Back to basics

The simple act of moving your body (exactly what we are designed to do) has a host of physical and mental benefits. Whether you’re dancing to music, practising yoga or performing exercise movements the health benefits are huge and numerous.

Gyms and group exercise classes can be intimidating to many people and Personal Trainers can appear a little indulgent but there is no reason that you can’t exercise in the comfort of your own home: you don’t have to face the masses, wait for equipment to become available or even get changed. But by doing this you might gain the confidence that you need to join a gym or exercise group.

So below are a few great ‘all over’ exercises that you can do wherever and whenever you want. Videos of these and other exercise movements can all be found on my website www.andalifitness.com/videos. These videos should help ensure that you perform them correctly, getting maximum benefit and lessening your chance of injury:

These can all be done with or without extra resistance equipment but as you progress and things start to become easier you can increase the benefits by:

add some more weighted resistance
perform more repetitions per exercise
increase the sets that you do
have less recovery between sets

This is known as progressive overload and is the process with which we make ourselves stronger, fitter, faster etc.

Exercises:

Squats
Reverse table thrusters
Alternate leg tuck jumps*
Bench dips
Lunges
Side plank reach throughs
Jumping jacks
Bent over rows
Romanian deadlifts
Arm punching*
Alternate Elbow Knees
Burpees

Recommendations:

Begin with bodyweight movements only performing 3 sets of 10 exercises with 15 seconds rest between exercises and 60 seconds rest between sets (the asterisk denotes that you have to perform one on the left and then one on the right to count as one rep).

Perform this twice a week and increase to 3- 4 times a week as you feel more able and want to increase the challenge.