SIDE-LYING LEG LIFTS
Benefits:
Strengthens and tones your outer thighs, glutes and quadriceps.
How to do it:
The key to weight control is keeping energy intake (food) and energy output (physical activity) in balance. When you consume only as many calories as your body needs, your weight will usually remain constant. If you take in more calories than your body needs, you will put on excess fat. If you expend more energy than you take in you will burn excess fat.
Exercise plays an important role in weight control by increasing energy output, calling on stored calories for extra fuel. Recent studies show that not only does exercise increase metabolism during a workout, but it causes your metabolism to stay increased for a period of time after exercising, allowing you to burn more calories.
How much exercise is needed to make a difference in your weight depends on the amount and type of activity, and on how much you eat. Aerobic exercise burns body fat. A medium-sized adult would have to walk more than 30 miles to burn up 3,500 calories, the equivalent of one pound of fat. Although that may seem like a lot, you don’t have to walk the 30 miles all at once. Walking a mile a day for 30 days will achieve the same result, providing you don’t increase your food intake to negate the effects of walking.
If you consume 100 calories a day more than your body needs, you will gain approximately 10 pounds in a year. You could take that weight off, or keep it off, by doing 30 minutes of moderate exercise daily. The combination of exercise and diet offers the most flexible and effective approach to weight control.
Since muscle tissue weighs more than fat tissue, and exercise develops muscle to a certain degree, your bathroom scale won’t necessarily tell you whether or not you are “fat.” Well-muscled individuals, with relatively little body fat, invariably are “overweight” according to standard weight charts. If you are doing a regular program of strength training, your muscles will increase in weight, and possibly your overall weight will increase. Body composition is a better indicator of your condition than body weight.
Lack of physical activity causes muscles to get soft, and if food intake is not decreased, added body weight is almost always fat. Once-active people, who continue to eat as they always have after settling into sedentary lifestyles, tend to suffer from “creeping obesity.”
INVISIBLE SKIPPING
Benefits:
Want the benefits of a great cardio move that will get your heart pumping, but don’t have the space for traditional skipping? Then forget the rope and just continue to rotate those arms while you’re jumping.
How to do it:
No time for exercise? Try these sneaky tricks to work out with almost no effort at all:
Wash the car
Go on, it needs a good clean, anyway. If you’ve got a van, then you’ll really work up a sweat. Make sure to switch hands when you’re scrubbing to get a good, even workout.
Ditch the trolley
Opt for a shopping basket rather than a trolley if you’re not planning a huge shop, and really work your upper body.
Spring clean in summer
Have a good ‘spring clean’ anytime of the year. Move the furniture, scrub the walls and reach for those cobwebs. It’ll get your heart going, and you’ll be rewarded with sparkling house!
See the sights
How well do you know your local area? Set aside a day with friends to walk around the local sights, as if you were tourists. You may be surprised how many calories you burn in a day spent hurrying around on your feet.
Stairway to fitness
Dragging yourself up the stairs might seem tough at first, but your fitness will step up in no time.
Have a break
Get into the habit of exercising whenever the TV show you’re watching hits an advert break. You can do crunches, run on the spot or even drop down into the plank position.
Trim at your chair
If you work in an office, the chances are your posture will suffer as a result of hours sitting at a desk. Use your upper back, shoulders and abdominal muscles to maintain a good posture.
Fix it
Burn those calories by getting stuck into some DIY around the house. Sanding walls, tiling floors and building cabinets all require serious strength.
Squeeze!
Stuck in traffic yet again? Don’t sit and stress: work your pelvic floor. You can even do it on the bus, as long as you do it discretely!
Green fingers
Cut the grass, get weeding and potting. Heaving a mower around is a great workout for your core, legs and arms – and is a major calorie burner.
PRESS UP
Benefits:
Strengthens and tones your upper arms, shoulders and chest.
How to do it:
SIDE PLANK TWIST
Benefits:
Targets the sides of the stomach, obliques (or muffin top as it’s affectionately known!).
How to do it:
STANDING STORK
Benefits:
Good posture is probably the world’s simplest beauty secret. It makes you instantly look taller and slimmer. Your movements become easier and more graceful and your clothes hang better. Here’s a step by step guide to a perfect poise.
How to do it:
As the popularity of high-intensity workouts soars, the pressure of Hiit workouts and the like, can mean that people are more susceptible to injury.
Which is why there is a new-found importance being placed on recovery – this year’s buzzword – and there has been a rise in classes such as restorative yoga and self-myofascial release (soft-tissue therapy) methods that also include massage balls, foam rollers, ice baths and massage.
These techniques can help promote recovery and enhance overall sports performance and longevity in training, whatever your goals might be.
The recovery phase has long been an important (but too often ignored) part of a workout. But these strategies speed up and optimise recovery and rebuilding, meaning you are less likely to tear, pull or anger anything that might end up putting you out of your new-year regime altogether.
SINGLE-LEG SQUAT
Benefits:
This move targets all muscles below the waist, including core, quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes.
How to do it:
Bodyweight training requires no fancy, expensive equipment, just of course your own body weight.
A worldwide survey of fitness trends for 2015 has listed squats, lunges, push-ups, burpees and planks as the No 1 fitness trend for the coming year.
But just because no machines, dumbbells or weights are required does not mean it’s easy. These movements are some of the most efficient ways to get in shape and strengthen muscles – so they are certainly intense.
Bodyweight training is quite a general term but it’s effective. Burpees, for instance, are exhausting.
Better still, this sort of training can be done practically anywhere from the living room to the park.