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Home Workouts - Portable Exercises At Home

Basics should never be forgotten and you can always get in a simple workout at home with absolutely no workout equipment at all, you just need to be creative!

Even small spaces can work if you are patient and willing. Chairs, beds, pillows and your simplest of surroundings can aid in a great workout.

Chest can be targeted by doing pushups on toes or knees but if you are too weak to do that then begin by doing them against a wall with feet only as far back as you can tolerate, slowly progressing them farther back until you then move onto the knee pushups.

Those of you with balcony can use the rail for the pushups similar to wall pushups.

For an isolated chest exercise use water bottles to perform chest flys, by stacking a pillow or 2 along your back to give you some height and allow a deeper fly range of motion.

Legs give you tons of variety from different types of lunges, squats, deadlifts, step ups, and calve raises. The step ups, calve raises and lunges can be enhanced when done using a step from a set of stairs in your home.

Isolated exercises like inner and outer thigh or prone butt exercises can be done lying on your side or face down (prone).

Horizontal pullups, horizontal chin ups and good old good mornings are all great choices for the targeting upper, lower and mid back as well as the biceps. The horizontal choices are done by anchoring a sturdy bar or wooden pole on chairs in a manner which will not roll around. In the gym I see people use the smith machine by anchoring the bar low or using a squat rack and anchoring the bar low on there.

Tricep Dips are an excellent and maybe only choice other than using water bottles for dumbbell traditional tri exercises. You can use chair, bed, bathtub and low counter edges to do these with a chair to mount your feet up on if you are at that advanced level.

Front Delt Raises and over head presses can be done using a chair as your weight tool or water bottles which will also allow for side delt raises.

Water bottles are also great for condition work such as rotator cuff internal and external rotation, rhomboid squeezes and thumb raises done prone and much more.

A few simple Pilates based exercises such as the planks and hundreds are excellent to end your session and cool down. Of course there is the lower back prone extension, crunches, cross crunches and superman exercises for core which can be done anywhere at anytime!

Whatever you choose from the above just make sure you don’t miss your workout even if you have to perform a selection of these at home. This will keep you on track to your goals and help you get your next day’s workout in to keep up the flow. You can also throw this workout into the mix to change things up once in a while. Finish up with a nice stretch for all the muscles worked on that day.

By Linda Cusmano