Charlie Custer

I have come up with a new workout plan. While I have no delusion that anyone other that myself would be interested in this, I’m going to document it here anyway, mostly for the sake of having it in writing somewhere.

I’m calling it 5-50-5 because it’s very simple:

• run 5 miles a day.
• do 50 reps of arm exercises per day
• do 5 planks to max per day.

I’ve also created a tracking sheet for this with some cool formulas, which I’m preserving here.

For anyone who’s done any serious fitness training, this plan has some immediate and really obvious deficiencies. The biggest one is that there’s no progression or inbuilt variation. Doing this for six months won’t get me ready to run a marathon or climb a big mountain, for example, because I’m still just running six miles per day.

So what does it have going for it?

Advantages

It’s relatively easy to schedule. Even factoring in a slow outdoor run, slow reps, and a slow shower, this is all doable in well under two hours. If pressed for time and running on the treadmill inside the house, I’m guessing I could probably squeeze all of it into roughly an hour if I needed to. This is important because I’ve been absurdly busy, and a more involved training schedule simply isn’t workable at the moment.

It’s descriptive, not prescriptive. One issue I’ve had with previous plans is that they become really depressing when something happens. Get hurt or sick for a week and suddenly your entire training schedule is fucked. This feels different, and I don’t expect I’ll hit 100% every week. That’s obviously the goal, but if something comes up, it comes up, and it doesn’t derail every day of exercise that comes after it.

There’s still (some) room for progression and variety. As is obvious from the numbers, I’m more interested in running than anything else, and the runs can be mixed up in a variety of ways. Could be five miles of HIIT one day, or five miles of hills another, or some mix. I can always try to run five miles faster. And of course, there are ways to progress in the other exercises as well.

Disadvantages

It’s not training for anything, except maybe a 5K. For whatever reason, I’ve never been that interested in improving my 5K time much; the next challenge I’m interested in has always (historically) been more distance. And I do still want to run a marathon, but it’s clearly not happening until at least the spring. This seems like a feasible but still challenging “holding pattern.”

It’s not optimized for anything. Which is fine as I’m really more concerned with general health and fitness than anything else at this point. If I get bored, I may have to build some kind of speed/hills/HIIT progression into the running, though.

Even so, I’m excited about it, and it worked well on Day 1. Did I jump into it too quickly, before I’d properly gotten over my cold? I suppose I’ll find out on Day 2…