Whether you want to lose weight, bodybuild, improve your sports fitness or maintain your heart health, you have many options for home workouts. Using little or no equipment or by adding one exercise machine to your plan, you can create effective home workouts if you follow a few, basic exercise principles. Plan your fitness strategy in advance to create and stick with effective home-exercise routines.
Exercise Types
Different exercises affect different bodily functions. Using free weights, resistance bands or home gyms helps build muscle and muscular endurance. Using less weight or resistance and working at a more intense pace improves hearth health and burns more calories. Circuit training with resistance and sprint training improves sports fitness. Aerobic exercise, such as jogging or using an exercise machine, trains slower muscle fibers and burns more fat, which may not be appropriate for tennis, basketball, volleyball and other sports that use faster muscle fibers and more carbohydrates.
Beginner Routines
To start working out at home, choose exercises that keep one or both feet on the floor at all times, to avoid high-impact movements that may cause pain. Use light weights to build muscle without tiring you out quickly. Your goal at this stage is to build your stamina and endurance, so that you can work nonstop for 15 minutes or more at the beginning, working up to 30-minute workouts. You may find more success using a variety of exercises to prevent the muscle fatigue that can come from making the same movements for long periods. Jog in place for 1 or 2 minutes. Walk up and down stairs for several minutes. Do 30 seconds each of situps, squats, lunges and pushups on your knees. Use an exercise machine, such as an exercise bike, for 5 minutes. You can buy a bike stand on which you can place a road bike for indoor use.
Weight-Loss Routines
To burn enough calories to lose weight, raise the intensity of your workouts and perform them for longer periods. You may need to add high-impact exercises to your home workouts, such as rope skipping, jumping jacks or aerobics that follow a TV program or DVD. An exercise machine is an effective option for cardio workouts; find one you enjoy that doesn't cause a repetitive stress injury and doesn't bore you. You can use an exercise bike, treadmill, rowing machine, elliptical or home gym with little or no resistance. Use a machine one day, then use the exercises for a beginner workout at a higher intensity to create an aerobic workout the next day. Whichever you choose, ensure that you are breathing hard during your workout but still able to talk.
Sports Fitness Routines
To improve your sports performance, you'll need to improve your ability to use your muscles without fatiguing during your match or game. You'll also need to train your ability to recover your breath between points. Use a circuit-training routine to build muscular endurance and cardio stamina. Move from exercise to exercise with short recovery periods in between. Create a circuit by putting together four exercises that you perform at a high intensity for 30 seconds each. Take 2 or 3 minutes to recover, then start another circuit. This not only builds your heart and muscles but helps your body to practice recovery. Use bodyweight exercises such as squats, lunges, pushups, situps, crunches, chinups, pullups and chair dips. Use an ab wheel to build core strength.
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