Do 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats and a 10km run every day and you'll be the strongest person on earth.

As someone who had zero desire to go to the gym and was finally forced to go as an ultimatum, I can say the following.

Go to the gym.

The hardest part is feeling embarrassed that you’re clueless and don’t know what to do. When you do, the pay off is great. You get toned real quick.

I’m 40 and only been going 4 months and I’m in the best shape I’ve been in for decades. Haven’t lost any weight, maybe gained 2 or 3 kilos, but I’ve converted a lot of fat into muscle.

If you need some motivation I can give you my routine as an absolute novice.

I'm sure there's more bodyweight stuff you could throw in without adding too much difficulty/effort but honestly I think that sounds like a really good start, all I would say as someone who is always working on this stuff is that there's no substitute for consistency. in my experience

if weight loss is your primary concern, the eating less/better and cutting out booze is more likely to be the thing that gets results than exercise (though of course that + regular exercise is great)

You can go really far with resistance excercise.

It’s often much easier to get more muscle mass using weights and excercise equipment.

You’ll also have an easier time by changing what and how you eat.

What do you dislike about the gym?

Exercise is very good! It keeps your metabolism up, keeps your body working a bit better, and makes you ready to just so more things in life.

The exercises you mention are good and fairly well-rounded ones. You should expect to get the benefitd above from them.

In terms of losing weighy, diet is much more important. Eating good whole foods, not too caloric, will help more than picking one exercise or the other.

If you want to build muscle, strength training is, by far, the best way to do that. It will take less time per workout and you'll get stronger faster. You can still get really far woth bodyweight exercises, but lifting weights will outperform that pretty quickly. If you haven't done barbell training beforr, make sure to learn the forms with just the bar first. I can also provide more info if you're interested.

You should add squats to that list.

If you want to lose weight, you just need routine exercise and to cut calories. The kind of exercise isn't super important since cutting calories does the actual work there, but if you try to cut calories without exercising you will feel like you're dying, so the exercise is still important.

If you want to gain muscle mass, the level of resistance is a big part of it, and serious programs will try to increase it routinely. This is a problem for body weight routines, since your weight isn't getting heavier, and you'll tend to plateau. That's still fine until you hit the plateau, and it's completely reasonable to continue an all body weight routine until you need to start adding lots of reps to challenge yourself. You should look for more resistance after that point though.

If you're set on those specific exercises anyway, you could try balancing heavy stuff on your back while doing pushups and so forth, I guess. That kind of anime shit is a real hassle though; the reason people like weightlifting is that it's simpler than that.

there are progression guides on the bodyweightfitness :reddit-logo: with rep and schedule recommendations that are pretty quality

If you eat right, use correct form with bodyweight exercises (so for pull ups, chest to bar with a slight pause at the bottom in the hang and at the top,, for push ups, fully protract the shoulders at the top, and go down until your chest touches the ground), and are prepared to do harder variations of the exercises when they become too easy (you can do 15+ reps in a set), you can go very far.

As for the routine I would take out sit ups and replace it with hanging leg raises or dead bugs if you really want to do an ab exercise. Just remember that spot reduction of fat is a myth and not real. Sit ups involve spinal flexion and can put a lot of pressure on the lumbar spine.

Push ups and pull ups are good, but I'd recommend adding in a horizontal pull like a bodyweight/inverted row, a overhead or vertical push like a pike push up and to train legs. A squat variation that can challenge you with only your bodyweight, like a split squat, and something for the hamstrings and posterior leg muscles, like a single leg Romanian deadlift or a Nordic curl. You don't have to do all these exercises in one day, I would recommend splitting it up over two or more days if you need.

You don't need to use weights so long as you are prepared to train at the correct intensity with bodyweight. The hardest part to train with bodyweight only is definitely legs, but unless you can do something like 3 sets of 20 pistol squats that break parallel there is still plenty you can do with bodyweight only.

You lose the most weight from cardio. I used to run until I burned 1000 calories at the gym. About an hour straight of running at a moderately high pace. Lost about 40 lbs after half a year of doing that. Would go through about 2 bottles of water and not need to urinate because I was sweating so much of it out. but after I started to develop chronic ankle pain, I cut back on running, but kept weightlifting, and I gained almost all the weight back, despite the fact that I was still exercising quite a bit.

You can expect a lot. I have been doing basically the same 6 exercises for like 2 years now. I only work out for about 40 mins to an hour in my room with a pullup bar. I have gymnastics rings on the pullup bar.

Do pull ups until they're too easy, then once they're too easy (as in you can do 3-5 sets of 8 perfect form chest to bar pull-ups), simply add some external weight to the process. Do inverted rows as well. When they get easy, elevate them, when that gets easy, simply add weight.

Do dips - start just on the side of a chair, progress to doing ring dips, when ring dips get easy.... You guessed it. Add weight. (Some people prefer to add weight to regular non-ring dips, which is totally fine. I just like the way ring dips feel more) Do pushups - perfect the form... Then move to ring pushups. Then elevate the ring pushups... then add weight.

These 4 exercises and their variations will keep the upper body gains coming fast for a very long time (with the correct diet).

In terms of legs I guess I have a preference for actual gym machines. I used to do squat progressions all the way up to pistol squats, but I just hated them. I switched it out for Bulgarian split squats with more and more weight, which I found more effective. For more glute/hamstring based stuff, bodyweight exercises do exist and can get you far, but I find them far too awkward. I just suck it up and hit the actual gym for legs nowadays.

Some people said do abs. Do em if you don't find them miserable. I find them boring so I just don't do them. Keeping my core engaged during the other exercises (especially elevated rows and pushups) is enough for me. Yeah, I don't have a six pack, but I still have a strong core.

The best fitness routine is the one you can stick to. I've found the best way to do that long term is 1) do something you enjoy doing and 2) do something that gets progressively harder so you continue to make progress. Eventually you'll plateau on your diet and fitness routine, and then you'll need to shake it up again. The goal is to inculcate a practice, kind of like mediation or painting or playing an instrument. Keep enjoying it and you'll never stop doing it.