We know the story by now, everybody is stuck at home and luckily a lot of people are still trying to get their fitness in every day. What exercises should you be doing? how many reps? how many sets? Those are all great questions? And the answer is that there’s no answer to it. You have thousands of different ways of going about using the movements that I am about to talk about. You can mix and mash them together to focus more on cardio, strength, hypertrophy etc.. Even within those terms you can play around with movements a bunch of different ways and I advise you to follow some of the online programming that is being offered right now. You don’t even have to follow one specific program, there are millions of random home workouts out there right now for you to do. Whatever home workout you decide to do, fundamental movements should still be at the core of the majority of your sessions.

Let’s talk about my favorite movements to do at home and how you can make a ”simple” workout out of it.

Push ups

We should all be push up pro’s after this whole deal is over. This relatively simple pressing movement is the base of so many workouts because it’s effective and hits so many different muscles that you don’t even realize it. We’re using the chest, triceps and shoulders to press. We’re using the shoulders glutes and core muscles to stabilize our body etc.. Like I said the push up is a pretty simple movement but still it’s so easy to mess up or do inefficiently. the main concept of the push up is to keep you elbow tucked in, bring your chest to the ground (this is where a lot of people mess up) and press up to an extended position. Focus on getting your chest all the way to the ground while keeping your legs off the ground every rep for maximum effort and strength gains.

there’re a couple different ways of performing the push depending on your skill level.

going from hardest to easiest

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Push up workout:

150 push ups for time * every minute on the minute stop and perform 10 jumping jacks

Jumping lunges

You can just do regular lunges but the jumping lunges add a different stimulus to your training that you won’t get from regular ones. The jumping lunges work on explosive leg strength, coordination and builds up muscle fatigue faster, just to name a few. How to perform the jumping lunges is pretty straight forward, you do everything you would do in a normal lunge but this time you accelerate up and switch your positioning when they leave the ground.

jumping lunge workout:

40-36-32-28-24-20-24-28-32-36-40 reps of jumping lunges. Rest the same amount of time as it takes you to complete the set. Your legs will thank me later. You can scale these numbers down of course if you need to take multiple breaks when completing a set.

V-ups and hollow holds

Probably two of my favorite core exercises, the starting positions of both are identical. One is a dynamic movement and one of them being a static hold and the great thing about both of these movements is that you can scale them down pretty significantly. the main focus of both these movements is to get your shoulder blades off the ground, if they’re still on the ground we’re not getting the full engagement of all the muscles. Where we mess up in the V-up is when we start to bend our upperbody to reach our feet, instead we want to stay straight and hinge from the hip. If you can’t touch your feet it’s okay to reach a little bit lower or scale the movement down.

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V-up and hollow hold workout:

”Durantes core”: 5 sets

10 second hollow hold -> 10 V-ups -> 10 tuck ups -> 10 second hollow hold/ 60 to 90 seconds rest between sets

Good mornings

I would advise you to add this exercise into your daily warm up because it’s a great way of putting tension on the lower back and hamstring. Another reason why I would add these in is because it’s a great way to make yourself aware of where your body is in space. A lot of us find it hard to feel when we’re in bad positions especially without mirrors around us to look in. the good morning is at the core an unweighted movement where we hinge forward from the hips and put tension on the hamstrings. Where we start to mess up is by bending forward too much where we lose the tension in our shoulders and as a result the back starts to round. Because it’s an unweighted and controlled movement it’s safe to play around with it and correct your positions when necessary.

Good morning workout:

3 sets: no rest between exercises or sets

50 band resistant good mornings

50 band glute bridges

Thrusters

any type of squatting movement should be included into your workouts but the thruster will give you a lot of other benefits as well. It will get your heart rate up more/faster, it will target not just the legs and core muscles but also the shoulder and arms to press the weight overhead, just to name 2. With the thruster we need to focus on opening up our hips explosively when we come out of our squat position so the pressing becomes easier. Where we miss up in the thruster is not timing our breath right and not using our hips enough so it basically becomes a front squat + a push press (which means a lot more energy wasted). You can use any sort of weight to do this movement, you can use a backpack, dumbbell, kettlebell, barbell, water bottles, pvc pipe etc.. The thruster is easily scalable by lowering the weight or doing a single arm version instead. Single arm thrusters will allow you to switch the weight over to your other arm, this will make it a unilateral movement and target your body in a unique way.

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thruster workout:

100 thrusters /150 single arm thrusters for time

*every minute perform 5 burpees over the dumbbell

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There are many more great movements out there that we should be using on a regular basis, we should never be content limiting ourselves to a few. These are just some of the movements that I wanted to highlight. go out, explore, have fun!