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.

The routine

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

Goals

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

— CrossFit Journal

  1. Daily: this routine is designed for people that, like me, have an easier time committing to smaller daily efforts rather than greater weekly ones.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Portable: this routine is designed to be relatively portable, minimizing the amount of required equipment and optimizing for equipment easy to carry around and/or DIY.
  5. Safe: this routine is designed around weight types with greater stabilization requirements, limiting the amount of weight that the trainee will be able to move. This routine is also designed to minimize the risk of injury and/or damage inherent in handling heavy weights, selecting movement variations that can be easily aborted.

Equipment

At minimum, this routine requires the following pieces of equipment:

  • Sandbags. Specifically, boulder-style sandbags, big and small. Instead of sand, consider filling with pea gravel. Additionally and optionally, log-style sandbags with handles.
  • A pull-up bar. Prefer freestanding or wall-mounted/ceiling-mounted bars to doorway bars. Preferably high enough to strap rings on it. Alternatively, a sturdy branch can suffice. Alternatively, rings can suffice.
  • A dip station or any other kind of dipping setup. If nothing else is available, a set of high-back chairs can suffice. Alternatively, rings can suffice.
  • A set of dumbbells and plates (like these) accompanied by a couple of kettlebell handles (like these).

Rings

A set of gymnastic rings can be an invaluable tool, both as a gateway to (much) harder movements and variations but also as an incredibly portable, all-in-one alternative to both the pull-up bar and the dip station. Get good straps with good buckles! You do not want to fall head-first into the ground while inverted.

Additional equipment

Other pieces of equipment I highly suggest:

  • 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.
  • A jump rope. Good for warming up and HIIT/metcon workouts.

License

This work © 2024 by Jacopo Scazzosi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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

2024-11-30

  • Slightly reduced daily load while increasing specificity by making each day focus on only two movements rather than three, with more sets per exercise.
  • Further reduced equipment requirements by focusing exclusively on sandbags and kettlebells.
  • Dropped kettlebell swings and clean & press from strength routine, the former because it’s exceedingly dynamic for high loads and the latter because it works better as a benchmark movement than a day-to-day one, given I can clean significantly more than I can press.

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.