My Exercise Routine

For me, routine is everything. Every weekday morning, I get up with my son, get dressed, have him go potty & get dressed, and then make breakfast for the both of us. If for some reason I go off routine, I end up forgetting something.

Sure, it doesn’t make for an exciting life. There’s not much spontaneity in routine. But once I’m settled into a routine, it feels comfortable.

The same goes for my exercise routine. One of my 2021 goals was to improve my health - specifically, weight less than 225 pounds and have a body fat percentage of 20% or lower.

While I’ve been below 225 all year, I’d mostly been hovering at 23% body fat. I did some quick math and to get to 20% body fat I’d either have to lose 8 pounds of fat - or gain 30 pounds of muscle!

Quick math:
225 lbs * 23% fat = 52 lbs of fat
Lose 8 lbs of fat means:
(52 - 8 ) / (225 - 8) = 44 / 217 = 20%
Gain 30 lbs of muscle means:
52 / (225 + 30) = 52 / 255 = 20%

At this point, I knew what I had been doing wasn’t going to work. I needed to update my routine.

I have been running every weekday morning - except those mornings I have meetings, then I run sometime in the afternoon. I aim to run either 4 miles or one hour (typically it’s about 4 miles in one hour). This burns around 500 calories.

Fun fact: I’ve started keeping a map of where I’ve run, and I’m trying to run on as many streets as possible in my city. I’ve already run on every street in my ward. Check out the map here:

After lunch, I take a walk with my wife and our two dogs. Our walk lasts about 20 minutes and is for around one mile. This burns about 100 calories.

And then, in the evening, during the hour before I go to bed, and typically while I’m watching something on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, I do my strength training exercises.

First, I do seven different exercises with a dumbbell. Right now, I’m either using a 20-pound dumbbell or a 30-pound dumbbell depending on the exercise. For each of these exercises, I do 3 sets of 10 reps.

These exercises are:

• wrist curls
• standing calf raises
• lateral raises
• bicep curls
• squats
• triceps extension
• single dumbbell bench press

After all this, I do 30 abdominal crunches.

Notice that I try to alternate between an upper-body strength exercise and a lower-body strength exercise. I feel this gives that part of my body some time to rest before I move it again.

Do you have a routine? Exercise or otherwise? Or is everything spotanious? Let me know in the comments below!