Simple Full Body Workouts

Simple, full-body workouts may be done at a busy gym with an exercise bench or at home using a chair. The convenience of exercising at home reduces a few of the barriers to exercise such as your drive time to the gym or a hectic schedule. Exercises in a simple routine can tone and strengthen the back of your arms, your inner thighs, your glutes and your hamstrings.

Benefits

Simple workouts take advantage of your own body weight. Exercise bands or a few dumbbells require you to activate your joint stabilizing muscles to maintain your balance. Uusing the big cable machines at your local gym weakens your stabilizing muscles, warns Paul Chek of the Corrective Holistic Exercise Kinesiology Institute. By continuously engaging these muscles, you reduce muscle imbalances and therefore you reduce your risk of injury.

Considerations

You will reach a point where simple workouts become easy and do not provide a sufficient amount of resistance to continue to improve your fitness. Use a weighted vest to increase the resistance for body weight exercises. Secure ankle weights around your ankles to increase the difficulty of abdominal exercises. Perform exercises at a faster rate to make them harder. You may also place your feet at a higher elevation for push-up type exercises or place your feet on unstable platforms such as an exercise ball or a suspended exercise band.

Home Routine

You need just a small area in your home, a dining chair and a moderate-tensioned exercise band to complete a full body workout. Train your upper body with push-ups, band curls, triceps dips, lateral band raises and band rows. Tone your legs with stationary lunges, body-weight squats and one-legged dead-lifts using the exercise band. Work your abdominal muscles with exercises you can do on the floor including basic crunches, reverse crunches and full sit-ups. If you are unable to do push-ups on your knees, begin with wall push offs to strengthen your chest, shoulder and triceps muscles. As you get stronger, do floor push-ups on your knees then floor push-ups on your toes.

Gym Routine

The gym weight room is generally busy just before people head to work and right after work. If this is the only time you are able to work out, you can effectively train your body using a portable exercise bench, two pairs of dumbbells and a moderate-tensioned exercise band. Bring your equipment to an out of the way corner in the gym. Ensure the dumbbells you choose are heavy enough to do flat dumbbell presses, one-arm dumbbell rows, split squats and straight-leg dead lifts. Use the exercise band for biceps curls, one-arm triceps extension and shoulder presses. You may do the same crunches as the home routine but also add a V-up crunch off the edge of exercise bench. As your abdominal strength improves, hold on to the short end of the bench to do reverse crunches; curl your pelvis up further off the bench.