Combine both high plank and side planks for a real core burner!
This is a great exercise to do if you are having any sort of problems with your knees or ankles. The TRX squat allows you to lean back into the exercise and get tension more through your hamstrings and glutes as opposed to your knees while also keeping your ankles and knees in a more neutral position.
One of the first exercises that come to mind when you think fitness! Push ups are a great way to exercise your chest, shoulders and arms. If you are new at this exercise and do not have the strength to perform it, you can either bend your legs at the knees to take off resistance or perform the exercise against the wall instead of the floor.
For the most advanced lifters, you can place your feet at a high surface such as a bench in order to increase the resistance and to target the upper chest more.
When people think of using a swiss (or sometimes known as a Fit) ball, this is often the exercise that comes to mind. It is a very common exercise to do in order to target your ab muscles.
To increase the difficulty, you can hold a weight across your chest or a theraband behind you where it is affixed to a post or secured location.
Dead lifts are considered to be one of – if not THE BEST exercises. The basic premise is that you are lifting a dead weight from the floor. It has many variations and can be mixed up to co-inside with your workout requirements. Using a kettle bell allows to mix up the positioning of the weight to be more central to your mass.
This is a great exercise for those who struggle to get those glutes to work and also to keep them in an activated state. The bridging component helps keep tension on the glutes to ensure they keep you in the right position!
To make this one more challenging, you can add weight onto your hips.
Do you know how to activate your glutes? Do you know how to tuck them? This exercise is definitely one that can help you with this! A very simple exercise that can be done practically anywhere.. except for may be a public toilet floor… for.. well obvious reasons.
Want to make this exercise more challenging? Add weights to your pelvis. Gentlemen mind your bits!
Getting our glutes to work can sometimes be tricky work. This exercise focuses on extending the hip so you can give the glutes a good squeeze. By going single leg, it means there is more weight for the glute to lift.
To make this exercise a touch easier, you can cross your floating legs ankle across your working legs knee.
To make it more challenging you can place a small weight across your hips (gentlemen – watch your bits!).
No actual legs involved in this exercise but it is a great one to finish off a session! This exercise isolates the Triceps at the back of your arms but it also has a secret lesson of holding your shoulder in the correct positioning to help with your posture. 2 for the price of some burny arms!
No weights? No problem! You can always do a workout with your body weight or in this case, your leg weight! The trick to this one is pelvis and lower back control. You must maintain control of them in order to get the most out of the exercise. If you arch your back too much, your lower back tries to take over which can hurt. If you can’t get your straightened legs down to the ground without arching – don’t go so low OR bend your knees.
You can make this exercise more challenging by holding a medicine ball or something weighted between your ankles!
The one arm row is such a great staple of the weights room and it is important that we get it right! Too many people reef the weight too high and they also pull the weight close to their chest which actually engages your internal rotators and chest muscles which isn’t right!
Ensure your back is in neutral with no skewing to the side.
Also ensure that you pull the weight to the top of your hip bone!
Tricep Dips are great because they can be done anywhere. At the gym, in the park, at home on a chair. The list of variations and locations go on. Some things to consider when doing dips though is that if you have any impingement issues with your shoulders, give dips a miss.
To increase the difficulty of this exercise, you can put weights across your lap to make it harder.
The silent stealthy killer! Pulse n Stands seem pretty good at first – not so much by the end! Just like sitting down in a chair, the Pulse n Stand is about engaging those glutes and hamstrings to control your descent and using your quad engagement at the correct part of the movement.
It is important to ensure that your knees don’t collapse inwards while doing this exercise and don’t forget to squeeze and engage your glutes otherwise your back will try and engage!
The Stiff Leg Dead Lift is a fantastic exercise to really target those hamstrings and glutes. By focusing on keeping your back straight and envisioning that your hips are the only joint that moves, you will get the most out of this exercise.
Big thing on this one – try not to hyper-extend or lock out your knees.
Pos Delt Tris stands for Posterior Deltoid and Triceps. This double movement allows us to engage some lesser used posterior deltoid and also the tricep!
The trick to getting this one right is not allowing your elbow to go to high and above your torso. Keep it in line with your back and you will engage more!
No access to cables or dumbbells but you have your trusty theraband? Triceps can be done! This is a really good alternative which works those triceps good! To increase the tension, you can stand further away from the anchor point and also work on the different angles. You can even go single armed to make it super hard!
While it would be AWESOME if you could flick out a set of adamantium claws at the end of this movement, the exercise is still pretty cool considering the benefits it has! Using a good solid set of your more underused back muscles, Wolverines will definitely help with your posture!
Just remember to keep your shoulders down and pinch those shoulder blades together at the end of the movement!
Often when someone has issues with their lower back, their adductor muscles or inner thigh muscles are tight and compromising their legs. Knees that tend to move inwards are likely to be affected by overly tight adductors too so rolling these suckers out is the way to go. You can do this one from the lowest part of your thigh next to your knee all the way up into the groin. Gentlemen – ensure your well secured… you will understand what I am saying.
