Hey guys! Fitness Should Be Fun!
Use Your Body!
It's all about you!
With so much fitness focus on health clubs, gyms and high tech equipment, we sometimes lose track of the fact that we can stay very fit without ever hitting the gym or lifting a brand-name weight. We forget that all we need to create a decent full-body workout is our own body and a bit of ingenuity.
The good news is that we can workout just about anywhere. The bad news (for some of us) is that there is one less excuse for not working out.
Few of us, however, know enough body weight moves to make up an entire full-body workout.
We all know some of the basic exercises ... pushups, situps, etc. Ya, the boring and totally un-cool exercises we avoid; but boring or not, they do the job and do it well. They are effective exercises because they can be tough. Most of us have trouble lifting our own total body weight.
Adjust yourself
When we are in the gym we have the luxury of adjusting the weight - grabbing a bigger or smaller plate or moving the pin up or down a notch on the weight stack. When it comes to body-weight exercises, however, adjustments are difficult, forcing us to work a little harder or to add a few more reps to achieve the desired results. That's where ingenuity comes in handy.
It all has to do with levers. The longer the lever, the more body weight there is to lift. The most common example of this is the various positions for performing common pushups. The toughest is with the longest lever - the classic military pushup with the legs and hips in a straight plane and the hands and toes bearing all the weight. If we shorten the lever by keeping the hips straight but resting on the knees, the intensity is reduced. By bending at the hips so the hips are right above the knees, the lever is, again, much shorter (butt-up pushups) and the intensity is less. Simlilarly, with situps, the position of our hands is used to adjust intensity. Positionning your hands down towards your hips makes situps easier. Positionning them on the chest, the shoulders or over your head makes them increasingly more difficult.
Since your ability to adjust weight in some body-weight exercises is limited we need to fine tune our workout by increasing or decreasing the number of sets and reps. Since we normally lift until failure, the number of reps is a no-brainer. We just repeat until we can't do any more. All of this assumes we have absolutely no objects, such as stairs, chairs, door frames, heavy objects, etc. to work with. Your job is simplified if you have any of these to add variety.
Workout ideas
If you need ideas, all it takes is a few minutes snuggled up with Google to find a wide range of exercises, even full-body routines, for a body-weight fitness session. Simply search for "body weight exercises". As always, BodyBuilding.com comes to our rescue. Visit http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/exercises.htm . Scroll down to Section 2 and select "Body Weight Only" in the "Equipment used" dropdown menu. Another mountain of information, About.com provides an abundance of information at http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/tipsandtricks/a/basictraining.htm .
These two sites alone will start you off with a good selection of body-weight-only exercises. Check them out now and be ready with your own routine for when you can't (or won't) go to the gym.
Remember, guys, if you have your own ideas or suggestions for body-weight moves, let us know in the itsgottabefun.ning blogs and forums. You can even post pics and videos showing how your exercises are done. Also, if you can't find an effective exercise for a particular body part, then let us all know loud and clear.
With so much fitness focus on health clubs, gyms and high tech equipment, we sometimes lose track of the fact that we can stay very fit without ever hitting the gym or lifting a brand-name weight. We forget that all we need to create a decent full-body workout is our own body and a bit of ingenuity.
The good news is that we can workout just about anywhere. The bad news (for some of us) is that there is one less excuse for not working out.
Few of us, however, know enough body weight moves to make up an entire full-body workout.
We all know some of the basic exercises ... pushups, situps, etc. Ya, the boring and totally un-cool exercises we avoid; but boring or not, they do the job and do it well. They are effective exercises because they can be tough. Most of us have trouble lifting our own total body weight.
Adjust yourself
When we are in the gym we have the luxury of adjusting the weight - grabbing a bigger or smaller plate or moving the pin up or down a notch on the weight stack. When it comes to body-weight exercises, however, adjustments are difficult, forcing us to work a little harder or to add a few more reps to achieve the desired results. That's where ingenuity comes in handy.
It all has to do with levers. The longer the lever, the more body weight there is to lift. The most common example of this is the various positions for performing common pushups. The toughest is with the longest lever - the classic military pushup with the legs and hips in a straight plane and the hands and toes bearing all the weight. If we shorten the lever by keeping the hips straight but resting on the knees, the intensity is reduced. By bending at the hips so the hips are right above the knees, the lever is, again, much shorter (butt-up pushups) and the intensity is less. Simlilarly, with situps, the position of our hands is used to adjust intensity. Positionning your hands down towards your hips makes situps easier. Positionning them on the chest, the shoulders or over your head makes them increasingly more difficult.
Since your ability to adjust weight in some body-weight exercises is limited we need to fine tune our workout by increasing or decreasing the number of sets and reps. Since we normally lift until failure, the number of reps is a no-brainer. We just repeat until we can't do any more. All of this assumes we have absolutely no objects, such as stairs, chairs, door frames, heavy objects, etc. to work with. Your job is simplified if you have any of these to add variety.
Workout ideas
If you need ideas, all it takes is a few minutes snuggled up with Google to find a wide range of exercises, even full-body routines, for a body-weight fitness session. Simply search for "body weight exercises". As always, BodyBuilding.com comes to our rescue. Visit http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/exercises.htm . Scroll down to Section 2 and select "Body Weight Only" in the "Equipment used" dropdown menu. Another mountain of information, About.com provides an abundance of information at http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/tipsandtricks/a/basictraining.htm .
These two sites alone will start you off with a good selection of body-weight-only exercises. Check them out now and be ready with your own routine for when you can't (or won't) go to the gym.
Remember, guys, if you have your own ideas or suggestions for body-weight moves, let us know in the itsgottabefun.ning blogs and forums. You can even post pics and videos showing how your exercises are done. Also, if you can't find an effective exercise for a particular body part, then let us all know loud and clear.
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