Bodyweight exercises are the best. Don’t get me wrong, I still swing weights around, but bodyweight fare checks a lot of boxes. It’s convenient, cost-effective and scalable across different fitness levels; it improves functional strength, flexibility and core stability; and, most importantly, it’s easy on the joints.
Little wonder that calisthenics has been dubbed one of the top training trends this year. The back-to-basics craze is mainly playing out on social media, where trainers share simple moves from backyards, living rooms or local parks. TikTok even anointed calisthenics as one of its “community trends of the year.”
Lifeguard Shape: Your Blueprint for the Ultimate Summer Body
Workouts tips and insight into how lifeguards train, sans any responsibility to actually patrol a beachOne of the better follows in this space is Mike Chang, founder of Flow60, a personal trainer who regularly posts easily-digestible fitness advice. In a recent video, he shared his top 12 exercises to plug in every single day:
1. Push up
2. Prone cobra
3. Burpee
4. Pike pushup
5. Squat
6. Lunge
7. Lying leg raise
8. Run in place
9. Kicks
10. Strikes (punching)
11. Jumps
12. Plank
“A lot of people don’t do these exercises because they feel really hard,” he says. “But you have to make them feel easy. Notice how I’m only doing about two or three repetitions for every exercise.”
It’s true. Watching that video, Chang makes the moves looks less like a workout and more like a dance, a flow. (His company’s name starts to come into clearer focus.) The ease of his effort calls to mind another, adjacent movement in bodyweight fitness right now — that of “animal movements,” wherein trainees crawl, hop and shuffle across the gym floor, harkening back to those healthy primal patterns we’ve long abandoned.
I’m a big fan of Chang’s approach here. Make no mistake, these moves are difficult and will elevate your heart rate. They’ll burn. But to his point, you don’t have to do so many in a given session. That restraint will allow you to practice them every day, more casually, which should help you A) master the form and B) get stronger.
Finally, if you’re looking for more specific guidelines than his freeform flow, take this specific advice from Chang (mined from the comments section):
“Set a timer that will give you 12 sets of 30 seconds. That allows you to do each exercise once, for 30 seconds. Don’t worry about counting. Just do the best you can. If you like to challenge yourself, you can do more rounds by setting your timer for 24 sets, or 36 sets, or 48 sets, etc.”
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