As the latest snow storm hits New England many of us are stuck at home and not able to get to the gym for a workout. Well don’t worry there are plenty of exercises that you can do at home and still get a great workout.
Interval training requires interval of extremely intense activity with brief periods of recovery. The exercises should be performed in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each exercise (the intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10) and a 10-second rest between exercises. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you’re done.
#1. jumping jacks
#2. wall sit
#3. push ups
#4. abdominal crunch
#5. step up onto a chair
#6. squat
#7. triceps dip on a chair
#8 plank
#9. high knees running in place
#10. lunge
#11. push up and rotation
#12. side plank
Click here to see exercise samples & more information regarding the benefits of interval training.
An article in the May-June issue of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal does just that. In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.
“There’s very good evidence” that high-intensity interval training provides “many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla., and co-author of the new article.
Work by scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and other institutions shows, for instance, that even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching your maximum capacity produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of several hours of running or bike riding.
