Full-Body High-Frequency For-Life

Version 2. Still Ambitious

29 April 2024, Pattaya, Thailand

The first iteration of this full-body, high-frequency guide, published not much longer than a month ago, was more like a draft. I called it The Matrix. Now I’m calling it FBHF For-Life. Whatever.

Except that it turned out to be pretty good.

My chief concern was that it would be too difficult. It’s not. Some days into testing it out, I began to worry that it might be too easy. I’m not doing this for any sort of mass-market appeal. I’m not doing it as a guru with all the “secrets” and special sauces. I’m not touting it as the “One True God” of workouts.

It’s a lot simpler than that.

For whatever reason, a few days before July 1, 2023, I decided to meet a challenge I saw online. To my utter amazement, I saw it through. What was it? It was to do 30-straight ass-busting days in the gym doing 15 unique workout routines that aren’t full-body, but they’re more than a single muscle group split routine; so, close to full-body and with lots of sets. I ran through those 15 routines twice for a total of 30 days. It was tough.

It changed my body. More importantly, it changed my mind. Here I am 2 days shy of 10 solid months at this, and I haven’t slowed down much. Now, I only hit the gym 5 days per week (usually M-F) and I take 2 days off. I turned 63 in January of this year, 2024. I was no stranger to the gym, but I never developed the solid commitment that has brought so many benefits until this cycle though that has stuck with me.

What have I changed?

I’ve made the workout set of 20 unique full-body routines a slight bit harder overall by identifying which ones were too easy and fixing that. None were too hard. I added a few exercises and got rid of a few. I changed the mix in a few of the workouts. A few exercises I made more prominent throughout the set of 20 unique workouts, and a few of them show up less frequently.

Initially, the distribution from the library was based on filling up 20 slots with an exercise in each of…legs, chest, back, shoulders, triceps, biceps, and abdominal.

This time through, I’m looking at each exercise in the library and seeing how I want that specific exercise distributed over 20 individual and unique routines. So, for instance, I had Romanian deadlifts in only 2 workouts. Now they’re in 3. Like that. Many other examples of thoughtful placing of exercises that deliver bang-for-buck properly spaced out among 20 routines.

The other thing I’ve done is simplified. Version 1 was focussed on whether you want to work out 2, 3, 4, or 5 times per week. So I made a plan for each of those. But the beauty of this program is that there are 20 routines, all full-body. Each one of the 20 is a complete gig. Skipping days matters less because it’s your whole body and not…’oh, man, way too long since I did legs’ (or chest, or back, or shoulders…).

So, you just run through the 20 routines in whatever order you want, though 1-20 is obviously the straightforward way. Nothing to remember. You do them when you want. You do #1, then you do #2 tomorrow, 2 days from now, or 3, or whatever. Then you do #3. Can be the next day after or the next week after. You can do 1-7 on January 1-7 as a NYR. You can do 5 routines in one week, 2 or 3 the next, then settle in at 4 for a few weeks.

Literally, whatever you want, guided only by your needs, desires, goals, elation, and shame.

My guidance on the sets shifts slightly. Before I actually put it into practice, running through all 20 routines in a month—some at a pace of 3 routines per week, then 4, and then “stress testing” it by doing the final 7 routines on 7 consecutive days—I’m more inclined to suggest that you perform the 2 sets per exercise in however way feels best for you in that particular exercise, in that particular routine, on that particular day.

For example, sometimes you might want to take set #1 to failure and then do what you can on set #2. Other times, you’ll feel like using set #1 as your heavy warm up, then #2 as your working set to failure. And sometimes, you might just do both sets staunchly; meaning, neither to failure, but solid effort on both.

It’s all going to depend on what you feel like and what your goals are. You can set daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever goals too. This is extreme flexibility and unless you are a bodybuilder or other professional, I suggest you listen to your body, your desires, and your feels, and go through the routines with purpose.

Have “sucky-fun.”