What would you suggest to someone who plain doesn’t like to do things with their body?
Maximize gains per unit of subjective effort! Turns out you can get a ton of benefit with very little time expended- like going from ‘nigh-bedridden arthritic old lady’ to ‘able to do deadlifts’ with 2 sets a day.
Strength training with progressive overload is probably the best for this kind of effort optimization. You won’t be running any marathons with this strategy, but you might find after a year that going up steps no longer hurts your knees, and that it’s been a while since your back felt weird.
Having a home “gym” helps a lot with sticking to this, because driving to an external gym to do <10 sets really doesn’t make much sense.
Equipment free bodyweight exercises can work for this, but they tend to be complicated and difficult to progress compared to ‘move progressively heavier thing’. It’s probably worth getting a decent adjustable bench (probably the kind that can roll, and that you can just stand up in a corner out of the way, like this one) and some adjustable dumbbells. Consider some padding for the floor too. This combo gives you a ton of options in very little space. Maybe add a pullup bar if you can manage it, but horizontal pulls (like bent over rows) with dumbbells will give you okay-ish transfer to vertical pulls.
If you pick a decent selection of motions that hit a wide range of muscle groups, and if you do just one set each time you come from the bathroom or kitchen, you’ll be able to do enough sets over time to get some serious strength increases.
(Just don’t hurt yourself; that is very anti-Gains.)
Maximize gains per unit of subjective effort! Turns out you can get a ton of benefit with very little time expended- like going from ‘nigh-bedridden arthritic old lady’ to ‘able to do deadlifts’ with 2 sets a day.
Strength training with progressive overload is probably the best for this kind of effort optimization. You won’t be running any marathons with this strategy, but you might find after a year that going up steps no longer hurts your knees, and that it’s been a while since your back felt weird.
Having a home “gym” helps a lot with sticking to this, because driving to an external gym to do <10 sets really doesn’t make much sense.
Equipment free bodyweight exercises can work for this, but they tend to be complicated and difficult to progress compared to ‘move progressively heavier thing’. It’s probably worth getting a decent adjustable bench (probably the kind that can roll, and that you can just stand up in a corner out of the way, like this one) and some adjustable dumbbells. Consider some padding for the floor too. This combo gives you a ton of options in very little space. Maybe add a pullup bar if you can manage it, but horizontal pulls (like bent over rows) with dumbbells will give you okay-ish transfer to vertical pulls.
If you pick a decent selection of motions that hit a wide range of muscle groups, and if you do just one set each time you come from the bathroom or kitchen, you’ll be able to do enough sets over time to get some serious strength increases.
(Just don’t hurt yourself; that is very anti-Gains.)