Three movements. Twenty minutes. No equipment. Two years later, still doing it.
I have tried, in order: a Peloton, a CrossFit membership, two yoga studios, a personal trainer, a gym near my office, a gym near my apartment, and the running club a friend kept inviting me to. The longest any of these lasted was eleven weeks.
What stuck is embarrassing in its simplicity. Three movements: push-ups, squats, and plank. I do as many as I can of each, three rounds, with a minute or two of rest between. The whole thing takes twenty minutes. I do it in the morning, before coffee, before I have time to talk myself out of it.
The reason it works is that it costs nothing, requires no commute, and there's no equipment to get in the way of starting. The bar is so low that even on a tired day I can hit it. And after two years the slow drift has added up — I do more push-ups now than I could when I started, and the squat numbers have crept up in a way that the Peloton never managed to do.
