A hot summer day makes you want to lie down and fan yourself but that certainly won’t get and keep you bikini ready. Fortunately there are some simple exercises you can do at home (and in the air conditioning) that will keep you looking hot.
While I advocate getting in as much movement throughout the day, in order for something to be counted as exercise you must get hot, sweaty and it should hurt(just a little) so crank the A/C and be sure to have a big glass of water nearby before you get started.
You can easily turn your house or apartment into an indoor parcourse with a few simple items. You will need a bench – this could also be an 24” high coffee table(just not glass!), some free weights(use the heaviest weight you can handle in good form) and a mat. If you can swing it, it would be great to have an exercise stability ball, a pull up bar for your door jam, a jumprope and a mini-stepper(I use an indestructible one used by the professional sports teams called The X-iser).
I like people to do resistance style training using body weight, cables and free weights that involves their four major body areas – upper body pushing, upper body pulling, hips & thighs and power core 2-3 times a week. For example you can do push-ups, dips off the coffee table or a chair or overhead presses for upper body pushing which works the chest, shoulders and triceps, you can do pull-ups or bentover rows for upper body pulling which works the lats, shoulders and biceps, you can do crunches on the ball for power core and squats or step-ups on the coffee table for hips and thighs.
I also recommend burst style cardiovascular training where you warm-up then go all out for 30 seconds, actively recover for 60 seconds and repeat this cycle to accumulate 4-8 total minutes of bursting and then cool down. An example of that could be walking alternated with sprinting but I will show you how to do this inside as well. by the way, this is a great thing to use that unused stairwell for at work – rather than going out for something that will ADD to your waistline, spend your break bursting up a flight of stairs and then walking back down to recover. If you don’t want to get sweaty at work you can divide this up throughout the day. Remember everything counts and you will do the majority of your movement when you aren’t actively working out so slap on a pedometer and make it a point to take every opportunity to move more daily. You can easily do your bursts at home with a jumprope or a mini stepper like The X-iser. You can see me demonstrate bursting at http://bursttoblastfat.com .
The #1 EXCUSE I hear from people is that they don’t have time to exercise. I say, make time but the good news is when you up the intensity, you get much more out of your session and you can exercise less. I have taken this idea a step further with my 4×4, 15 minute total body workout. It incorporates bursting through big hip & thigh exercises and then goes around in a circuit to include upper body pushing, upper body pulling and power core exercises. You finish with some dynamic stretching. I have designed this to be fast, effective and easily done at home or the gym. You can grab your free workout at http://jjvirgin.com/4x4workout
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