A Brutally Effective 15-Minute Full-Body Workout You Can Perform Anywhere
Everybody wants to stay fit, but most can spare neither the time nor the money on gym memberships, trainers, and long arduous workouts.
Neeramitra Reddy
Build muscle and torch fat even when in a hurry
Everybody wants to stay fit, but most can spare neither the time nor the money on gym memberships, trainers, and long arduous workouts.
The good news is you don’t need to — all you need is your body weight and a will to stay fit.
In fact, you can hammer your entire body in just 15 minutes.
While you won’t be able to build washboard abs or bulging arms with roadmap veins, you’ll build and maintain an athletic physique.
If you’re already an obsessed gym rat like me, this will come in handy when the gyms are closed — or when you bag a last-minute date with that pretty coworker you’ve been pining after.
Unlike the 15-minute workouts rampant on the internet, this won’t be a cardio routine of jumping jacks and burpees.
We want to build muscle in less time — and that means intense sets where you reach (close to) muscular failure. To max out intensity, we’ll use rest-pause reps.
Since we want the most bang for our buck, we’ll leverage all 3 major mechanisms of building muscle — mechanical tension, muscular failure, and metabolic stress.
Enough of the boring exercise science, let’s dive into the routine.
Only 3 Exercises with 3 Sets Each
For the upper body, it’s pushups and pullups — while the former hammer your chest, shoulders, and triceps; the latter thrash your back, biceps, and forearms.
Pistol squats will take care of the lower body — while they are quad and glute dominant, if performed in a controlled fashion, they will hammer your hamstrings as well.
The best part? All three of them murder your core.
Don’t worry if you can’t perform any of them yet — I’ll give you progression exercises to build up to them:
The Workout Routine
SS means superset — performing sets of two or more exercises back to back.
RP means rest-pause — doing reps until failure, pausing 5 seconds, and eking out a few more reps.
- 3 RP-Sets of Pullups SS with 3 RP-Sets of Pushups. Rest 60 to 90s between supersets.
- 2 Normal Sets + 1 RP-Set of Pistol Squats. Rest 60 to 75 seconds between sets.
Progressions
Most can do pushups, few can do pullups, but I doubt any untrained person can get a pistol squat. So here are progressions for all three:
- Pushups: Wall pushups → Incline pushup negatives → Knee pushups→ Incline pushups→ Flat pushup negatives → Flat pushups → Controlled flat pushups → Staggered pushups → Archer pushups.
- Pullups. Active hang → Hanging scapular retractions → Pullup negatives → Assisted pullups → Pullups → Controlled pullups → Archer pullups.
- Pistol squats. Bench-assisted air squats → Wide-feet air squats → Air squats → Single-leg box squat negatives→ Single-leg box squats→ Pistol-squat negatives → Pistol squats → Controlled Pistol squats.
Start small and only when you can perform a comfortable 8–12 perfect-form reps of a particular progression, climb to the next.
Potential Tweaks to This Program
If you can spare another 2 minutes, add 2 sets of hanging leg raises at the end of your workout. If you can spare 5 minutes — add another Pushup-Pullup SS and an RP-set of air squats.
If the exercises get easy, control each rep further and try to max out the progressions.
If you find even the controlled versions of the maxed-out progressions easy, add weights into the mix — grab a bag and load it up with random household items.
With such creative tweaks, you can gain muscle and strength for a long time with this ridiculously simple program.
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Neeramitra Reddy
11x Top Writer | Thinker | Bookworm | Gymrat | Personal Growth Addict | Open to gigs: neeramitra.writes@gmail.com | Join my newsletter: abetterlife.substack.com
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