“Don’t be silly,” you say. “It isn’t possible to exercise effectively at home!”
Think again. There are sooooo many home workouts that are super effective and perfect for those days where you just want to get it done from your living room! Give these a try this week.
1. Use your body weight
Body weight exercises are extremely effective for toning and muscle building. Look at the body of a male gymnast – their training focuses on body weight exercises and they have immense strength and muscle mass.
The beauty of body weight exercises is that you can do them anywhere, any time – including at home.
Try these for your lower body:
- Squats
- Lunges,
- Glute raises (aka bridges)
- Step-ups using a chair
These are highly functional and compound exercises – meaning they use many muscles (glutes, quads, calves, hamstrings etc). You can combine these together to create an effective home workout, or slot them into your busy day.
Waiting for your dinner to finish cooking? Do two sets of 10 lunges on each leg: it’s that easy!
Try these for the upper body:
- Push-ups
- Pull-ups
- Dip
Use a railing and do alternating sets of overhand and underhand grip pull-ups, or grab a chair and do your tricep dips while you watch the news.
Our Lean and Strong program is perfect for toning, and includes a lot of exercises you can do at home with minimal equipment.
2. Blast your abs in 5 mins
Allocate five minutes to doing simple abs exercises before you go to bed.
Try these:
- 60-second plank
- Sit-ups
- Crunches
- Side planks
- Leg raises
Continue to increase your reps each day and you’ll notice the difference.
3. Start your own ‘home gym’
Maybe you enjoy free weights and resistance training, but don’t enjoy the gym? Why not get creative and set up your own home gym?
You can go all out and still do it cheaply:
- Set of dumbbells
- Some resistance bands
- A skipping rope
Or, simply use everyday items in your home workout to get the same result:
- Use a backpack with books inside to add weight to your lunges and squats
- Use rice-filled drink bottles for bicep curls, shoulder presses or side raises
- Use a towel for pull-ups
Just take a moment, look around your house – you’ll be surprised at what you can find that works just as well as the real thing! We’ve even explained how you can perform the exercises.
4. Get creative with cardio
Let’s talk cardio. Don’t think you can’t get a solid sweat on at home! If you have stairs in your house, set yourself a competitive total (20 sets!) and sprint from bottom to top, walking back down for recovery.
If you don’t have stairs, do some sprints in your backyard. Even if it’s only 20 metres, you can do 20 sets and hit 400m of sprints: not shabby at all.
And nothing really beats a skipping rope – 10 minutes of skipping burns around 110 calories!
If you’re looking to seriously maximise weight loss through cardio, check out our Learn to Run program which takes you step-by-step through running (seriously, one of the best non-gym exercises you can do!).
5. Home workout videos
If you’re someone who needs a little motivation, home workout videos could be your perfect weapon.
There are many great videos to suit a variety of goals, and once again you can be in your lounge room, wearing whatever you want and still get awesome results.
It doesn’t matter how busy you are, how self-conscious you may be at a gym, or how little money you can allocate to exercise, there is always an option at hand. And we’ve set out it out for you in even more detail. Get creative – ready, set, GO!
When you sign up to 12WBT you’ll receive weekly Exercise Plans that you can do at home, outdoors or at the gym, as well as weekly Meal Plans and twice-weekly Mindset Videos to keep you on track.