It's confirmed! Winter is here and with it all of the snow, ice, wind, and downright bone rattling chill that it brings. But don't let the season get you down! There are still plenty of great exercises that you can do indoors, right in the comfort of your own home, just in case you can't make it to your fitness facility due to inclement weather.
It is important to remember to choose your exercises wisely and that they include a great deal of full body movements. So, for instance you won't want to spend a lot of time with isolation exercises, especially if your main goal is to lose weight. Isolation exercises, such as bicep curls and calf raises are important and do have their own time and place. But our main goal in our Butts and Guts online classes is to tone and sculpt. You will want to see those sleek muscles begin to take shape and watch the fat slink away.
Squats are great lower body exercises to complete anytime due to the fact that they include tons of muscle recruitment and involvement simultaneously. Deemed the world's best overall exercise, you wind up working your thighs, hamstrings, and most definitely your butt! In our online classes I use the basic squat movement but then modify it to target different angles and change speeds, giving the glutes a much slimmer and rounded shape.
Because changing exercises on a constant basis gives you the best results, two great modifications you can use right now for squats would be the narrow squat and the wide squat. Just like the name implies your feet will either be together or apart. Stand up right now and give these two a try. You only need to do a few repetitions of each to notice they are working different areas, and all you changed was your foot placement.
For a narrow squat, place your hands on your hips and bring your feet together. There should only be about half of an inch between your feet and knees. Keeping your back straight and shoulders back, simply squat down and push your butt back and down, just like you are sitting in a chair. Bend the knees to a ninety degree angle (you will achieve this once your calf and your hamstring look like the corner of a square) and press through your heels to get yourself back to your starting position. After completing ten or so in rapid succession, you will feel a burn on the outside sweep of your thighs as well as the outside of your hips. For a picture of what a correct narrow squat should look like click http://www.oxygenmag.com/content/oxy62/narrow_squats.jpg
While performing the wide squat, take up the same position with your hands on your waist, but with your feet make sure they are wider then your shoulders. (For this article we will say about one foot wider, just so you get a good feel of this particular exercise.) In the classes we have them a bit wider for a little more challenge. Point the toes out just a bit and now bend the knees to that ninety degree angle again to lower yourself towards the floor. Your butt should be pressed down and back just like in the narrow squat. Pressing through your heels back up to your start you will feel a burn now in your inner thighs and butt. Click here now to see what a wide squat looks like http://www.purekracht.nl/menu_items/images/custom/Squats-wide-finish.jpg
Isn't it interesting that you can feel two completely different burns in two completely different places from just one simple exercise. No wonder they call the squat the world's best exercise!
