A Workout Plan for People Who Sit All Day Like Me

Most days I am at a screen for more hours than I planned. It starts at eight and becomes ten, sometimes more, without much ceremony. The only thing moving is my hands, and by evening my shoulders have rolled forward, and I have burned almost nothing.

That is the problem with spending your day this way. Most of the people I know eat fine. The trouble is that the body gets no load at all, five days a week, for years.

So I wrote a plan for myself. Sixty minutes a day (or even more), two dumbbells, one skipping rope. No gym membership, no machines. I am putting it here because I think it fits a lot of people who spend their days like me.

I am not a trainer and I always recommend gym if you want to train harder and activate particular muscle groups. This is what I follow, not a prescription. If something hurts in a way that is not muscle soreness, stop and ask someone qualified.

Every exercise name here is a link#

When I started, the annoying part was not the training. It was that a plan would say "reverse fly, 3 sets of 12" and then leave me to work out what a reverse fly is. So I would search it, land on a YouTube video with a minute of intro, and lose the thread.

Every exercise below links to its page on MuscleWiki (a really useful website, in my opinion). Click the name and you get a looping video of the movement from two angles, which muscles it hits, and the form cues. You don't have to search for anything or sign up before you see the demo.

The videos load with a male model by default, which is the body I had in mind writing this. MuscleWiki has a Female toggle at the top of its body map that swaps the demonstrator on every video, and it stays set once you flip it. You can also add the ?model=f param to the end of any link on this page to go straight there. None of this is a men's-only plan. The movements, the sets, and the progression are the same either way, and the only real variable is the weight on the dumbbell, which differs between any two people anyway.

The hour#

Every training day is the same four blocks in the same order, but timing may vary.

• Warm-up, 7 minutes
• Strength training, 40 minutes
• Cardio, 7 to 15 minutes
• Cool down, whatever is left

The order is the part people get wrong, myself included for a while. Strength goes first, while you still have energy to actually load the muscle. Cardio goes after, when your glycogen is already low and the fat burn comes easier. Do it the other way around and you are doing your best sets tired.

Strength first for muscle. Cardio after for fat.

Warm-up, 7 minutes#

Skipping this is tempting when you are short on time. But don't, it is also how you pull something.

• Neck rotations, 1 min, all combinations
• Arm circles, 30 sec, each direction
• Bodyweight squats*, 15 reps
• Bicycle crunch, 20 reps
• Cardio Knee Taps, 1 min
• Jumping jacks, 1 min

The neck rotations do more for someone on a screen-heavy schedule than they look like they should. That is exactly where 10+ hours of screen time collects.

*You may also replace bodyweight squats with Topu Karanam (or Thoppukaranam) which is commonly translated in English as squats or sit ups combined with holding the ear lobes and it is globally popularized as super brain yoga. You can check that out here in this video.

Strength training, 40 minutes#

Rest 30 seconds between sets. Rest 60 seconds when you move to a new exercise. Keep a clock going, because rest is how a sixty minute session becomes a ninety minute one.

Everything below needs two dumbbells of your preferred weights, a floor, and a chair or bed edge for the dips.

Day 1, chest and triceps#

• Push-ups, 4 × 10-15 (can't do a full one yet? Start with knee push-ups)
• Dumbbell chest press on the floor, 4 × 12
• Dumbbell fly on the floor, 3 × 12
• Bench dips, 3 × 12

The floor versions are not a downgrade here. The floor stops your elbows travelling too far back, which is the range where a shoulder gets hurt on a bench.

Day 2, back and biceps#

• One-arm dumbbell row, 4 × 12, each hand
• Bicep curls, 3 × 12
• Hammer curls, 3 × 12
• Reverse fly, 3 × 12

Rows and reverse fly pull the shoulders back. If you only ever push, you end up reinforcing the posture the chair already gave you.

Day 3, legs and core#

• Glute bridge, 3 × 15
• Plank, 3 × 45 sec
• Leg raises, 3 × 12
• Dumbbell Squats, 4 × 15
• Dumbbell lunges, 3 × 10 each leg

Glutes go to sleep when you sit on them all day. The bridge is the cheapest way to remind them they exist. This is my favourite day of the week, and most people I know say the same but not about the morning after :)

Day 4, shoulders and arms#

• Shoulder press, 4 × 12
• Lateral raise, 3 × 12
• Front raise, 3 × 12
• Tricep overhead extension, 3 × 12

Day 5, full body and core#

• Burpees, 3 × 8
• Mountain climbers, 3 × 30 sec
• Dumbbell Russian twist, 3 × 16
• Dumbbell thrusters, 3 × 12

This one is short on paper and the hardest day of the week in practice.

Day 6, active recovery#

• Skipping, 10 min, keep it light
• Stretching, 15 min

This has to be lighter than the rest of the week. Days 6 and 7 are only there to take the load off. Stretching, though, is the most important part of this plan, and it is not optional. Do it after everyday's workout.

Day 7, rest#

Rest properly. Not "rest and do a quick set of push-ups". The muscle grows on this day, not on day 5.

Cardio#

Straight after the strength block, while you are still warm.

• Week 1 and 2, 7 to 10 minutes
• Week 3 onward, 12 to 15 minutes

The skipping rope is the whole cardio budget here. It is cheap, it fits in a bag, and it is genuinely hard for the first two weeks. Start at 7 minutes even if you feel like you could do more, because your calves will disagree with you the next morning.

Food, once a week instead of never#

My first version of this plan had a section titled STRICTLY AVOID. Sugary drinks, bakery items, deep fried food, excess oil, late-night eating, junk food. All of it, gone.

I took that out, and I think it is the most important change I made.

Nobody reading this is prepping for a stage. We are engineers who sit too much and want to feel less like a bag of wet cement by Friday. A rule you break in week two and then feel guilty about is worse than a looser rule you keep for a year.

The list is still the list. It just gets one slot a week.

• Sugary drinks
• Bakery items
• Deep fried food
• Heavy oil
• Junk food

Pick a day. The weekend works for most people because that is when the plans happen anyway. Eat the thing, enjoy it, and go back to normal the next morning. The rest of the week is normal home food, protein at every meal, and water instead of the fourth coffee.

One item I did not move to the weekly slot is late-night eating, because that one is not really about food. Eating close to bedtime costs you sleep quality, and sleep is doing more work in this plan than any single exercise.

Four rules I do not bend#

Sleep 7 to 8 hours. You are not building anything on 5, and this is the rule that decides whether the other 59 minutes were worth anything.

Progressive overload. Slow reps, good form, and a little more over time: more weight, more reps, or slower on the way down. If week 8 looks exactly like week 1, nothing is happening.

No crash dieting. You will lose the weight and the muscle together, and get all of the first back.

Consistency over intensity. Four honest sessions a week beat one heroic one followed by five days of recovery. The plan is built to be repeatable on a bad week rather than impressive on a good one.

There is no free time, so give it a time#

The version of this plan that fails is the one where you tell yourself you will train when you get some free time.

You will not. Free time does not arrive on a working day. Something fills it every evening, and it is usually something reasonable: a bug at 6pm, a call that runs twenty minutes over, a deploy that wants watching. The hour loses to whatever turned up, and it goes without a fight, because you never cancelled it. There was nothing to cancel.

Give it a clock time and put it in the calendar like anything else. Pick the time that survives your worst day rather than your best one. Straight after logging off works for me, because closing the laptop is already a signal and I have not sat back down yet. Early morning works better for people whose evenings are unpredictable.

You stop deciding. You are not weighing up whether tonight is a good night for it. It is 7pm, so it is the hour.

Let the room do the reminding#

James Clear spends a good part of Atomic Habits on this, and it is the idea from that book I have got the most out of. You get further by changing your surroundings than by trying to want it more. Motivation comes and goes. A room stays how you left it.

The dumbbells and the rope live in the room I work in, not in a cupboard or in the other room where they would look tidier.

Think about what starting costs in each case. If the rope is in a box somewhere else, starting means going to fetch it, and that is a small decision you have to win every single day. Some days you will not win it. If it is on the floor beside the desk, in your eye line, there is no decision left to lose. You see it at 7pm and you pick it up.

It works in reverse too. Anything you put out of sight, you have taken out of the plan.

The same goes for the people around you. Clear argues that habits stick faster when you spend time with people for whom that behaviour is already the default. A gym is the obvious example. Everyone there has already decided that showing up is normal, so you are matching them instead of building motivation from scratch. That is why I still recommend one if you want to train harder. The room does some of the work your willpower would otherwise do alone.

What it adds up to#

The equipment cost almost nothing, and that turned out to matter more than I expected.

You will not look different at week three. Your neck will feel better at week one, which is a strange payoff to get first, and it was enough to keep me going until the real ones showed up.

Two dumbbells, one rope, and an hour you defend the way you defend a meeting. The plan is not the hard part.