One of the things I love about You Are Your Own Gym (YAYOG) is that it doesn’t throw you in the deep end.  Yes, some of the initial work outs are hard and it maybe difficult to complete all of the repetitions, but keep trying and showing up, even if you can’t hit all the repetitions or feel like you don’t have the right form.

After approximately the first three weeks I saw how all the different exercises were starting to kick in to make other exercises easier and stronger than they had before.  A great example is push-ups.  There are programs out there for “getting to 100 pushups.”  I’m not knocking those programs–they probably work, but if you’re like me and you’re not that naturally active or you’re getting older you might not have all the muscles needed to support doing those pushups.  Yes, you can brute force your way to getting to 100 pushups, but what I like about YAYOG is that everything feels like it is building on each other.

The program doesn’t just build muscle in one place, it builds muscle everywhere in ways that add more support to simple exercises like pushups.  I think this is a smarter way to go because it also lessens the chance of injury.  I also recommend the five minute video warm-up routine.

I was doing a set of stappers where there were six elevated push-ups as part of the sequence.  At the end of the eight weeks I felt a ton stronger than when I started.  It was amazing how easy those six pushups were–so I did twenty instead–and they all felt strong.  That’s doing 4 or 5 workouts a week and never spending more than 36 min on any particular workout–wherever you are, no gym required!