Home Exercise Tips
With all our busy schedules these days, sometimes getting to the gym is just more of a time requirement than anything else. And when time is short, the days of going to the gym become less and less. In just a few weeks, you can fall out of your regular exercise routine, and before you know it, several months have gone by and you’ve put on weight you wished you hadn’t. Exercising at home can be the perfect solution to our hectic lifestyles. Here’s some tried and true tips to making your home exercise program top notch and long-lasting.
First, you need to be clear on your exercise goals. Need to lose weight? Are you simply in maintenance mode? Are you trying to build muscle or gain muscle tone? Once you know you fitness goals, you can better design your actual workout routine to match, and also know what fitness equipment you will need to get. If you are in maintenance mode and don’t want or need to use weights at all, that’s fine. In that case, a good cardio machine might do. If building muscle mass or tone is your desired outcome, then you are going to need to type of weight set, even if it is just a full set of quality dumbbells.
Second, always do a warm up. The minimum warm up is 3 minutes. Sometimes working out at home might tempt you to try to save even more time, but don’t do this. I understand that we’re exercising at home to save all that time driving back and forth to the gym, but a warm up is critically important. I don’t have the room here to explain in detail why (physically) it is very important that you warm up, but always do it. A great warm up exercise can be a moderate walk or simple push ups, sits up and stretches. Personally, I prefer a warm up that consists of several different bodyweight exercises that cover off all the major muscle groups. This gets the entire body warmed up, instead of just primarily the legs (when doing walking.)
Third, find ways to make it fun. This is one of the other benefits of exercising at home. You can listen to music while exercising and that keeps it fun. You can also watch the news or some other program on TV, and in this case you can be using your exercise time for double use (like catching up on your favorite TV shows). Of course, you can listen to music at the gym and watch TV as well (in most gyms, but not all). But that always involves head phones. At home, I can just let the boom box blast my favorite music without having to have ear buds in my ears. It’s just more comfortable. Making your exercise time fun and efficient will make sure that you actually look forward to it, instead of dreading it as something you “have” to do.
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