A four-week full-body home workout with no equipment

Most home workout plans fail for the same reason: they are built to look impressive on the page rather than to be repeated on a Tuesday when you are tired. This one is built the other way round.

Three sessions a week. Thirty minutes each. Five movements. Nothing to buy.

The five movements

Almost everything a beginner needs is covered by five patterns, and between them they train every major muscle group:

• —Bodyweight squat — legs, and the hip and ankle mobility to use them
• —Push-up, from the knees if you need to — chest, shoulders, triceps
• —Reverse lunge — one leg at a time, which is how you actually walk and climb
• —Glute bridge — the back of the hips, which sitting all day switches off
• —Plank — the trunk, braced rather than crunched

You are not missing anything important. Add movements later because you want to, not because a plan told you a beginner needs eleven exercises.

The four weeks

Do the same session three times a week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or whatever three days you will actually keep. Walk on the days between.

Week 1 — find the floor

Two rounds of:

1. 01Squat — 8 reps
2. 02Push-up — as many as you can do with a straight back, then stop
3. 03Reverse lunge — 6 each leg
4. 04Glute bridge — 12 reps
5. 05Plank — 20 seconds

Rest as long as you need between rounds. The goal this week is to finish, not to suffer.

Week 2 — add a round

Three rounds of the same thing, same numbers. Nothing else changes. If week 1 left you sore for three days, repeat week 1 instead — soreness is information, and the plan is not the boss of you.

Week 3 — add reps

Three rounds:

1. 01Squat — 12 reps
2. 02Push-up — one more than your best set in week 2
3. 03Reverse lunge — 8 each leg
4. 04Glute bridge — 15 reps
5. 05Plank — 30 seconds

Week 4 — add difficulty, not weight

Same numbers as week 3, but slower. Three seconds down on every squat, lunge and push-up. This is the part people skip and it is the part that works: a squat taken down over three seconds is meaningfully harder than the same squat dropped into, and you did not buy anything to make it so.

How to make it harder after that

This is the question that decides whether a home programme lasts three months or three years. You have four levers before you ever need equipment:

• —Tempo. Slow the lowering phase. Three seconds, then five.
• —Range. Squat deeper. Let your chest touch the floor on the push-up. Elevate your front foot in the lunge.
• —Pauses. Two seconds at the bottom, where it is hardest and where you have no momentum to hide behind.
• —One limb instead of two. Split squats, then one-leg glute bridges. Halving the base is the biggest jump available without a dumbbell.

Use them in that order. By the time all four are exhausted you will be strong enough that buying a pair of dumbbells is an obvious decision rather than a hopeful one.

What to do about the flat downstairs

Two practical notes for training in an Indian apartment, because both come up constantly:

Burpees and jumping jacks are loud. Ten mountain climbers do the same job for your heart rate and your neighbours will never know. And you need less floor than you think — roughly six feet by six feet, which is a moved tea table in most living rooms.

The part that is not the workout

Three honest things, in the order they matter:

Turning up beats optimising. The best programme is the one still happening in March. Nothing on this page is worth changing your three days for.

Protein is probably your gap. Most Indian vegetarian diets land around 40 to 55 grams a day; someone training regularly wants closer to 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight. That gap is why people train hard for two months and see less than they should.

Sleep decides how much of this you keep. Nothing in a programme survives five hours a night for long.

When a coach is worth it

Everything above works on your own. What it cannot do is see you.

The commonest reason a home programme quietly stops working is not the programme — it is that the squat has been drifting for three weeks, or the push-up is being done from a sagging back, and nobody has said so. That is the one thing a video cannot do and a live class can.

If you want eyes on it, take the self-assessment — it is free, it takes a few minutes, and it will tell you where you are actually starting from.