I don't suggest that my (old) workout routine would be suitable to anybody else, but since you started a thread about resistance training.
I have in my old age and career stress got quite sedentary so don't confuse this with information about me now. But, I have at a couple points been in quite good shape. My main activity was caving, which is mostly about musculo-skeletal and mental endurance, but flexibility, coordination and some strength.
After following the typical path that many late teen and early 20s guys follow when they make their first adventures into the psychological hall-of-mirrors that is (or at least was) the tyical weight room, I eventually realized that resitance training to get big or truly 'powerful' strong did not serve me and my interests. For one thing I don't have the body for it, for another some joint problems that heavy workouts continually irritated/reinjured, and lastly, being Arnold does not help in a tight cave passage or on a 29-hour long caving trip.
For my purposes, I found my best resistance workout was about once per week, and lasted about 2 hours maybe up to 2.5 hours. I did all muscle groups in one session, generally striving to do three sets of each exercise, but for exercises that were 'auxillary' workouts of muscle groups two sets would suffice. At least 15 reps on 1st set but striving more toward 20, and slightly less on second and third set with slightly more weight. Probably never did more than 60% of 1RM; in general I was probably more in the 45% range. It may sound 'woosy' to never lift anything 'heavy,' i.e., never lift anything that really strains you, but having observed weight room culture, weight lifters and studied the stuff a good bit, I have concluded that lifting heavy weight is just about as useless as tits on a boar.
Go ahead and try to do ALL muscle groups (three variant workouts for the main muscle groups chest/back/gluts/quads/abs/lower back and at least two for the more distal muscle groups bi/tri/forearm/soleus, etc.) for 2 hours and tell me how exhausted you are after ward.
This is obviously the exact opposite of what 95% of resistance routines advise: 3 to 5 sets doing as close to 1RM as you can and striving for 6, 5, 3 reps or something like that.
If you are a powerlifter with hundreds of hours in the weight room, excellent form, and a good basic fitness level, those high %1RM workouts are great to build power. But if you are an average guy/gal it is most likely doing you wrong in a number of ways: 1. not building cardio or muscle endurance; 2. not giving a balanced metabolic workout; 3. possibly even promoting cardiac problems; 4. setting you up mentally for a path that you are not really going to culminate; 5. setting you up for increased risk of injury; and 6. via points 4 and 5, setting you up to burnout.
If you think about what our ancestors did during most of our natural history, lifting truly heavy weight was rarely ever part of it. Lifting moderate or even low/moderate weight repeatedly, for prolonged periods, along with walking/jogging/running for prolonged periods were CONSTANT parts of our natural history.
