JJ Virgin breaks down three pillars of daily movement: NEAT (8,000+ steps), resistance training 2-3 times weekly targeting major muscle groups, and HIIT twice weekly using methods like Tabata and the Norwegian 4x4. She prioritizes them in that order and adds yoga and Zone 2 cardio as supporting work.
Every day I want you to move more, right? Get that NEAT in. Get at least 8,000 steps daily. And more is better. And bonus points if you wanna throw on a Weight Best just to help you burn more calories. You moving more, fidgeting, everything else can add up to another 800 to 2,000 calories a day. It's huge. Then I want you to do that resistance training and I want you to get in minimally 2 times a week for each body part, push, pull, hip and thigh hinging up to 3 times a week. Now, you could do that where you're splitting the routine, so you're doing 4 days or, or 6 days a week of resistance training, but you're hitting each body part 2 to 3 times a week. So upper body pushing, upper body pulling, and hip and thigh. Why? Because I want you to build more muscle to boost that metabolism, improve your bones, and improve your insulin sensitivity. And remember, you're working in that range probably somewhere in the 6 to 15 rep range, multiple sets so that you're building muscle in there. The lower rep range is going to build you more strength. But if you don't feel comfortable doing really heavy, then go to the little higher rep range. The other thing that I want you to do is some HIIT training 2 days a week. HIIT training is that high-intensity interval training where you go all out, then recover, all out, then recover. And I want you to do that 2 days a week. When people tell me I'm doing HIIT every day, I'm like, no, you're not. If you're really doing HIIT correctly, you can't. There's a couple different ways to do it. You could do a 1:1, which is, you know, 30 to 60-second increments of hard followed by the same amount of time of easy. That's kind of my go-to one. Today I did the Wingate one, which is 30 seconds all out and then 3.5 minutes recover. I'm doing that 4 times. There's also Tabata where you do 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds recover, or there is the Norwegian 4x4 named for the Norwegian cross-country team where you do 4 minutes of hard, 3 minutes active recovery. Again, if you're doing this correctly, you cannot do it every day because it's taxing you. I think an easy thing to do here is go, you know what, I'm going to do resistance training, full body, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I'll do HIIT training, maybe Tuesday, Thursday, and then restorative yoga on Saturday and a long zone 2-y type of thing on Sunday. And zone 2 again is where you can work out and you sound breathy and sexy, but that's the zone that you're in. That zone. It's not hard where you can't talk, you can still carry on a conversation, but it's a little challenging. So that's how I would put all of that together. The priority is NEAT, then resistance training, then HIIT training. And then bonus points if we can throw in that yoga and that zone 2. I think those are also very important. Now I'm putting mobility work in throughout as I do my warmups, my resistance training, by doing more full range and standing types of resistance training. But I love the focus mobility of yoga, cuz it also makes me work in all of the different planes too. I also love like yoga just cuz it, even though it's work and it can be hard, it's, it's, it feels like I'm moving things through and it's helping me recover better as well. So every day I want you to think, what am I gonna do today to move? Right? So you're moving on a regular basis, but you're doing all sorts of different things. So that it's helping your body avoid injury, cross-train, and continue to progress.
