Why This 2x2x2 Workout Works Better Than Hours at the Gym

You wanna work out, but you just can't seem to find the time. I've got you. It's called my 2x2x2 workout. Here it is. It's 2 exercises, 2 times, and 2 times a week. I've divided the body into 4 different parts. We've got upper body pushing, upper body pulling. We've got power core, and we've got hip and thigh hinging. Now here's the reality. When you're doing things the way I'm gonna show you how to do it, your power core is always involved. So we can put that one aside. But what we're gonna focus on the 2x2x2 is hitting each of those 3 areas, 2 exercises done 2 times and 2 times a week. It's easy. Now I say it's easy. It's easy to implement and it's gonna be hard to do because you gotta challenge your muscles. This is for you if you are that person saying, I don't know when I can fit this in because here's what's the coolest thing about the 2x2x2. You don't have to do all of it 2 days a week. You could do 2 exercises for pushing on Monday. Then on Tuesday, you could do 2 pulling exercises. Then on Wednesday, you could do 2 hip and thigh hinging. You could take Thursday off and start it all over again on Friday. See how this works? And so literally that could be done in 5 minutes a day. But the 2x2 workout by 2 is literally something that you can do in 20 minutes twice a week, or you can divide it and do a little bit each day. Doesn't matter as long as you do it and you stay consistent, cuz it's the consistency of challenging your muscles that makes the difference over time. The other thing that's important here is you have freedom here and it's really based on your time. So I'm gonna show you 2 exercises for upper body pushing, then 2 exercises for upper body pulling, and then 2 exercises for hip and thigh hinging. Again, you may decide that you're gonna do them Monday and Thursday, all of them. Or you may decide that you're gonna do pushing one day, pulling the next, hip and thigh hinging the next, and repeat. It doesn't matter as long as you get them all done twice in a week and that you have at least a day break. So if you push on Monday, do not push on Tuesday, push again on Wednesday or Thursday. One other thing you can do if you want to do them all in one day, but you wanna save time, you're gonna have about 2 minutes or so of a break in between your exercise. So if you do a set of pushups, give yourself 2 minutes, even up to 3 minutes, of a break before you do it again. What are you gonna do during that time? Well, you could check email, but the other thing that you could do is you could do a pulling exercise while you're recovering from a pushing exercise, or you could do a hip and thigh hinging while you're recovering. So what you can do is what's called supersetting. So when you're taking a break from one exercise, you do the other exercise. A superset is when you're doing oppositional exercises. So what you wouldn't do is say 2 pushing exercises rotated, you'll get too fatigued. You need that little rest of the 2-ish minutes. But if you want to vary between those, you can do that. It will save you even more time. So the first thing we're gonna start with is upper body pushing. Now, my favorite exercise here is a pushup. And before you tell me, I can't do a pushup, unless you have something like carpal tunnel or something going on with elbow tendonitis, you can do a pushup. Just vary it based on where you're starting from. Remember, the goal here is to challenge your muscles. So that means We're going to meet you where you are. You could do a push-up against a wall, right? And that might be where you start. As long as you're challenging your muscles, that's fine. You can do a push-up against a bench. And again, that might be where you start from, and you can do it against a bench and make it even easier still. By going onto your knees, or you can do a push-up against the floor. Now I'm going to show you variations on the floor as well. And here's what's great, you can do these anywhere, right? Well, nearly anywhere. So if you are in great condition, you could start up on your hands and toes. Eventually, whatever's going on, you want to get to this point and you want to get to this point and do a good set. And we're working right now on a set of somewhere between, say, 6 reps and 15 reps. With these sets, if you can get to 15, it feels easy, make it harder. If you can't get to 6, make it a little bit easier. So that's the rule of thumb here. So for a push-up here, This would be good form. My hips are slightly elevated. I'm doing a full range of motion. I'm not sagging in my back. If that is too hard, you can drop your knees. If that is still too hard, you can walk your knees in. So those are all the different variations of a push-up. Bottom line is you're doing some kind of pushing exercise. This is working your chest. And the front of your shoulders and your tricep. Form is everything. Don't sacrifice form to go to the harder one, but you also want to challenge your muscles. So you should be able to work somewhere in that 6 to 15 rep range. But if you can't get even to 6, go to the easier one until you build up. Next up, we are going to do an overhead press. I love an overhead press because it loads your spine. Just like the push-up was great because it's using my core a lot, what's going to happen with a, with an overhead press done correctly where we're standing is you're gonna load your spine when you push up and the weights are overhead. Bonus points if you happen to have one of these PowerPoints at home and you can actually stand on the PowerPoint plate and do your overhead presses and pull in a lot more of your nervous system to stabilize you. Now, just a case in point, cuz I've had some of the haters love to point this out. When I'm demonstrating an exercise, I don't demonstrate with the heaviest weight I can handle. I'm just gonna show you because behind the scenes I'm probably doing a lot of these, but I wanna show you in good form how to do this. So what I do differently with an overhead press is I'm not out here. Why? Because that can impinge your shoulder. I'm starting here, thumbs pointed towards the shoulders. I've got my abs, my belly button pulled to my spine, but I'm not tilting my hips under. I'm in a little bit of a squat here, and then I'm going to push up. I should be able to see the front of the dumbbell in front of me, but I'm not pushing it out in front of me. I'm pushing it up. And up. So see how that looks. What I'm working here is my upper back and my shoulders, the front and middle shoulder, and my triceps. Anytime you're pushing, you're using your triceps. So what you don't want to do is arch your back. You don't want to overly curl in. You want to have a neutral spine as you're doing this. Belly button lifted, slightly bent. There you go. That is an overhead press. Now, if you needed to, to start, you could do these seated, but again, if possible, I love to do these standing to pull in more of your body, right? And to incorporate some balance. As you advance, you could even do a one-legged to pull in more balance or stand on a Power Plate. Next, we are gonna move into upper body pulling exercises. The first thing that I'm gonna focus on, and whenever we're doing pulling exercises, We're gonna use your bicep. And with the push, you use your tricep. With the pull, you use your bicep. We're gonna do a bent-over row. And so what you're gonna do is, I always say, put your hands on your knees as if you're a shortstop, stick your glutes out, extend your spine, feel like you have a stick coming up through your head so you're, you're not dropping your head, and then drop your hands straight down. And then you're gonna rotate up as if you're cupping your ribs when you pull up. So as you do this, you might feel a little bit of a stress, a stretch in your hamstrings. You'll feel your quads working. You've got your belly button to spine, back is extended, and you want to feel like you're pinching your shoulder blades together at the top. And when I do this, where I'm what's called supinating, as I lift up, it actually pulls in more of the bicep. Now this is working my rear deltoids, my rhomboids, my lats, my biceps. So back of the shoulders, lats, biceps. If you have any issues with your back where you're not able to be in that position, I have a modification for you and it is called a one-arm row. Now likely you've seen a one-arm row done where someone will put their knee up on a bench to do it. I think that is not the best way to do it because it throws your spine off a little bit. So here's how I teach you to do a one-arm row. I want you to stand over the bench, put your hands together, and then all you're going to do is take one hand off. Your knees are slightly bent, your back is extended, your belly button's pulled towards your spine, and then we're going to mimic the exact same movement. If you're doing a one-arm row this way rather than that two-arm bent-over row, obviously you're not going to pull in as much of your core because the hand is using it, but you don't want to sag onto the core. You want to lift up to the hand, you want to lift off of it. Likely you'll be able to use a little bit more weight. You want to make sure you're keeping your head level, your whole back and spine is extended. Don't let your head drop. And same feeling here as you're pulling your shoulder blade back, as if you're pinching the other shoulder blade. And again, you're not sagging down here, lifting off that hand. So that is what you do with the one-arm row, and you just alternate back and forth. So that is your bent-over row. Your modification is your one-arm row. You could do this using a chair, you don't have to have a bench. Now the next thing We're gonna do is what's called a high pull. It's a better version of something called an upright row cuz it's not as problematic for your shoulders. And what you wanna think of when you do this is again, knees are soft, you've got your belly button lifted, your spine extended, and you're gonna lift your elbows, your thumbs up, and your elbows follow. They come along for the ride is what I like to say. So you're really guiding up with your thumbs, right? And your elbows are coming up. Your thumbs are the things that come up the highest. What's happening when I'm doing this? I am working my upper back traps. I'm working my shoulder girdle, my shoulder girdle and around my deltoids. And I'm also working my bicep. So let me show you how this looks with dumbbells. This can also be done with a band. So I'm coming up. Now you could also do this if you need to with only one dumbbell. I prefer whenever possible to use two dumbbells because that way if one arm's stronger, I'm not gonna baby the weak arm because I always wanna focus on the weakest link here, right? And not get imbalanced. Okay, again, the way you know that you're doing this well— if you're just starting out, the biggest thing you want to learn is your form. Once you've got your form down, when you're doing your 2 working sets, you should feel like when you're getting to the last one that if you did another one, your form would start to go. You should feel like you're slowing down a little bit. You don't need to go to failure, You don't ever want to go to technical failure or full failure. I call technical failure when just when your form starts to feel like it's going a bit, you're slowing down. That's the point you're trying to get to. Next up are your hip and thigh hinging exercises. Now, one of the things that I love here is to do a squat because it is the most functional exercise that we have. I like to say you train to get better. At life, not trained to get better at training. And if you look at all the different things that you have to do in life that involve a squat, everything from getting out of the car, getting out of the chair and getting off the toilet, it's really important. And the thing I love here is besides the fact that it's working your quads and your glutes, it's also really engaging your core as well. So the important thing when you're doing a squat, your feet are about hip width apart. I feel a little better when I turn my feet out just a little bit, but I'm making sure that that's happening at my hips and hips, knees, toes are all in the same direction. I'm not doing this or that. And then I'm gonna think of sitting back as if I'm sitting back into a chair and then just coming back up again. So it's the movements initiating now by my glutes, and then I'm coming up and I see people not really finish these.. I wanna come all the way up and finish, and I finish and squeeze. So I'm coming all the way down. And how low should you go? As low as you can go. I will sometimes use a TRX to help me go lower because I've got some old joint injuries and joint replacements from dumb things as a teen. So it is hard for me to go much lower than this, but this is where you wanna start, is just body weight only. See how you do. Once you've got the body weight down, next thing you can do is add some weight to it. There's a variety of ways you can add weight. One of the easiest things to do is just hold onto a dumbbell or two. You can put 'em on your shoulders, you can hang 'em down, just don't swing 'em, or hold it in front of you and then just add the weight and go. So Here is a squat, again guiding back with my hips, all the way down as low as you can go. And this here, the way I'm holding it, this is known as a goblet squat. Again, a variation on that is just to hold them down here. Realize if they're down here, you're not having to move move that weight as much as if you did if you were up here, or to put them up on your shoulders. So whatever you want to do to add that weight is fine. So that is a simple squat. And again, these are something that you can do from anywhere. The next one is a step up, and the reason I like a step up is because this is something we have to do in a lot of different places. So I'm going to show you how to do this. This is something you could do if you have a bench. I like to have a 90-degree at my hip and knee. Um, if you're just starting out, you can do it a little lower. So these little benches that you can get on Amazon are great. So maybe if you're just starting, you want to just start here, that's fine. But what's great about these is it's also going to pull in some balance. So I'm going to show you how to do it and then how to add weight to it. So what I like to do with this, with this is just when you're starting, you're just going to start with easy little taps. Now the important thing with the step-up is that I am not changing feet. I'm keeping all the work on this left leg. So I'm standing Up with the left. Now ideally, because part of this is also a balance exercise, is ideally you stop even having that foot touch. So you have to work a lot more on balance. And then as you get stronger, you can do two things. Lift it up a little higher. Again, my goal is that right angle at the knee and hip, right? So this is the next, the next evolution. And then the next thing you do is add some weights. And the big thing here is that you are not swinging. So you do it all to one side. Once you've worked that side, maybe 15 reps, 10 reps, whatever it is, then you go to the other side. Now, as you progress, once you've gotten up to that right angle, then you can just continue to increase your weights. So that is your 2x2x2. I just gave you two options for each body part. We started with upper body pushing, push-ups and overhead press. Then we went to upper body pulling, bent of a row, high pull, and then we went to squats and step-ups. Now there are a lot of different options, and one of the things we'll include with this training is other options, other choices for you. For upper body pushing, you can do things like dips. Upper body pulling can be a pull-down or a pull-up. Hip and thigh hinging, you could add in Bulgarian split squat, Romanian deadlifts, lunges. So there's a lot of other things, and especially there's other things if you have access to more equipment like cables or bands or free weights. But I didn't want to have that be a limiter for you. And I wanted you just to be able to get started. And I'll give you one other piece of advice on this. This is a great tool to have in your toolbox for when you're traveling. Recently, I was traveling through Egypt, which was super cool. And we were on a river cruise and literally the gym for the river cruise was about the size of a really big bathroom, maybe not even. And they had very few things and not really that much even in terms of free weights, no real space. And I used the 2x2x2 to make sure that I kept everything going while I was traveling. So this can be that thing that you keep in your hip pocket so that wherever you are, you make sure you get your workouts in. Or if you're one of those people who just hasn't found the time to exercise, This is the way that you can start to find the time. And my advice there is just decide Monday is pushing and Tuesday is pulling and Wednesday is hip and thigh hinging, and then start again and just keep doing it. Take one day off a week if you want to, or use that day for maybe, you know, a big zone 2 or HIIT training day, but just get yourself going. Consistency is what makes the biggest difference overall, not the amount. If you decide I'm I'm going to work out 3 hours a day, you probably won't do it. But if you say, hey, I can, I can add in 5 to 10 minutes a day, that will make the biggest difference long term. Here's the bottom line: if you want to fix your metabolism, take a muscle-first approach. This is going to help you build muscle, which is going to help you heal your metabolism and burn fat and achieve that great metabolic balance. If you'd like more of this, be sure to subscribe to the channel so you never miss a beat, and check out the download that I did for other options so that you can get these 2x2x2s incorporated into your life and start to improve that metabolism today.