Want to really target the shoulders – this exercise is a great way to isolate those deltoids!
The Shoulder Extension Stretch is to help stretch out your shoulder muscles and also your chest muscles.
This exercise is to help set your shoulder blade and give a bit of a balancing challenge. The stabiliser muscles of the shoulder have to kick in to keep your shoulder blade and humerus bone in place. A great warm up protocol for when working with shoulders!
As stability and strength improves add a DB to one hand.
This is an often underused exercise often because people don’t do them properly. There is some great benefit in leg extensions provided that you lose your ego and recognise that heavier is most likely to be counter productive to your goals.
This exercise is regarding full leg extensions.
This is a great exercise to help with your overall core strength. This even helps with how to do a handstand!
The Dumbbell Seated Calf Raise is a clever alternative for those who do not have a machine based seated calf raise machine. In some ways this set up is actually better than a machine, mainly due to the knees being more free and the sensation of trying to lift your heels up and forward is slightly more effective!
The couch stretch is great for opening the hips by stretching out the quads and hip flexors. The main thing to remember with this one is that quite often people will be tight through these muscle structures so it may not take much to get that stretch happening. Each time you do it, try and increase the angle and positioning! This stretch is great for doing against the couch (hence the name) and also against a flat bench in the gym. Pop a rolled towel or pillow under that knee for comfort!
This is a great exercise for engaging your oblique muscles. Evolutions of this exercise can involve dropping and elevating your hips from that standard straight bodied position.
Often it can be a case that lower back pain is compounded by certain structures getting tight which makes it difficult to allow the lower back to be in the correct anatomical position. Your Quadratus Lumborum (QL) and Latissimus Dorsi muscles are two such muscles that can be inhibiting your lower back to be neutral! You QL attachment points are the Iliac crest of your hip and the twelfth rib and the tranverse processes of your lumbar vertebrae L1-L4. This stretch is great for stretching these structures!
Body weight exercises are the best way for PTs to illustrate that you can indeed to exercise nearly ANYWHERE at ANYTIME. I say nearly because a funeral or during a fire drill are 2 such examples of times and places that they are not appropriate. Where was I? Oh yes – Bicycles. Great core exercise that really allows you get those pesky obliques!
Dumbbell Press is a great exercise to progress to from doing your standard barbell bench press. It forces your muscles to work harder to stabilise the movement and means you get more engagement in your shoulder joints.
Lateral raises are easy in that you don’t need much weight but challenging because they are hard work! A lot of people go too heavy with these and sacrifice form for feeding their ego. Let’s not be one of those people eh? đŸ˜€
This one is just for you Lilian!
Your big swinging, pronounced movements!
A simple calf stretch that can be done on any step – provided the step is deep enough to allow you to drop your heels low enough! You can do this stretch both feet at a time or you can do one foot at a time to really get that targeted stretch for each calf.
This is an easy calf stretch that can be done anywhere there is a step. This stretch helps target the Gastrocnemius part of the calves.
This variation on the leaning calf stretch targets the second muscle that makes up your calves – the Soleus muscle. It sits behind the Gastrocnemius muscle and is more of a longer sheath of muscle compared to the somewhat bulked up look of the Gastrocnemius.
An easy stretch that can be done practically anywhere there is something you can lean into. By straightening out the back leg and keeping that heel on the ground, we can get a great stretch through the calf muscles of that leg. In particular the Gastrocnemius muscle which is that mango shaped muscle we generally see as the calf muscle.