March, 2019 | Life Health Fitness

When There’s No Gym in Site, Bodyweight Workouts Have You Covered

What do you do when you’re on vacation and there’s no gym for miles around? You do a bodyweight workout, of course! Bodyweight exercises can build strength, but they mainly boost muscle endurance. However, you can modify bodyweight exercises to make them more challenging. With a few modifications, they can provide the progressive overload your muscles need to grow in size and strength. Plus, bodyweight workouts are ideal when you’re trying to stay fit with no equipment around. In fact, you can put together a quick but effective circuit workout that uses only your own bodyweight.

You can even kick the fitness benefits up a notch by adding cardio between bodyweight movements to elevate your heart rate and keep it high throughout your workout. Who doesn’t love cardio and strength rolled into a single, time-expedient session? Ready to get started?

Build a Bodyweight Circuit Workout

You can easily design a bodyweight workout for days you don’t have access to exercise equipment. The best equipment-free options for building strength/muscle endurance are triceps dips, push-ups, planks, and deep squats. If you don’t have weights available for squats, going deeper into the squat will make the exercise more effective. It’s helpful to have a chair or table to support your hands when you do triceps dips.

To keep your heart rate up, choose a cardio exercise to do between each bodyweight exercise. Cardio movements you can do with limited space include jumping jacks, butt kicks, high knees, squat jumps, mountain climbers, and burpees. For variety, alternate between the cardio exercises. These exercises provide cardiovascular benefits and an additional calorie burn.

Now, Get Started!

Once you’ve chosen your exercises, warm up by doing 5 minutes of dynamic exercises that stretch the muscles you’ll be working. The warm-up will also elevate your heart rate and raise your core body temperature. Never work muscles that are cold. After the warm-up, cycle through your chosen exercises. First, do 30 seconds of a bodyweight exercise. Then, 30 seconds of a cardio movement. Keep cycling back and forth through the exercises until at least 10 minutes have elapsed. If you’re doing the exercises with intensity, 15 minutes is enough to offer benefits. Once the workout is over, do a 5- minute cool down by doing the same exercise you did during the warm-up at an even lower intensity. With the warm-up and cool down, the entire workout should take around 20 minutes.

Since you’re not resting between exercises, you don’t need to exercise for 30 minutes or longer. Intensity matters more than duration for improving your fitness level. That’s why there’s a movement toward shorter workouts that are more intense. In fact, studies now show that more vigorous workouts are better for enhancing cardiovascular fitness than moderate-intensity exercise that’s longer in duration.

Benefits of Doing Bodyweight Circuits

The biggest benefit of bodyweight circuits is you are your own gym! No one can deny the benefits of using weights but when they aren’t available, you can always fire up a bodyweight circuit and get in shape wherever you are. This type of workout offers variety too. You choose the bodyweight and cardio exercises you use for your circuits.

The Bottom Line

Bodyweight circuits should dispel the notion that you need an expensive gym membership or fancy equipment to get a workout. Now, you have no excuse to skip a workout when you’re on vacation. You don’t even need much space to build muscle endurance and work your entire body. Keep this in mind when you travel but be prepared to sweat! Bodyweight circuits are fast-paced, sweaty endeavors, but they’re over before you know it! So, what are you waiting for?

References:

On Fitness. September/October 2011.

ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal: May/June 2013 – Volume 17 – Issue 3 – p 8-13. doi: 10.1249/FIT.0b013e31828cb1e8.

Mayo Clinic. “Is Body Weight Training Effective as a Strength Training Exercise?

Compound Exercise Benefits for Weight Loss

Why You Should Focus on Compound Exercises When You Strength Train

To build strength and muscle size, you must gradually increase the challenge your place on your muscles. Fitness experts refer to this as progressive overload, and it’s a fundamental tenet of strength training. If you ignore this principle, your workout becomes stagnant, and you stop making gains. If you’re serious about improving your strength and total body fitness, that’s not what you want.

Unfortunately, some people devote too much of their workout to cardiovascular exercise because they are not aware of the benefits of strength training. Training our muscles keeps them around longer because with age, we gradually lose muscle size and strength. This process begins after the age of thirty and accelerates once you hit mid-life. What you don’t use, you lose, and most forms of cardiovascular exercise don’t preserve muscle in the upper body and core. Strength training does that. So, the time you spend working your muscles against resistance is time well spent in terms of your future health.

However, there’s a caveat. Not all strength-training exercises are created equal. Some exercises offer more return for the time you spent doing them. These exercises are called compound exercises, and they’re the key to making big gains in strength and muscle size. Furthermore, because you be using more muscles at the same time it will increase the amount of energy used. After all, it take more any to move two muscles than it does to move one.

What is a Compound Exercise?

Compound exercises are strength-training moves that involve movement around more than one joint simultaneously. Compound movements also work more than one muscle group at the same time. Examples of compound exercises include deadlifts, push-ups, squats, dips, bent-over rows, military press, and bench press. For example, the main muscles you work when you bench press are the pectoral muscles in the chest, but the muscles in your triceps and shoulders are activated too. You get more bang for you buck when you perform compound movements.

In contrast, isolation exercises activate a single muscle group. They consist of movement around a single joint. Examples include biceps curls, leg extensions, lateral raises, and chest flies. These exercises offer benefits, but they shouldn’t make up the bulk of your workout. Compound exercises have benefits you won’t get from isolation movements.

What Are the Benefits of Compound Exercises?

Compound exercises are time expedient. Since you’re working multiple muscle groups, you don’t have to do as many sets or exercises to get a full-body workout. In fact, you can work your entire body by doing only a few, compound exercises. A few sets of deadlifts, squats, and bench press will work every muscle without taking a lot of time.

Another benefit of compound exercises is they are functional movements. In other words, compound exercises, like squats and deadlifts, train your leg muscles to work more effectively as a unit. Muscles don’t usually work independently of each other, and that’s where isolation exercises fall short. Shifting the focus to compound exercises translates into greater functionality when you do things around the house, like bending over to lift something heavy or squatting down to retrieve something off the floor. Compound exercises are also beneficial if you play sports. It’s a more “holistic” approach to getting strong.

Compound exercises also burn more calories because you’re working multiple muscle groups at the same time. The more muscles you put to work, the more energy stores your body has to tap in to. Compound exercises that work the large muscles in the lower body burn the most calories. So, deadlifts and squats are your friends if you’re trying to get lean and ripped. These are the exercises that get you stronger and leaner faster.

Some studies suggest that working large muscles groups against heavy resistance creates more of an anabolic effect relative to working smaller muscle groups with isolation exercises. In other words, targeting large muscle group with heavy weights stimulates the release of hormones, like testosterone and growth hormone, which fuel muscle growth. However, this is controversial. Not all studies support this idea. Yet it does appear that anabolic hormones are elevated for at least 15 minutes after a challenging strength training workout that emphasizes the large muscles in the lower body.

Compound Exercises

Chest

Bench Press
Push Ups

Back

Bent Over Barbell Row
Pull Ups

Abs

Plank
Bicycles

Shoulders

Overhead Press
Lateral Raise’

Leg

Squats
Lunge

The Bottom Line

Include isolation exercises in your strength-training routine but make the focus of your workouts compound exercises. A good ratio is 75% compound exercises to 25% isolation exercises. If you have muscle asymmetries where you’re more developed on one side than the other, isolation exercises on the underdeveloped side can help restore balance. But, overall, compound exercises are a strength and muscle-building ally to take advantage of. When you’re pressed for time, make all of your exercises compound movements to get the most benefits out of the time you have. Twenty or thirty minutes of compound exercises pack a lot more punch than an equivalent amount of isolation exercises. Take advantage of the benefits compound movements offer. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you see gains!

How To Start Plyometric Training At Home

Power Up Your Fitness with Plyometric Training

When you are pressed for time, space or financial resources plyometric training might be your best option. You can improve your strength, speed and burn fat by performing plyometric exercises at home. All you need is your bodyweight.

Examples of Plyometric exercises are squat jump,lateral jump and plyo push ups.

These exercises involves power and speed.

Strength training makes the muscles you work stronger but won’t necessarily make them more powerful. Power has a time component to it. It’s the amount of work your muscles can do in a specified period of time. If you’re strong, you can generate a lot of force but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can generate that force quickly. But, if you have powerful muscles, you can generate that force super fast. Think of basketball and volleyball players. They must have considerable power in their lower body to jump explosively into the air. How do you develop that kind of explosive power?

One way to boost power capabilities is to add plyometrics to your routine. What are plyometrics? They’re movements that stretch a muscle to store energy and then shorten or contract the muscle quickly to release that energy. An example of a simple plyometric move is squat jumps. To do a squat jump, you descend into a squat and then explosively propel your body upward toward the sky. If you dissected the movement, you would see that when you descend into a squat, the muscles in your legs store energy. When you launch into the explosive jump, the stored energy is released, and your body ascends into the air.

For a plyometric move to be effective, you have to release the stored energy quickly. You can’t descend into a squat and hold the position for a while before you jump. It’s an explosive move. Plyometric moves effectively boost your heart rate as well. So, you also get a cardiovascular workout if you do plyometric exercises for a sustained period of time. There’s another perk. Studies show that adding lower body plyometrics to a training routine may lower the risk of knee injuries, especially anterior cruciate ligament tears.

Beginner Plyometric Moves

The best way to add plyometrics to your routine, if you’ve never done them, is to begin with squat jumps on the floor. To do a squat jump, get into a squat position. Then, explosively jump into the air and land again in the same squat position. Repeat the movement for 20 or 30 seconds at first. You can gradually increase the time.

Another good, beginner plyometric exercise is lateral jumps. To do this exercise, place a pole or other object on the ground in front of you. Stand on one side of the pole. Then, descend into a squat and jump over the pole, landing in a squat position on the other side. Repeat for 20 to 30 seconds. This is a good movement for increasing lateral mobility too.

Another safe, beginning move is plyometric lunges. Here’s how to do it. Get into a lunge position with your right leg in front of you. As you descend into a lunge, explosively switch your legs so your left leg is in front when you land. Keep switching the leg in front as you do explosive lunges.

More Advanced Plyometric Moves

More advanced plyometric moves include box jumps where you jump onto boxes or risers of various heights. But, don’t attempt box jumps until you’ve done beginner plyometric moves for a few weeks. The risk of injury is higher when you’re jumping on and off a box. It takes strength, power, agility, and coordination to do it safely. Always start with a low box or riser and gradually raise the height as the movement becomes easier. Box jumps are an exercise athletes do to improve their vertical jump height. If you have health problems that preclude you from doing high-impact exercises, box jumps aren’t for you.

Upper Body Plyometric Exercises

Plyometrics aren’t just for your lower body. You can build power in your upper body with plyometric push-ups. It’s a tough move, so make sure you’ve mastered standard push-ups before trying a plyometric one. To do a plyometric push-up, get into a standard push-up position. Your hands should be slightly wider than your shoulders. Lower your body toward the ground in the classic, push-up manner. As you approach the floor, explosively push your body upward until your hands come off the floor. Land in a push-up position and repeat. You may only be able to do a few at first, but gradually work up to doing more.

Why is the Ability to Generate Power Important?

Having good power capabilities helps you perform better in sports that require jumping or sprinting. Plus, we lose strength as we age but power capabilities also decline. That’s one reason people become frail and chair bound later in life. It’s because they can’t generate enough power to rise out of a chair! Building muscle power and maintaining it throughout life is the key to healthy aging. Due to the intense nature of many plyometric exercises, they can help you preserve muscle strength, agility, and power.

Be Safe When You Do Plyometrics

Start with the easiest moves, like squat jumps, and work up to harder variations, like box jumps. Even if you never progress beyond squat jumps, you’ll still get benefits. Always start with a warm-up to avoid placing stress on cold muscles. You can even include plyometric moves between your strength-training exercises. What a way to challenge your body! Enjoy the benefits that plyometric moves offer.

References:

ACE Fitness. “Plyometrics: Controlled Impact/Maximum Power”

Int J Exerc Sci 2(2): 131-151, 2009.

National Strength and Conditioning Association. Volume 27, Number 2, pages 78-80.

Am J Sports Med. 1999;27:699-706. doi: 10.1177/03635465990270060301.

Short Summary:

Adult Hula Hoop

Hooping Ain’t Easy

When most people think of a hula hoop, the image of a happy child with a colorful plastic ring twirling around her waist comes to mind. While this image still holds true, hooping is no longer just for kids! More and more adults are embracing the hula hoop in an exciting and modern way– hoop dance. Gone are the days of simply spinning the hoop around one’s waist. Hoop dance involves dancing inside the hoop, around the hoop, and making that hoop do amazing things! It is so much fun that it’s easy to forget that you are getting an excellent workout session while you play.

Benefits of Hoop Dance

If the fun isn’t reason enough to give hoop dance a try, there are also considerable benefits to the mind and body. Hoop dance utilizes multiple muscles including the arms, legs, buttocks, hips, and abdomen. It tones and strengthens muscles, burns calories, elevates your heart rate, increases your flexibility, and improves your balance. In a study sponsored by the ACE, the American Council on Exercise, hooping was found to burn an average of seven calories per minute, or 210 calories during 30 minutes of hooping. The study also showed hula hooping to produce an increase in heart-rate comparable to the increase that one would get from boot camp, step aerobics, cardio kickboxing, and advanced Pilates.

Learning new moves can take a lot of time and practice, but the sense of accomplishment and pride you feel when you get a move just right is priceless. In addition to the self-esteem boost that is engendered when you have learned a new skill, you may find that the feedback that you receive from others is quite uplifting. Even very basic moves appear quite elegant and impressive to onlookers, as you will discover quickly when a friend or family member sees what you are doing and gasps in amazement.

Another important benefit of hoop dance is the calming and meditative effect that it has on one’s mind. Rebecca DeShon, a professional hooper since 2008, and founder of HoopEssence, Inc., based in Atlanta, Georgia says, “It has lifted me out of the depths of self-loathing and depression by opening up my heart and mind to creative self-expression! The hoop is such a soothing rhythm; it quickly turned into my ‘moving meditation’. It helps to center my energy and gives me time to clear my head and focus my energy.” A few minutes of hooping in the morning before you start your day can really help to get your mind in a positive place and your body full of energy, ready to face whatever may come your way.

Getting Started

Many times adults will say that they were able to hoop as a child, but when they tried the neighbor kid’s hoop, they quickly discovered that they had completely lost the ability that they once possessed. In most cases, this is not true at all. The real problem is that they are trying to use a child’s hoop. An adult person needs an adult hoop. Adult hoops are larger and heavier than the child’s version. With the proper hoop, there are no limits to what you and your hoop can do. Best of all, a hoop and the willingness to get up and use it are the only things required to start hoop dancing!

The best way to find the right hoop is to find someone locally who makes them. This can be done by typing “hula hoop” plus your city and state into an internet search engine. The great thing about buying your hoop locally is that it’s a sure way to meet other hoopers, many of whom will probably be quite eager to tell you all about hoop jams where people gather in a park or large building and hoop together. They’ll also be an excellent source of information about instructional classes, performances, and hoop-related events that may be happening in your area. Often you will find that the person who makes your hoop is more than happy to share a few tips and tricks to get you started.

If you live in a rural area, or if there are simply no local sources for hula hoops, all is not lost! You can order one online, or even make one yourself. There are many wonderful resources available online today that can guide you through purchasing a hoop, making your own hoop, and learning tricks and moves, from beginner to intermediate. There are entire websites available free of charge dedicated to all things hula hoop, complete with instructional video tutorials.

Give Hoop Dance a Whirl

Hooping is a low impact activity. Therefore it is a good option for you if have arthritis. It will give you the active range of motion you need in your joints to keep them moving.

If you are looking for a form of exercise that you’ll actually look forward to doing each day, hoop dance may be just the thing for you. Best of all, beginning this potentially life-changing activity is just as easy as procuring an appropriate hoop and giving it a spin. You don’t even have to leave your own house or yard. All you have to do is make the decision to get up and move that body!

It is recommended that you perform at least 30 mins of cardio activity a minimum of 5 days a week, hooping will count towards that goal. Do not be discourage if you mess up a few time. No one becomes a master hooper at the first try. With practice you will become an expert and reap the heal benefits of physical activity.