The good news is I found some nice guides for body weight fitness. See here. The idea is to use your body weight for strength training instead of weights(although weights can't hurt). It's a great idea, and a lot of the exercises are progressive, which makes things more interesting(at least for me). It makes great sense, rather than doing 30 elevated push-ups eight times a day like I did before, I'm pushing myself towards one-handed push-ups through harder and harder exercises with less sets at lower reps.
A push-up progression goes something like this;
Let's say you want to learn how to do one-handed push-ups. Jumping right into one-handed push-ups would be crazy, you probably wouldn't be able to do one, and when you finally learn how, your form would probably be terrible.
Instead you focus on regular push-ups until you can comfortably do 25 or 30 reps. You don't have to do eight sets a day, but obviously the more sets you perform the faster you'll progress ;)
After a couple weeks of focusing on proper technique(flexed butt and abs, straight back) with a set or two every day or every other day you'll feel that it's less of a challenge, so you progress to diamond push-ups, again focusing on proper technique to that you're not straining your shoulders.Your rep count will drop, and you'll work on getting it back up to 25-30.
Once you're comfortably doing 25-30 diamond push-ups you can progress to elevated diamond push-ups. These are the same, but with your feet up on a chair or even a desk, off the ground by at least several feet. Every new progression will lower your rep count, challenging you to bring it back up.
Once your bring the rep count back up, you can progress to where I'm at now, which is archer push-ups(This was kind of a big leap). These are pretty challenging for me, and I'm currently at eight reps on each arm. There are lots of variations to all these progression exercises, but in my mind these archer push-ups are the last step before one-handed push-ups with proper form. It's super important to stop if your form breaks at all. Technique, technique, technique!
There's tons of great progression exercises, they're all about crazy core stability and give a crazy pump. I'll be focusing on the progressing to the full planche, handstands, eventually 90 degree push-ups, the L-sit, and eventually the V-sit, as seen below.
The beauty of all of this is how creative I can get with absolutely no gym equipment. If you're at all interested, the first link I have in this post is a good starting point.
I'm also going to give leangains a shot to help lower my body fat% and stay lean. This is just a neat intermittent fasting routine. The guide explains that for males, ideally you want to fast for 16 hours a day, and limit eating to those eight remaining hours. I'll experiment with my timeline, but I'm going to start with eating from 10am to 6pm, then not eating again until 10am the next day.
There's going to be tons of calorie counting and constant adaptation, but hey that's what life's about! May the gods of consistency and accountability be upon me ha.
