can literally grab a book or do what other people do and just grab a water jug. Grab a gallon water jug and just curl that for weights. Like, seriously, I'm telling you, that's how creative you can be with these things. Just curl that will be able to track it easily. Probably not, but you're still going to be able to make some progress with that.
00:08:17
And now legs. Legs are very simple. It's just the quads, the hamstrings, the glutes, and the calves. Okay? To hit those, you want to hit some squats lunges and some calf raises.
00:08:28
That's pretty much it. That's all the legs really need to do. That's essentially your push pull leg split right there. Go on ahead, pick some of those exercises, pick some variations. And I would just recommend just sticking with your traditional three sets of ten as we talked about the muscle ranges and things like that before a couple of episodes back.
00:08:44
If you missed that, you missed a great episode. Go on back, check that out and see exactly what you missed. But again, pick a push muscle, pick some pushing muscle exercises to do. Pick some pull muscle exercises to do and some leg exercises to do. Combine all those into a nice little workout and then voila, there you go.
00:09:04
Now what about our upper lower friends? Now I know push pull legs is very common, but let's say you want something a little bit more simplistic than that. Okay, fine. We have upper lower. What is upper lower?
00:09:17
Basically, you're just going to combine your push and your pull into one day. And then your lower is your leg, which is your second day. This is what falls into your three workouts per week. You're going to have an upper. So day one is upper.
00:09:29
Day two, lower. Day three, upper. Day four, lower. Day five, upper. Day six, lower.
00:09:34
And your rest. Or you can throw rest days somewhere in between in the middle there. But you'll see, just doing upper lower, upper, lower, upper, lower. You get three times of hitting each of the muscle groups. Now the only issue with this one is that you may find yourself fatiguing quicker on some exercises simply because of just you doing upper and lower in such a quick succession.
00:09:55
Now if you go a little bit lighter on the weight, you probably won't run into this issue as prevalently, but just be warned that that could possibly happen to you. So there's not really much else to talk about. Upper lower essentially just take the push and pull muscles groups and combine them into one day and you do your legs the next day. That's pretty much all that is right. I told you you could be writing all these notes down.
00:10:16
I told you all this stuff super, super simple. This is not rocket surgery here people. It's very, very simple stuff. And finally full body. We're just stacking everything.
00:10:26
It's basically stacking up like a pyramid. You can think push, pull legs. Now you can stack, push and pull together into upper and then legs just carries up. And now we're on full body FB, we're on full body now. So what is full body?
00:10:39
You take the upper and the lower and combine those. Even now you do everything in one day. This is going to require more than likely the most amount of time. I have found when doing push pull legs, you have to work out usually the most. It feels like you're just like every day you're working out.
00:10:58
But the workouts can also be relatively quick since you're working such a small specific muscle group. It could be 2030 minutes, 45 tops. And you can get everything done for each day. Upper, lower. I found that on upper days will take a little bit longer, maybe like an hour.
00:11:15
It will take that and then legs will be shorter. But ever since, recently I've been trying to do a little bit more full body workouts just to experiment with those and I found that me doing those full body workouts just, just the other day, the last day I worked out when I went to the gym, that took about an hour. 41. Now again, again it probably will not take you that long to do that because I also did end with a mile walk, slash sprint. So that also added it on some time as well.
00:11:41
But again, I was in the gym for over an hour and so that's not your thing. I would recommend to either tailor back everything that you're doing or probably just to pick another split. That way you can save a little bit of time but you can do full body if you want to because the perks of full body is that you can do this. Two to I would recommend probably three though since you're hitting full body three times a week. So you can do day one is full body.
00:12:05
Day two is rest. Day three, full body. Day four, rest. Day five, full body. Day six and seven rest.
00:12:12
So you're working out three days a week, but you're hitting everything, so it's really good. So if you want to get it all done one time and then be done, this is really good for you. But it also might take the longest period of time during that workout. So it's up to you what you want to do with that. And now for the all time question for the astute amongst you all who are probably thinking, well, that's really great and all, but what about the cardio?
00:12:35
And cardio we will be discussing in another episode. But real quick, I will definitely say there are two main types of cardio that are out there. There is List, which is liss or low intensity, steady state, and Hit, which a lot of people already know about, which is high intensity interval training. Which one do I recommend? It all depends on what you're trying to do.
00:12:56
You're trying to lose weight quicker. I'd recommend going for hit. If you want something that's a lot more, it's going to take a little bit longer, but it's more sustainable. I'd recommend doing lists, but again, best case scenario, I would say just combine the two so you get the benefits of both worlds. So again, here we are at the end of the episode.
00:13:15
So long story short, what can you expect from this episode? Pick a workout, split, push, pull, legs, upper, lower, full body, pick one, stick with it if you're going to work out from home again, stick to your four Holy Grail exercises, push ups, pull ups, dips, squats. This whole thing is just about keeping it simple. Push, pull legs. If you want to stick with that, you do push one day, pulled second day, legs the next day, rest and keep repeating to your heart's content.
00:13:40
Up or lower, combine, push and pull into one day and keep the legs the same. Full body, combine everything in the past into one day for anything cardio related. If you want something. Again, so that's just more sustainable, we'll do List cardio. If you want something that's going to be a little bit more shows your results a little bit faster, go for your Hit cardio.
00:14:01
But again, we will be talking about those in a future episode. But until we get to that point, guys, I'm going to leave you all there for this week. Thank you all so much for listening. And before you go guys, please do not forget to leave a rating and review as it really does go a long way. Again, there's an email list that you can join where you can get access to new episode releases, merge, drops, upcoming events, and so much more.
00:14:26
Check out the description for more information on that. If you feel so inclined to support the show, I appreciate you greatly. You can support me on Buy Me a Coffee also links to that in the description. And again, anything else that I mentioned or forgot to mention just check out the description. All the information will be there.
00:14:44
And remember that a goal without any action is just a dream. Take care of yourselves and I will see you all next time.Listen On
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