Strength By Fitness

Equipment needed for our Bodyweight, outdoor gym focused fitness plan. 1 Backpack with rocks, or other weight items, Resistance Bands, pull up bar/branch, dip station, boxing bag, running shoes, truck tire/big rock.

Effective, fact-based home gym plan that rivals a commercial gym from Strength by Fitness.

Some Coach input on the exercise selection, load, RIR, and cues for group 1, day one.

Pull-ups and dips are both massive compound exercises that stand on equal terms with any barbell compound movement.

Sure, they are not as easy to progress with additional load at first sight. But not only do both of these exercises work several muscle groups at the same time as agonists, and many more as antagonists and stabilizers, but you can easily add load to them just as you do with a benchpress, squat, bent over barbell row, seated row, or pulldown.

And as you almost always should choose to do, we start day one with the two biggest exercises because we are at our freshest, for the week and the day, this gives us this nice fitness equation of the most bang for the buck. And unlike with the tire flip on day three, you can easily add ever more load to these exercises if you are strong enough, or ease up on the load with the help of resistance bands underneath your feet, or a friendly workout buddy.

This means that you can progress your load for each set if you need to start with an easier warm-up set or two.

As always, when you are working with supersets, rest as much as you need between the two exercises in the actual super set.

You do not have to go from exercise 1 to exercise number two in the blink of an second. Take a 10 to 60-second breather as needed so you can perform exercise two with the proper effort and performance, too. Once exercise number two is done, you then take your full rest pause for anything between 2 & 6 minutes before you do your next super set for that exercise group.

RIR 0 to 4.

This is a wide range, but it also happens to be the single most useful RIR range to train in, no matter if you are looking for strength and power progression or hypertrophy. No, you do not need to reach RIR 0 to tap into hypertrophic benefits, and you do not have to avoid RIR 0 if you are looking to build serious strength.

Instead, consider the entire RIR 0 to 4 range as a really good set. If you are fully loaded with energy, and you recover well in between sets, joints, and tendons feel fine, go closer to RIR 0 even for set 1. If you need a set to work yourself up towards a bigger load or RIR 0 effort, RIR 4 is your non-exhaustive friend that will still deliver great progression over time.

In the final work set, set number three for this exercise group, go for that RIR 0 set and bring out your to-the-wall effort.

Load, bodyweight, and higher.

Now, even tho we are not doing this fitness plan in the comfort of a commercial gym with the ease of life thats barbells, weight plates, dumbbells, and machines, you can fill that backpack with 0 to ~40 kg of rocks, or 10 kg if thats a more suitable load for you, once you are crushing 8 to 12 controlled, full range of motion bodyweight dips, and vertical pullups.

But start with the basics, it’s hard enough for a lot of folks to do a single bodyweight pullup. So start with that, and if needed, make use of a resistance band or two under your feet to make the weight slightly lower.

Unless you have a trusted workout partner who can lightly spot you by lifting a little under your knees.

Once you can do 8 to 12 controlled, full rom pushups and dips, you can start considering adding weights to your backpack or weight vest and take exercise group 1 to a whole new level.

Coaching cues, pullups, and dips.

Pull-ups are the first trial by fire for our day 1 in this bodyweight, outdoor gym fitness plan.

Start and stop in the same fully lengthened position, straight arms above your head, a fully lengthened scapula, and lats.
You do not have to pull with a perfectly still body and a perfect vertical pull.

You can swing with a bit of momentum, and you can have your feet straight down, or slightly behind you, and you can pull your chin close to the bar, above the bar, or go further and pull the bar to your collarbone, or even to your chest bone.

It all depends on how strong and athletic you are.
But whatever you can do injury-free on a consistent weekly basis is the baseline for you, and from there, you work your way to a complete pullup.

Use resistance bands under your feet if you need some slight assistance to complete the pull-up. A solid workout partner that’s holding gently beneath your feet or knees works too.

Muscle activation for pullups is primarily the lats, upper back, rear shoulders, lower arm, and the biceps. In-person clients know that I am a big fan of doing each set as a cluster set.

This means that you use a bigger load, and even tho your total rep volume in that set will end up being 8 or 12, or even 15 reps, you do 1 full-on effort rep at a time.

Breathe in, and power up for a few seconds before you do the next repetition. This way, you are basically doing several 1 to 5 RM lifts per set, despite doing a total of 8 to 15 or something reps. You can do all your reps in a unbroken traditional way; this works great too.

There are many ways of training.

But I love the cluster set approach I am using for my personal fitness life, and it´s worked amazingly with every client I have tried it on over the many years I have been coaching.

It’s not for everyone, but it works incredibly well.

I am mentioning this because, as the video below will show you, pull-ups are a perfect exercise for this type of set approach.

Dips. 

This is another massive compound exercise that will directly work your triceps, chest, and shoulders in a bench press level way. If you are a champ at crunching out full range of motion dips and you can do 12+ bodyweight dips, its time to fill up that backpack, and work your ass, with benchpress type loads.

I don’t care if you lean your upper body slightly forward or if you keep your upper body perfectly vertical.

What this does is change the percentage of muscle activation around a little. If you lean your upper body forward, you will engage your chest a little bit more.
The important thing to keep in mind is that every variant is ok as long as it feels pain-free for you and does not end in injuries.

As such, go as deep as your shoulders can tolerate, and if needed, brace at the bottom by gently pushing your feet against the ground or exercise station.

Control the negative, and make use of a lengthened bottom phase for ~ roughly a second or two, and push explosively back up. Breathe in at the top, and do the next rep, breathe out when you push up from the bottom.

It doesn’t matter if you are keeping your feet straight down, bent behind you, or if you have your knees slightly bent in front of you.

Try it all and find out what’s best for you.

As for your dip hand position, try to keep them at the center of your body, or slightly forward; this makes for a much nicer internal rotation in your shoulders.
Placing your hands behind your body does the opposite, and while this is perfectly fine for some people, it is a frequent contributor to shoulder discomfort for many others.

Finally, line up your elbows, wrist, and shoulder joint in a nice vertical line; this not only makes for a nice and strong dip position, but it also makes for a high level of triceps stimulus and keeps your elbow and shoulders happy.

Some vertical and lateral spread is fine, like with every other exercise on the planet, it’s not about every single human being making use of the exact same execution, you have some leeway thats uniquely individual for you.

Muscle activation for dips are primarily triceps, shoulders, and chest.

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Some Coach input for exercise group 2, day one.

Stationary lunges and elevated pushups make for two more compound movements that can only be described as two very powerful body weight exercise choices. Best of all, thanks to your weighted backpack, you will be able to progress these two for decades to come with no need for a commercial gym in sight.

First off the bat are the stationary lunges.

If you are not compatible with this movement pattern, try the full range of motion step-up instead. It´s basically the same stimulus, and they are both just as good as the other.

No, they are not carbon copies, but if, for some reason, you just can’t do one of them, the other makes for a perfect replacement.

RIR 0 to 4.

For this exercise group, RIR 0 to 4 still works perfectly fine, but your lower body really progresses nicely when you push it, so if you have the mental fortitude, go for that RIR 0 to 1 set and bring out your inner Viking warrior with every set during the lunges.

Load, bodyweight, and higher.

Your lower body is both mightily strong and very durable, so pack your backpack and do our stationary lunges weighted right from the get-go, unless you have mitigating issues that make the bodyweight version challenging enough as it is.

5 to 25 reps is a perfectly fine rep range here, and if you can honestly reach that 0 to 1 RIR with a 15+ rep range, that will build both strength, muscular endurance, athletic capacity, cardiovascular health, and lean muscle mass.

But I would recommend just adding more load and keeping it between 5 and 15 reps for most. It’s just easier to train within that rep range to exhaustion.

If you can load it big enough to keep your rep range below 15 reps.

Coaching cues, lunges.

I am calling this one stationary lunges, but if you prefer doing your lunges in a walking pattern, that’s just as fine.

I prefer teaching clients the stationary variant, however, for one very simple reason, if it’s stationary, you can use a hand against a machine, or a wall for balancing support, which allows you to safely load the exercise even more. And that’s what we want: more load, more effort, more exercise-induced adaptation, and progress without increased risk.

So, for most people, the stationary lunges make for a better choice than the walking version.

Shoulder-wide square stance, ie, feet apart laterally with one foot forward and one behind you.

Slight knee bend on your rear leg, and your front leg should be positioned in such a way that your foot and knee are slightly in front of your body.

Some people prefer to do this exercise with a straight upper body, while others feel much better by hinging their upper body slightly forward over their quads and knees.

Both variants are perfectly fine, experiment and find which one feels the best for you, from both a performance, stimulus perspective, as well as what feels best for your knee.

Yes, actual muscle activation changes ever so slightly depending on how you keep your upper body here. Try it out and feel the difference in stimulus yourself.

Drive your force through the toes and heel of your front leg, like with squats, it just doesn’t matter if your knees are over the midfoot, your toes, or going slightly beyond your toes.

Go with what feels the best for you; it’s all safe and fine.

Muscle activation is primarily the gluteus and quads, but since it’s one leg at a time, there’s some quadratus lumbarum activation and some core too. But the primary muscles are the quads, hamstrings, and gluteus muscles.

Elevated pushups. 

Another mighty fine compound exercise.

Regular, all-year-round gym goers like myself usually overlook the pushup in our regular fitness plans, it’s after all much easier to grab bigger dumbbells or load up the barbell even more than to go through the trouble of having someone add an entire mountain of plates on your back while doing pushups to reach the same total load with the same rep range.

But when you have no gym nearby, or at least no access to a proper bench, dumbbells, and a barbell with enough plates, the mighty pushup is a wonderful compound exercise for your chest, triceps, and shoulders.

Thanks to the backpack, you can also load it up quite nicely without building a tower of plates on your back. 20 to 40 kg should make it a great deal more challenging if you are running through regular pushups like butter.

And perhaps you can even push it higher in due time.

I am calling this exercise elevated pushups because putting your feet higher up on something makes it even harder than regular pushups. It forces you to lift more of your bodyweight.

Likewise, if normal pushups are too hard for you, you can do your pushups on your knees instead, or at an incline with your hands elevated instead.

A funny thing with elevating your hands, is that you can, as is visible in the video down below, make use of a slight hand elevation to increase range of motion for your push up, and as always, when we increase range of motion we make our exercises harder, which is great for our progression.

So, when you combine a slightly elevated hand position for increased range of motion with the elevated feet variant, you will have a very challenging push-up.

Load and execution are, as always, based on your relative need and capacity.

That’s all part of your individual progression.

Hands beneath your shoulders, placed on the ground, straight body from head to toes, and if you can, place those feet up on something, off the ground; this already adds more load for your chest, shoulders, and triceps to handle.

Brace your core and gluteus so your upper body doesn’t implode with your belly button trying to rest against the ground.

Ideally, it’s chest lightly touching the ground, at the bottom, without resting against the ground, while your tummy is still floating up in the air.

Muscle activation is mainly in the chest, shoulders, and triceps. That’s why you do this exercise.

But indirectly, your core is also involved, and to some degree, especially with added load, your gluteus, erectors, and scapula.

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Some Coach input for Nordic curls, day one.

Nordic curls are hard on the hamstrings. More so than the seated leg curl machine in the gym, for most folks anyway. As such, we are settling on just 2 sets taken to RIR 0-4.

Not to mention that hamstrings work overtime in sprint and run intervals, too. Keep your hands close to the ground throughout the entire movement instead of keeping them tucked to your chest as he does in the video.

Nordic curls for most people can end with an abrupt RIR 0 coming out of nowhere, so it’s just nicer for your face and your hamstrings to be able to lightly catch yourself with your hands being close to the ground already.

Load, bodyweight, and higher.

Yes, the Nordic Curl is a bodyweight exercise, but it is one of the hardest bodyweight exercises out there, so only add load to your Nordic curls ( by holding a dumbbell, weight plate, or similar item, or putting rocks in your backpack ) if you manage to do more than 8 to 12 + strict full-rom reps.

Anything below ~5 reps with your bodyweight in this exercise needs more reps, and not more load.

Coaching cues, Nordic curls.

Brace your core properly, and fall with your upper body in a controlled motion toward the ground. Catch yourself lightly with your hands.
Let your upper body touch the ground, and if needed, push off lightly with your hands against the ground, as you curl your upper body back up to the upright top position with your hamstrings and glutes doing the job.

Do not hip-hinge your way down to the ground; it’s your hamstrings that are supposed to do the work. So, try to keep a straight upper body with the biggest motion happening in your knee joint and not your hip hinge.

Muscle activation is primarily gluteus and hamstrings with some stimulus for your core and erector spinae as well.

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Coach input: Lateral raise & rear raise/row, day one.

Both the lateral raise and the rear shoulder raise, or meadows row, are superb exercises for not just your shoulder, but most of your scapula region too. You can further do the lateral raise with nothing but resistance bands, or you can take that backpack of yours, adjust the weighted items inside so you have a suitably high load, and crush those shoulder raises just as good as the biggest, baddest dumbbells at the gym would ever challenge you.

Load, from resistance bands to a packed backpack.

Resistance bands offer a very gentle progression, and it’s easy to add more resistance by adding yet another band. Resistance bands are not perfect, but they’re a solid option.

Once you get strong enough, you can always advance to using that weighted backpack of yours; using it as a dumbbell is nothing short of phenomenal.

Just grab it by the double back straps and you are good to go.

Does that really work?

Of course it does, when we are out and about, or I have no access to our regular gym, I have done plenty of rear and lateral raises like this with an easily adjusted load ranging from 20 to 40 + kg in my backpack.

So, no, you won’t miss the dumbbell rack back at the gym.

Coaching cues, shoulder lateral raise.

Roughly speaking, take a shoulder-wide stance, with the opposite foot to the hand that’s doing the lifting placed on the ground, in front of your body.

This makes for a much more stable position, so you can pull as explosively and as controlled as possible, no matter how big the load ends up being.

Brace your core properly, and stand tall and proud.

The hand that will do the lifting should start slightly over the middle of your body, so you are pulling a little in front of your body, instead of stopping against the side of your body.

Breathe in, and raise the weight slightly aggressively, but controlled in front of your body, to the side, with your hand going in an arch up towards the sky.

Depending on load and mobility, go as high as you can with your hand.

Some do it all the way up, and that’s ok, it has no downsides. Most others lift their hand up roughly to shoulder height, and some, due to lifting very heavy loads, stop slightly short of their horizontal shoulder height.

It’s all ok.

No need to squeeze at the top, unless weights are so low that you need to squeeze to get a good enough stimulus.
Control the descent down, all the way to that starting position, breathe in for a second, and repeat until you reach that RIR 0 to 4.

Once done, rest for a few seconds until you have caught your breath, and do the other side.

Coaching cues, rear shoulder raise/row.

The rear shoulder raise is a wolf in disguise.

It can be a gentle exercise that you do with nothing more than resistance bands, just like a regular dumbbell rear shoulder raise. Or you can do the TRX version, where you lean backwards and pull your hands back and out while regulating the load via the angle you are leaning with, depicted in the image.

There´s the fantastic Meadows Row variant too, not to mention that this is one shoulder exercise where you can go ultra hard equally well with gym dumbbells or your trusty stone-filled backpack.

Do it ultra strictly, or you push that load big time, and turn this bad boy into an exhausting, shoulder-frying shoulder raise/row, which will also activate more of your upper back.

Here’s how I do it, and how I coach our in-person clients.

Take a square stance, feet shoulder-width, with the dumbbell/backpack in the center of your feet, placed on the ground, slightly in front of your body.

Hip hinge down so you are standing bent over, just like a deep barbell row.

Place the non-lifting hand on your opposite leg to help you brace, since you will raise the weight laterally toward and away from the other leg with your other hand.

Start and end each rep on the ground. With your weight slightly over to the other side of the middle of your body.

Pull explosively with a nearly straight arm at the beginning of the rep, and finish each pull with a light bend in your arm at the top of your repetition.

Breathe in, and brace your core before every rep.

As you pull, raise the weight aggressively out to the side of your body. And yes, it’s ok if you have some upper body movement, just don’t swing too wildly. But it’s ok to turn your upper body just a little bit, especially with bigger weights.

Training for performance beats hypertrophy-focused training.

As you reach the top, take absolute control of the weight and control the descent, all the way back over the middle of your body before you put the weight down on the ground again.

Once the load gets big enough in this exercise, this will work not just your rear shoulder and scapula, this exercise will work most of your core and upper back.

Once you have reached RIR 0 to 4, rest as needed and do the other side.

The two Jeff Nippard down below, especially the rear shoulder video are included because they show you some of the many ways you do approach both of these exercises. There are no singular ways to do either thats 100% the only way to do it. So think of all the exercise videos in this article as a starting point from which you can branch out and find the perfect execution, and exercise choices for your situation, and goals.

Cardio.

Once done, finish off day one with a 10 to 20-minute long sprint interval with at least 5 minutes of jogging between each 5 to 10 second sprint.

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Exercise Day Two is Coming soon in a separate article, link down below.

I have decided to publish our public fitness plans with one individual article per exercise day. This way you wont have to scroll up and down forever to find the right exercises, coaching cues, exercise videos and so on. Each exercise day in each public fitness plan will also link to the other days of that fitness plan. And at times provide exercise variations for that day.

Making for very easy, user friendly, and structured browsing.

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