Happy June! And happy Pride! 🏳️🌈
This month’s strength workout is a great one to kick off summertime — and in fact, we’ll be sticking with it for a few extra weeks into true summer: The first Sunday of next month falls on a holiday weekend, and this is often a season of travel and routine disruption, so with the help of a few subscribers on the Substack chat (thank you!), I decided to let this workout serve as our June and July progressive overload plan. You’ll still get lots of great other workouts throughout the next few weeks (including some really good complementary strength workouts that will pair well with this one), but return to this one regularly if you can.
A few reminders if you’re taking that repeated approach and using progressive overload (AKA adding weight as you get more comfortable with the movements):
For your first workout or two, take it a little easy. Don’t immediately jump to the heaviest weight you can stand to move. Ease your way in to hopefully avoid destroying yourself with soreness and feeling the need to take a super-long break before you go back for another workout (or even feeling discouraged entirely). THEN start to push. Nudge just slightly out of your comfort zone each time. Grunting, cursing, and heavy breathing all very welcome.
Record the weights you used, if you’re comfortable (if recording body-related numbers is not good for you, skip this part). You should be trying to use a weight that gets you very fatigued and almost close to failure (i.e. you can’t do another rep) by the end of the minute-long set.
Repeat the workout once or twice more within the week if possible.
Do this for four-ish weeks (or more!), adding weight to the extent possible for each exercise that uses weight. Keep recording your weights (again, if this feels like a wise move for you) so you can see your progress! You can also mark progress on things like number of reps, longer working time (if you started off needing to take a break before the end of the set, etc.), or positioning (moving toward a more advanced version of the exercise), if applicable.
You can do the other WOWs that come through over the next couple of weeks as a way to mix things up and supplement your training, if you have time.
Then you’ll get another strength-training–focused workout in August, and the cycle begins anew.
I’m typically a big fan of offering up the option to skip the warmup or cooldown, or one or two rounds of the circuit. However, if you’re doing this in a progressive overload setup, I’d like to encourage you to keep the warmup and cooldown to make sure you’re taking good care of your body. If you can only do one or two circuits the first week, see if you’re able to add a second or third circuit in subsequent weeks.
If you aren’t interested in progressive overload–focused strength training (or not yet), you are very welcome to just follow this video like a regular one-off workout! And you can do the whole thing, or if you have less time or energy than that, you can trim things down by:
Skipping the warmup
Skipping the cooldown
Skipping one or two of the three rounds of the resistance-training circuit
Make it work for you. If you’d like to repeat this workout a time or two throughout the week, great.
Let’s go!
