About 5BX

5BX is an exercise program developed in the late 1950's for the Royal Canadian Air Force to improve the health and fitness of their pilots. One of the benefits of this program is that no equipment is required. Even pilots at remote northern bases were able to do these exercises and improve their health.

5BX stands for Five Basic Exercises.

These 5 basic exercises include some form of:

The exercise program consists of 6 different charts containing a variation of the 5 different exercises. Each chart has 12 different levels. Each higher level will have an additional rep or two for each of the 5 exercises. The exercises are performed each day, and every week or so you move up one level, increasing the number of reps of each exercise. Once the last level on a chart is completed, you move to the first level of the next chart where the difficulty of the exercises also increases.

Using pushups as an example, the first level of chart 1 has you do only 2 pushups on your knees. By the last level of chart 1 you are doing 13 push-ups on your knees. At that point you move to the first level of chart 2 where you start off doing 9 pushups, but now they are standard pushup. By the time you reach the last level of Chart 20 you will be doing 20 standard pushups. The same goes for the other 4 exercises.

The daily activity, well rounded exercises, and gradual increase in difficulty leads to an easy increase in overall fitness.

The development and publication of the program was paid for by taxpayers and is publicly available from many sources online under the fair use / fair dealing section of the Canadian Copyright Act In addition to an example of programming, the purpose of this webpage is to help someone track their progress with the 5BX program, or any training activity, not push the 5BX program itself... although it is very effective. Because of this I will not go over the whole program, but I will include several links about the exercise program including a link to the full pdf below. It is a short pamphlet with lots of useful tips so it is definitely worth a read.

As with all exercise programs... consult a doctor before beginning.

The Purpose of the WoodApps 5BX Web App

As mentioned, the program uses a variety of charts and levels of increasing reps to gradually increase fitness. Remembering what chart and level you are on is difficult. Also finding and reading the reps of each exercises off the table as you are in the middle of exercising is very difficult.

The main feature of the App is the ability to remember which level you are on and quickly see the number of repetitions required for each exercise, as well as a brief description of that exercise.

Other features include the following:

The program can also track other non-5BX exercises as well! Weights, Swimming, Gym programs... anything. If you decide to take a break from the 5BX program, or focus on something else for a while, you can keep using this app to track your progress and provide encouragement which is really handy.

Personally, I used 5BX daily to get back into shape, but once that happened I got back into kickboxing which I mostly tracked with the app. I would still do 5BX but not as often.

Other features will probably be added in the future as well.

Programming features

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