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The Five Basic Exercises (5BX) Plan is an exercise program developed for the Royal Canadian Air Force by Bill Orban in the late 1950s.

The Royal Canadian Air Force asked Orban to develop a fitness program for their pilots, a third of whom were not considered fit to fly. In response to this brief he created the 5BX (5 Basic Exercises) plan. The plan was innovative in two respects. Firstly, it did not require access to specialized equipment. Many Air Force pilots were located in remote bases in northern Canada, with no access to these facilities, so it was important to offer a means of keeping fit without their use. Secondly, the plan only required 11 minutes per day to be spent on the exercises. Orban had noticed when testing oxygen intake in Illinois that long periods of exercise did not necessarily lead to significant improvement. This led him to the conclusion that the intensity of exercise was more important that the amount of time spent on it. This aspect of the plan drew a negative reaction from others in the field but the 5BX program proved its worth. 23 million copies of the booklet were sold to the Canadian public and it was popular around the world, being translated into 13 languages. Orban, as a public servant, received no additional income from the success of the plan.

The 5BX Plan is composed of six charts arranged in increasing order of difficulty. Each chart is composed of five exercises which are performed within 11 minutes. As you progress within the system the number of each type of exercise that must be performed increases and the difficulty of each exercise increases. The 5BX plan was developed for men. A corresponding program was developed for women under the name XBX (Ten Basic Exercises)