MONTREAL- With the beautiful weather here to (hopefully) stay for a few months it is a good time to think about taking your workout outdoors – or at least balancing some outdoor exercise with your home or gym workouts.
This week we are offering some options for ways to change up your workouts, use your environment, and add some interval training. With the help of Gina, Andree, and Eva (all graduate students at McGill University), we are showing you some ways to train your full body using only the things that are available in the park.
All of the following exercises can be done on their own or within your walking, running, or cycling programs, and we have a few variations to change up the difficulty.
Upper-body exercises
Push-ups
For beginners or individuals who feel that they are not strong in the upper body, start with standing push-ups. You can use any vertical surface, including the wall of a building, a tree, a lamppost, or any other monuments or statues, etc.
You can alter your grip to be either close (hands slightly closer together than shoulder-width, keep elbows in, and bring yourself to the surface and then push yourself away from the surface), normal (hands at shoulder width), and wide (hands to either side of your shoulders).
Also, the closer you are to being parallel to the ground, the harder the push-up.
The hardest push-up will be raising your legs on a bench or step and doing a push-up on the ground.
Triceps dips on a park bench
You could also use bleacher seats or the platforms in children playgrounds and some steps might work as well.
The easiest dip is one where you sit on the edge of the bench and place your hands on the edge with your fingers facing you. Push yourself off the bench and lower your butt towards the ground, keeping your knees bent. Lower yourself towards the ground until your arms create a 90-degree angle and then push up to almost seated position.
A harder variation of this exercise is to straighten your legs for the duration of the exercise, and the most difficult is to raise your legs by resting them on another nearby bench or bleacher seat, or a rock or other object in the environment.
Lower body and cardiovascular
Step-ups are a great way to get some added cardio into your workout and to work your legs.
Again, use a bench, a step, bleachers, or any other stable and higher object in your environment.
You can do a regular step up onto the bench by simply stepping up with one foot, bring the other foot up, and step down, and then repeating with the other foot leading.
To add difficulty, you could jump onto the bench with both feet and then jump down off the bench.
And you can step up more quickly with your first foot, add a "scissor kick" foot exchange while jumping, and then landing back on the ground with the opposite foot.
Interval training
One of the best ways to kick up your workout is to use interval training, meaning to change the intensity while you walk or run (or cycle).
There are many ways to increase and decrease the intensity of your workout, but three easy ways include:
(1) choose to run up and down the stairs in the park or the environment, or up and down a hill on your route;
(2) use your music to increase your workout intensity by choosing to speed up during the chorus, for example, or during specific songs that you can program in a certain order, or every other song etc. This philosophy also works for those of you working out indoors on a treadmill or elliptical trainer with music, or if you like to watch television while working out – use the commercials to change the intensity of your training;
(3) use different cues in your environment to change the intensity. For example, every other tree speed up and slow down, or every lamp post, or bus stop, or mailbox…depending on the cue, you may have shorter and longer bouts of higher intensity walking or running, but you will notice more in your neighbourhood and will feel much better when your training is complete.
Lunges
Last segment we showed you lunges that can be done with or without weights (in our case, it was laundry detergent bottles!).
This segment we are providing some variations of this exercise:
(1) regular lunges that are done walking forward and then backwards;
(2) lunge with a foot exchange (and small break) in the middle before switching your forward foot, and then
(3) alternating lunge leg without a break or stopping in the middle.
You can do any of these lunges uphill (not downhill though!) for added difficulty. Or try side lunges using stairs in the park or along the trails. This is done holding and facing the handrail, taking a side step up one or two stairs, and then bringing your back foot up to meet your front foot.
Focus on form
As always, do these exercises at slow and steady paces, and focus on your form.
Do as many repetitions as you can, and then try to keep track of what you do and improve on it weekly. Change things up by adding both variety and difficulty.
Oh, and importantly, let go of any fears or anxiety about other people watching you exercise outside. You are the one doing it, they are just watching! Be a role model.
Your challenge for this segment is to move at least one workout a week outside and see what you enjoy most.
To ask a question send an email to lifetimemontreal@ctv.ca.
