This August, we’re going back to basics. Even though gyms have opened back up for some, our focus for August is relative strength and body weight exercises. I was so excited to lift weights again for the past month that I forgot to maintain my conditioning and flexibility. Stiffness and shortness of breath are two feelings that people would rather avoid. So, what exactly is the use your body challenge?
We know that it can be overwhelming trying to change your routine overnight, or even over the course of a week. To save you the time and effort of looking through the site, here are some at-home workouts for you with notes about them to help you pick the right one. Most of them require absolutely no equipment whatsoever.
Yoga is the oldest form of a workout and it has remained relevant even in the modern day world. Unlike other forms of exercise that limit people by age, yoga can be practiced by both the young and old. On the other hand, practicing yoga poses seems easy when you watch someone else do the magic. But then it gets harder when you are the one doing the posses. In fact, you can’t practice yoga out of the blue and achieve commendable results. People actually enroll in yoga classes so that they can learn from those that have already mastered the art. Without someone to teach you the ropes, you can easily throw in the towel within a few weeks or months. As a matter of fact, practicing yoga is not difficult like we are made to believe. You only need to start from the bottom and advance gradually. It only gets harder when you want from the top instead of the other way round. Here is a list of reasons why everyone can practice yoga like a pro.
Happy Workout Wednesday, everyone, and welcome to one of our favorite workouts! Everyone has a different approach to training, and it may take a trial with every single one of those to find out what works for you, but one popular tactic is taking care of two important aspects at once. Combining core and cardio can be effective, since they’re extremely important to overall health, but can be painstakingly boring. It’s like vacuuming and scooping litter at the same time, in a way.
Now, to be clear, core refers to exercises that will help strengthen muscles throughout your abdomen, on your front and back. That means, you’ll be working your abs, obliques, lower back, hips and even glutes since they all work closely with one another when you’re performing more complex, or demanding, exercises and activities. Cardio is a misunderstood and overused word that we’ll use today to refer to exercises that will help you elevate your heart rate significantly in an effort to either burn fat or increase your athletic performance by building endurance. I hope that explanation makes sense.
Recently, someone in the gym asked us about an exercise we were performing, specifically inquiring if it was targeting our abs and then questioning how it differs from the abdominal crunch machine he was using. We explained that this particular variation of the abdominal crunch would activate more muscles in his core, since the weight could force his body left or right as well.
When he showed obvious frustration and explained how he’d been using the machine for years with no progress, we asked how he was using the machine, specifically referring to how many reps and sets he was doing. When he told us that he performed 30-40 reps per set, we asked him if he was happy with his upper arms. When he said that he was indeed happy with that body part, we asked him how he trained his arms, specifically referring to how many reps and sets he was doing. When he told us that he performed 8-12 reps per set, we presented the question: why are you training your abs differently?
Hilarious freezings of kongs
Christmas shopping
Getting funny Christmas cards
Great soccer matches
Chris following his December goals and bringing home-cooked meals to every work day
Core workouts
Cute kitties
Cute puppies
A beautiful view
We all complain that we simply don’t have enough time. Does that sound familiar? I say it too. We all use it as an excuse–whether that’s in order to not do the dishes, not brush your teeth, or not exercise! Well I say bollocks! You do have time. You just need to realize it. Even though it’s easy to say you don’t have time to workout, you do. It doesn’t need to be an hour workout. It can even be six minutes! Something is better than nothing so do this before you go to bed!
30 seconds each
1 minute
The above workout is six minutes. SIX MINUTES! You can do that. Do yourself a favor and even if you “don’t have any time,” I promise you can squeeze this in. Not only is it good for your health and sculpting your core, it will make you feel better about yourself. You will feel that you have accomplished something, even if it’s a short workout. This is a great, healthy thing to do before bed. Make it a habit and do it every other day! Believe in yourself! This will give you power! Please leave any comments or questions in the comment section. And as always…stay hungry and fit!
BONUS KITTY PIC
meow
One of the most simplest yet most effective core exercise requires more willpower than it does strength (although that certainly helps, too). What am I talking about? The Plank, of course! When I train clients, I experience more people dropping out due to sheer loss of willpower rather than muscle fatigue. Because it’s hard to fatigue your core. Although some people do go until their muscles fail, which is something I absolutely admire. You can tell when this happens–the entire body will start to shake and they will fall on their face. Admirable. But go ahead, try a plank real quick, go as long as you can. Notice how you kind of get bored and your willpower muscle starts to fail? Let’s change that.
So I challenge you to try to do a plank every day for the rest of the year. Train your willpower (and your core), bat down your boredom and focus on strength and discipline. I believe and I know through experience that practicing the plank over and over is the true way to increasing your willpower enough to actually plank until muscle fatigue. Who’s with me?! Plank every day to stay hungry and fit!
BONUS…SNAKE PIC
Dovah being silly
So you really don’t have a lot of time, but you want to get some kind of cardio and strength activity in. Maybe you’re running off to see Jack the Giant Slayer in 15 minutes, but you want to get some muscle work in (hmm, sounds familiar…). This one ended up being a great core blaster with great upper body work as well.
And that’s my delightful chicken scratch! Do as many sets as you have time for. You can do one set in 7-10 minutes, depending on how long you last until failure. The weight for curls, rows, and press is up to you! You should get a light sweat and feel it in the abs and upper body, at least I did. Do them right, no rushing! If you have any questions on the exercises, feel free to comment and ask!
Cheers! And as always…stay hungry and fit!
Many people are obsessed with doing abs. What they don’t know is that they should be obsessed with doing core instead. So what’s the difference?!
“Abs” refer to a part on your torso. The rectus abdominus and the obliques are what are targeted when people say “abs.” Sometimes, it doesn’t even include the obliques.
Ignore the body shape on the bottom, I know he’s scary.
So…then, what is core?
I’ll leave it to Chris to rant now.
So basically, we can look at this conceptually, as what we’ll refer to as our “abs” and then our “core.” For abs, I am referring strictly to the upper abs, lower abs, and we’ll say side abs, or–more fittingly–obliques. Then we have our core, which is much more important, and we’re going to include everything in our “mid-section” that acts as important stabilizers for strength and balance in either strength-training sessions or fully-interactive sporting sessions. So let’s break down the abs first.
Basically, as we already mentioned, we will look at and focus our workouts to our upper and lower abs and our obliques. Now, there are two major ways to workout abs when we focus a workout on them. First, is what I would think as the more common method, doing as many repetitions of as many abs exercises as we can find in magazines and online. Let’s do 3000 reps, 30 reps of 10 different exercises ten times over in an hour. I hear that one a lot, and I’ve done it a lot. 9000 reps on serious days. Will this work and will you feel it the next day? Sure, you probably will. But you could also feel some serious pain in your lower back or have a bruised tailbone if you don’t make sure that you are spot on with form and focus for thousands of reps, which is not an easy task. While you don’t need weight to train and break down those muscle fibers, it does help in its own ways. And while this is a great endurance workout that can really get your heart rate jumping, there is another way of working out those abs.
The alternative I speak of is strength training your abs. Abs are a muscle group, just like biceps, quads, lats, etc… so of course you can train them with a little extra resistance. I am not offering workouts here, just stating how I feel on this matter, but I would still keep rep ranges relatively high, over that 15-18 rep mark, going still towards 25-30 reps per set. So please, don’t take this as a suggestion to max out on an ab exercises. If I had to choose one exercise for each of our three ab groups, to do 25-30 reps while increasing my weight each set for three total sets, it would be: a kneeling cable crunch for upper abs, a weighted reverse crunch with our legs in a declined position for our lower abs, and an inverted weighted twist for our obliques.
Don’t yell at me if you do these wrong and they don’t work because I’m not putting my actual workout up for another few weeks when I’m a little more back in shape. (FYI, your obliques are a muscle group that tapers from the side of your body towards your hip area, and if you were to “bulk” these up through strength training there is a great chance that your waist size would increase, making you look thicker, just a side note) But I wouldn’t leave it as this, because I personally don’t ever do abs… EVER… I always do core, and this is why:
As a former athlete that works out not to feel good, or for appearance, but for performance, I know the importance of maintaining a strong core. I consider my core anywhere under my chest down through the upper leg. So to be in more detail, muscle groups that I hit when I do a core workout include: upper abs, lower abs, obliques, lower back, hip adductors, hip abductors, and even upper glutes. While I will isolate these muscle groups with free weights, and unfortunately on some machines (mainly for hips) , I always try to incorporate them on some heavier and more complex exercises.
For instance, when I do firemen carries with friends, it is a leg workout picking them up waking with their weight, and it is a shoulder workout holding them in place, but it is also a GREAT core workout trying to keep all those muscles in your abs and lower back tight to stabilize your body throughout the workout and prevent any injuries and accidents. Deadlifts, romanian deadlifts, and squats really require you keep that core tight and that form precise in order to target your muscles properly. Most hanging core exercises require that you do not swing so that your core finds that stable position, making you constantly work harder.
Stronger core means stronger everything else.
Someone could have a massive set of legs, but when they put that loaded bar on their back and try to squat 600 lbs, their lower back might want to snap causing them to lean to far forward and not only fail to complete a rep, but also potentially and likely hurt themselves. Watch the crossfit fails video on YouTube and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Crossfit will be a serious rant post, and total immersion swimming, but back on track.
And remember, my favorite way to work out core is integrate it into something FUN, like sports. Rock climbing, swimming, soccer, frisbee, football, baseball… really any sport at any competitive (meaning people are actually trying) level is an amazing core workout, and you don’t even have to count reps, because it’s so integrated in what you’re doing. One of the recommended doctors that contributes to Men’s Health in some issue over the past few years said his favorite lower back workout was pickup soccer (we’re in the US :/). Strengthen that core!!! Abs will come naturally if you do.
And finally, since this is all over the place, and I think I hit most the points I wanted to… if you’re trying to go from not having any visual abs in a pack to a certain goal like a six-pack you need to consider everything. In no particular order…
Do what you need to do in order to strengthen that core and look and feel how you want.
