New Years 2023 Announcement: BWF Primer Follow-along Event + BWSF Routine Soft-Launch!

@thomm Glad it passes the initial vibe check!!

Deffo trying to rest and recoup as hard as possible hehe. spending time with fam, playing guitar, eating real good food, and most importantly not thinking at all about courseworks, dissertations or clinical placements!
 
@dontdosadness Having started the RR about 6 months ago I concur that it is a bit difficult to start with it. There’s a lot of material to go through just to figure out what you should be doing.

With that said, I really like the little flow charts to illustrate progressions. Those are golden when you want to add some challenge to your routine.
 
@dontdosadness 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Been doing RR for a year and my own modified version for 4 months. Modified as in: I’ve actually stopped doing dips and added handstand progression for overhead push exercise, so I welcome this change and will probably add pike push up to my routine. I also added banded adductor and abductor exercise.

I’ll keep doing the current RR core triplets thought. Birddog and deadbug don’t really work for me.
 
@dontdosadness Hello!

Is there already any app with ready routine and progressions? It's much much easier for me when I have everything in one place including links to videos, timer and history.

Will there be in future more progressions with rings? Right now I found them only in push-ups.

Me and my friend are starting our journey with calisthenic and already bought necessary equipment for pull-ups and dips including rings. One and the most important (power tower) will come this week.
Today I checked up on Reddit and found this thread. I'm a bit disappointed because right now Recommended Routine is no longer recommended 😐

I'm not sure what we should do now. Stick to our plan of doing RR or drop it and go straight to BWSF routine.
Maybe someone is in similar situation here?
 
@sebum For pull-ups and rows they are identical to being done with a bar, that is why they are not listed as separate progressions. They are a much harder progression for push-ups and dips, but dips are not in the program as standard.

You will still have a use for your rings in this routine, because you can use them for pull-ups, rows and eventually push-ups, so that's 3 out of 8 exercises. If you choose to do ab-wheels instead of deadbugs, you can do rollouts on rings as a substitute for ab-wheels, so that's 4 out of 8. Then if you choose to sub dips out for pike push-ups (would not recommend), then that can get eventually up to 5 out of 8 exercises.

So do not fret, rings are more or less as useful in this program as they were in the RR.

And to address your initial question, no there's no app at the moment, sorry!
 
@sebum Following the RR, I have been using the "8x3 : bodyweight fitness" app (free). It has the RR workout saved. You can choose your progression on each exercises (there is information, sometime videos). You can "record" your session (I don't know if you can log it afterwards): it tells you which exercises to do next as soon as you log your repetition for each set. There is a global timer, rest time countdown and you can set timers during exercises. For now -as I started a few weeks ago - I find it useful to follow and integrate the RR. I am not sure on the long term as I don't think there is a lot of flexibility if you want to customize your routine.
 
@abigailv You can feel free to not use the routine, the RR is still available in the wiki. I, in my capacity as 'this dude', won't be offended at all!

I've passed by every detail of this routine (bwsf) and the last (primer) by every other active mod, including Steven, and the routine replacing the RR was approved by them all. I don't make any move or any change on the sub without making that known to the other mods and making space for comments and feedback.

If you are feeling incredulous about my qualifications to be designing these programs, I also have an undergraduate degree in Sport and Exercise Science, am halfway through a masters degree in physical therapy, have been training for about 10 years now, am a qualified personal trainer and sports massage therapist and I was one of the three major contributors to the 2017 update to the RR.

I am certain you are also able to make your own personal individual assessment about the program and if you think it is worse, or you for any reason don't like it, you are totally free to not do it nor recommend it to your peers!
 
@dontdosadness Ok, pushback time. Most changes are sound and long coming, but some are a matter of preference and others are a step back. Long story short: keep the good changes, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The core work. You basically removed it while pretending that you didn't. What you have left is less of a core workout than the McGill Big 3, which I do daily on top of the RR. It's fine to remove the core portion if you think it's not needed (many do), but it's a sacrifice that not everyone will get behind.

RR also contains the honest recommendation to integrate barbells when possible. You can't work the lower back properly with bodyweight only, so "just do deadlifts". Elsewhere in this discussion you write something to the effect that letting the lower back fall behind the rest of the body is fine. Are you absolutely sure about that? I'll keep doing my deadlifts, thank you very much. That recommendation is not there without a reason, and it shouldn't be removed without a reason.

Pairs and triplets are a very useful way to save time (they don't make the workout longer like you mentioned here, on the contrary). You want to remove them for the sake of "simplicity"? They are not that hard to understand. I know I can continue to do them, but I also think newcomers should continue to learn about them. I'm glad I did.

I also doubt that you made the whole thing "shorter and easier to read". No offence, but you're not a very laconic writer, to put it politely.

In general, I'm opposed to another be-all-end-all routine written by a single character, with all the attached idiosyncrasies (I think that stomach vacuums are better than your precious deadbugs, how do you like that? :D). The RR in its current form with obvious mistakes (like 1,3,7) fixed, with information on good practices, sound training principles and tips on tweaking it to one's preference is FINE.

There is no one-size-fits-all routine. We all end up following the discussions, asking for advice and tweaking the RR to our liking and goals. The RR serves as a scaffolding for that and an educational piece, a crash course on the basic information on strength training. Replace the RR with a "perfect" routine and you lose all that.

Don't get me wrong, you offer many improvements. But don't throw away the "wisdom of the crowd", because it doesn't fit into your very bestest perfect routine. And don't push your preferences to replace sound alternatives.
 
@tetelestei
  1. Nowhere in the routine did I say you weren't allowed to do more or different core work. In fact its perfectly fine and encouraged and if i did not make that clear enough, ill happily go back over it and make the changes to do so. The standard recommendation is just what id call the minimum, with the best bang for buck in my professional opinion. If you personally want to do mcgills big 3 or do vacuums instead of deadbugs or 5 different core exercises that fit your preferences and goals, you are absolutely free to do that and you won't get in trouble for it by any higher authority.
  2. If you look in the Squat and Posterior Chain progression listed, you will find barbell squats and romanian deadlifts as a progression path. This has not been removed as you've stated. So in the event you do the routine, you can actually keep on doing those deadlifts, you're welcome very much! :)
  3. You might have liked paired sets but an equal number of people find them unnecessarily confusing and don't like them and it has acted as a barrier of understanding to start, which is one of the biggest things tackled to change by this program. However, I will definitely add a part into the 'program modification' section more formally introducing them as a concept if one wants to save time. Thank you for highlighting this for me.
  4. You are free to doubt that it is easier to read but so far every single person besides you that i have heard from on the discord server, in this comment section and that I have shown it to personally during its development has said as much in favour of it. I am aware this comment will likely invite some stragglers to chime in and say "I dislike your writing style too, actually!" But the fact of the matter is the overwhelming majority are seeing it as an improvement.
  5. The 'crash course' you're describing has not gone away. It has been spread out across the 14 buildup days of the primer and this routine to make it more accessible/reduce the barrier to entry. No information on training theory has been lost in the move to these two routines, they've just been spread out over a longer period of time to be more easily digestible. And you may disagree with that, and that's fine.
  6. This is not intended to be a 'perfect' or 'very bestest' routine, and nothing you just described about the discussion and tweaking process is not applicable to this routine in the exact same way as the RR. This program too can be a scaffold for those that want it to be customizable, but for those that do not, the overwhelming view from the feedback ive receieved over its development is that what is written here is a better basic, generalized training template for mass consumption.
  7. In general, the RR is still available on the wiki. You are free to not do or look at or acknowledge this program or recommend it to your peers. To say the program has 'replaced the RR' is not nearly as fatalistic as it sounds and is ultimately just symbolic of putting it about 10 lines above the RR in the wiki and it will be the routine that the active mod team has agreed they will recommend to users. You can rest assured that none of the valuable info stored in the RR has been lost. If the wisdom of the crowd dictates that the RR is indeed better, people will simply continue to recommend it instead. You certainly can do so if you think the program has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and it will be of no consequence or harm to me. If indeed a vast of majority of people agree with you, then it will become clear that it would be better to return to the RR as the standard recommendation but we will have to wait and see!
Hope that all makes sense and if you have any further questions do feel free to shoot them out in response, but maybe work on your tone of delivery as your initial comments came off perhaps a bit more snarky and unnecessarily combative/hostile than I'm sure you intended.
 
@dontdosadness I'm not being "snarky", I'm being matter-of-fact. Just because I don't punctuate every sentence with an exclamation mark, doesn't mean I'm impolite.

It's arguably more impolite to write a wall of text without addressing the main issue, responding to a bunch of things I didn't say and end it with a passive aggressive comment on how I'm welcome to have all of my other confusions clarified, and by the way let me educate you on how to be more courteous.

It's dismissive and patronizing. Content is more important than "tone of delivery" and a polite tone can be disrespectful. I was hostile enough to summarize my central point twice, but you were too unconfrontational to address it.

The problem is that your routine will in fact replace the RR, as the only thing that newcomers read. Therefore any arbitrary changes that are due to your preference matter, because you are burying the work of previous contributors. You don't have to remove it to bury it. And if you make changes that aren't universally agreed upon, that's a problem.

Your defense of these changes is flimsy. Pairs are confusing to many people? You're making this up. They are explained perfectly well. Your "inclusion" of barbells is clearly not what I meant, the honest recommendation now gone, and you pretend that the rest of the flowchart is just as good as weighted RDLs. That's just clearly wrong and what I believe to be bad advice.

Another problem is that you create a false dichotomy between leaving the RR unchanged and pushing your own routine. You cite the support of all the people that prefer what you did to the RR as it is now. Guess what: I'm among them.

tl;dr This is what the discussion here lacks. A third option I have outlined and you conveniently ignored. I think it's much better to simply fix the RR, without giving it the full Captain Nachos treatment.
 
@tetelestei Weird how you would assume that previous contributors didn’t have any input and didn’t support whatever changes were made.

Also weird that you’re making a lot of assumptions about how easy it is for others (especially inexperienced beginners) to understand the RR when it has some things that are very unfamiliar to people with passing basic knowledge of fitness and fitness routines. The original RR weighted recommendation didn’t even make a ton of sense considering that strictly in terms of strength and hypertrophy progression, if you have access to a barbell you should just be doing as much work on it as possible. As a strength specific foundational routine, the bwsf addresses this at least as well.

There also isn’t a false dichotomy about anything lol. The dichotomy is either “keep the RR as is” or “introduce a new routine (more or less similar to the RR)”. The bwsf is (if you want to think about it in simple terms) a simpler and more straightforward unpaired RR. All the exercises are the same or more widely recommended for reliable strength & hypertrophy gains, and the basic structure and goals are the same. Just seems like you’re taking personal offense to newer routine supplanting a functional but at times confusing older routine.
 
@jkitten The RR is not only a routine, but also a page with a wealth of information that is in danger of being archived and buried. That's where the false dichotomy comes from.
 
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