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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

Interesting results. Just last night I read an article about training for rock climbing that suggested cutting back on intensive cardio routines outside of climbing if you're having trouble making strength gains, and I went to sleep last night wondering how much merit there is to the claim, since I'm both a cyclist and a climber.

Anecdotally, when cycling in the city it's usually shorter rides with high intensity hill climbs and sprints, but after an 18 hour, 300km ride in the country last summer, it took me weeks to get that climbing/sprinting power back, that one big ride made me substantially weaker.

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Further off topic: high intensity workouts also have the benefit of being short and therefore easier to do after work :)

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A great workout that only requires an exercise bike is:

- 4-5min of biking, sprinting for 30sec every minute.

- no break, 20 push-ups, 20 squats, 20 crunches

- ~1min break, repeat the above two more times

The result should be a ~20min strength building exercise that is easy on the joints and gets a nice heartrate/endorphin spike.

The body-weight push-ups and squat are only a very light strength building exercise. Sadly, you'll still be above average in fitness if you do this workout.

If you keep some progression going, and don't over-eat, you'll end up with a pretty nice physique at least.

I think a big reason why so many have a hard time maintaining a life-long fitness habit is because their goals are merely cosmetic. The first thing an excercise routine needs to be is fun, and after that the rest is butter.

The entire discipline of calisthenics would disagree with you on this one... (oh, and me too)

The discipline of calisthenics does not consider plain push-ups, bodyweight squats and crunches as anything more than beginner-level exercises.

The trick with body weight exercise progression is to use leverage to increase the effective resistance. For example: http://stevenlow.org/the-fundamentals-of-bodyweight-strength...

Done correctly body weight alone can allow one to achieve great strength. In fact, it’s probably superior on account of gymnasts can easily do weight lifting exercises while weight training doesn’t really transfer to gymnastics.

Further off topic still... you need to add some pulling exercises to balance your pushups, maybe some vertical pulling and pushing (pullups, overhead presses) as well, and swapping the squats for lunges or step-ups once in a while will give you better overall leg development (squats for quads, lunges and stepups will work glutes and hamstrings a bit more)

You're probably not going to run into issues with that low of an intensity (20 pushups is not nothing, but if you stop at 20 every time, it's not like you'll keep making the imbalance worse) but adding another few exercises will only add like 5 mins total to your workout, and will give better overall results

Great input! I believe a serious workout would involve some sort of lifting routine before hand. This exercise is really just intended to get some cardio/endorphins without being heavily aerobic.

Further off topic, you have essentially described the model that CrossFit uses! You could steal workouts from https://www.crossfit.com/ as the publish them for free. There is also a lot of good material tied to the crossfit name for high intensity interval training if you google around.

For what it's worth, 8 years ago when I had a climbing coach and took it seriously we did HIIT (before it took off as a trend) and it was further super tailored for climbing - for instance had days of the week called climbing specific which were mostly campus board with camera work for motion tracking type stuff. So at least I can vouch for a small group of fairly serious Colorado climbers who mostly did this type of training versus just running for many miles. Outside of climbing / training I mostly just walked a LOT to stay lean but that's quite different than running for long periods. I think there is some specific differentiation between alpine sport climbers and boulders/indoor comp climbers in terms of endurance needs.

I definitely made noticeable strength gains with his program I did it from like 18-23/4. Biggest regret of my life giving it up but that's another story!

You can still do cardio and maintain muscle mass. Sprinting is better than running miles and miles.

But, if you want to run marathons or triathlons, google "alex viada the Hybrid Athlete." He's a bodybuilder who maintains his muscle mass and strength while also doing triathlons. He has a background in biochemistry and works in pharmaceuticals. At least he used to. I'm not sure if he still does.

Given his background in body building and pharma, I would bet he is using PEDs to be able to be a hybrid athlete.

Based on a google image search I think that's a safe assumption. Still impressive though.

I’d agree. The people I know who can reasonably simply be a “hybrid” are those who use various anabolic steroids, SARMs, and peptides, the latter two bring more interesting for this case as various ones target, say, joint damage and help repair them

I know a bunch of triathletes who look like that despite not using PEDs. They do, however, treat their bodies like temples and have the most rigorous diets I've ever seen.

Same here, but there's no sense trying to convince the people here that.

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