Jaco's daily fitness routine

Intro

I’ve been developing and dogfooding my own fitness routine for a number of years, mostly because I dislike commercial gyms and the mainstream approach to fitness.

In 2024 I decided to adopt a more systematic approach to its development, wanting to better track each change and the motivations behind it. I also had a number of people ask about my workout regimen, which made versioning and publishing within my blog somewhat of an obvious choice.

I am not a qualified professional and I share this program solely for informative purposes. Make sure to read the license and liability sections below before continuing and always check in with your medical and fitness professionals before making changes to your fitness regime.

Goals

[…] fitness is about performing well at any and every task imaginable.

— CrossFit Journal

Day to day: this routine is designed for people that, like me, have an easier time committing to smaller daily efforts rather than greater weekly ones.
Generalist: this routine is designed to develop general fitness levels. It does not optimize for strength, power, speed, endurance or hypertrophy but aims to strike a functional compromise between each of these that can easily transfer to the trainee’s daily life.
Sustainable: this routine is designed to minimize daily volume while maximizing weekly variety to lessen its impact on joints, ligaments and allow for shorter recovery times.
Portable: this routine is designed to be relatively portable, minimizing the amount of required equipment and optimizing for equipment that easy to carry around and craft.

The routine

The routine lives as a printer-friendly, evolving HTML document. Previous versions are linked in the Changelog section below.

Equipment

While the routine is designed to be relatively portable, having access to some or all of the following equipment definitely helps:

A set of gymnastic rings, best when hanging from a tall branch. Two sets if you are using rings as alternatives for both the pull-up bar and the dip station.
A dip station. Alternatively, chairs can suffice. Alternatively, rings can suffice.
A pull-up bar. Prefer freestanding or wall-mounted/ceiling-mounted bars to doorway bars. Alternatively, a sturdy branch can suffice. Alternatively, rings can suffice.
A dumbell weight set.
A set of kettlebells. Alternatively, kettlebell handles for weight plates and/or for dumbells can suffice.
sandbags Best for squats, lifts and weighted exercises requiring heavier weights. Tip: use pea gravel rather than sand.
A jump rope. Good for warming up.
A rowing machine. A very nice and versatile piece of equipment, ideal for warming up and slow days in which I do not feel like working out.

Note that many of these can be found in fitness parks all around the world.

License

Liability

As stated in section 5. of the legal code of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, I take no responsibility for any outcome arising from or in connection with the use of this routine.

Changelog

2024-11-16

Replaced thursday’s horizontal pressing with push-up variations. Once greater stabilization requirements are brought in through specific variations I find push-up to be an overall superior, more complete exercise. See variations with either hands and/or feet on rings, raised legs, …
Dropped handstand push-up from monday’s vertical pressing due to the limited ROM, particularly in the absence of handles, parallettes and so on.
Greater structure to saturday’s exercies with a focus on weights, given that the past week felt a little too biased towards control of the body and not of external objects.