Excerpt from "Staying Fit with No Gym in Sight" on "Mr Money Mustache" Blog

As a start, you could think of your body as having five groups:

• Legs: squats
• Back: rows
• Chest and triceps (your “pushing muscles”): bench press
• Upper Back and biceps (any time you find yourself “pulling”): curls
• Core (all the complex muscles that hold you together at the middle): calisthenics

Now, how will you overload each group at least a little bit, every day or two?

If you like to go to a gym, and you use the free weight room instead of the inefficient cardio stuff, great. Through my teens and 20s, I was on this plan and it went well. But after getting married, then becoming a father, I found that long stretches of time would pass as I became complacent and made excuses. This is not great – to improve from wherever you are now, you need every muscle group to be blasted down with reasonable exertion (enough to cause at least a tiny bit of soreness) – every week.

To translate the vague concept of muscle groups into practical exercises you can do in many places, here’s a guide of my favorite exercises. You can look these up anywhere to get the basics of how to do each movement safely. For example, Google “How to Do Squats”.

Legs:

• Squats (with just your own weight when getting started. Then with barbells, or one-legged if no barbells available)
• Deadlifts
• Jumping on or off of anything (including boxes like this one)
• Running up and down stairs
• Sprinting around anywhere
• Urban Parkour-style hooliganism with friends when visiting any city
• Note that my daily cycling doesn’t count as a real leg exercise, since it’s a heart-building rather than muscle-building exercise.

Back:

• Pullups from any bar or overhanging surface. You can assist yourself with your legs if you’re not yet strong enough to do real pull-ups.
• Barbell or dumbell rows
• Pulling any heavy item from the ground to your chest while you’re bent over.
• Snow shoveling, digging trenches, chopping wood, moving bags of concrete
• And anything else that feels like hard work is probably good for your back.
• The Deadlift, mentioned under “Legs”, is also great for your lower back.
  But build this strength up slowly if you’re untrained – we’ve all heard stories about unfit people who “throw out their backs” when lifting something after years of deadly inactivity. The goal here is to make your back unbreakable – for life.

Chest and Triceps:

• the Clean and Press (lift a barbell from the ground to over your head – my second favorite exercise in the world after squats).
• bench press
• dumbbell press
  (these first three are generally only if I’m lucky enough to be at home)
• dips
• pushups
• On the road, the barbells are unavailable so I try to increase to 100 pushups per day, and using any available parallel surface, inside corner of a kitchen countertop, or pair of posts for dips.
• To increase resistance, you can get a friend or loved one to sit on your back during pushups: 8 insanely hard pushups are better for you than 50 easy ones.

Core: 

The benefit of doing real-world exercise (especially sprinting) instead of lame treadmills at the gym, is that it forces you to flex and stabilize all your abdomen and oblique muscles and make them stronger. But you can still target the core directly with a few of my favorites:

• Planks (hover your body flat and still with only forearms and toes touching the ground for 60-300 seconds)
• Leg-raises while hanging from a bar, tree branch, or anything else
• Twisting or jumping motions of any sort
• Situps and abdominal crunches

Important note: core and abdominal muscles do not help you lose abdominal fat any faster than any other exercise. The fastest way to lose fat (after fixing your diet) is to accelerate calorie burn, which means triggering muscle growth. So if you want better abs, do squats.