You don't need dumbbells, barbells, a kettlebell or a home gym to create effective, full-body workouts. Whether your goal is weight loss, muscle building or improving athletic performance, you can work your legs, hips, torso and arms with little or no equipment. Use familiar exercises to create efficient, non-weighted workouts.
Muscle Building
Build muscle using body weight exercises such as pushups, situps, lunges, squats, chair dips, crunches, calf raises, pullups, chinups and situps. Use resistance bands during lunges and squats and add biceps curls, triceps extension, rows, and chest presses and flyes. Perform a set of 10 or so repetitions, depending on your strength, then take a break of several minutes. Repeat the same set two more times before beginning a new exercise. Alternate upper and lower body.
To maximize muscle building, perform repetitions slowly and do not fully extend your reps. For example, rather than letting your arms drop after a biceps curl uplift, stop your downlift when your arms are at a 45-degree angle. This will force you to use muscle to lower the weight, improving the benefit from these eccentric muscle contractions. Other examples of this would be keeping your shoulders off the ground as you lower yourself from a crunch or situp, or maintaining tension in your arms after you lower yourself from a pullup or chinup.
Cardio
Perform body weight exercises and calisthenics at 40 to 70 percent to increase your heart rate and burn calories, recommends the American Council on Exercise. Do 30 seconds each of four different exercises without stopping, then recover for two to three minutes. In addition to the aforementioned exercises, add burpees, skipping rope, running stairs, butt kicks, jumping jacks and running or high-knee skipping in place.
Sports Performance
Improve muscular endurance throughout your body with a circuit-training routine consisting of one exercise per set. Do an exercise for one minute, then take one minute to recover before starting the next exercise. Use about 50 percent of the maximum weight you can lift. Alternate exercises, moving from a lower body to an upper body to a core exercise. Use different exercises for each circuit during your workout, or repeat several exercise two or three times each.
Workout Pattern
Whichever way you choose to create a full-body workout, use the same pattern each time. Warm up for several minutes, using medium-paced movements to get blood circulating in your muscles while you gently stretch them. Butt kicks, jogging in place and arm swings are good warm-up exercises. After you have finished your workout, cool down using these same movements at a gradually decreasing pace. This will lower your heart rate, help lactic acid and excess blood leave your muscles, and reduce stiffness and soreness later. Stretch your muscles with static stretching, holding a stretch just beyond your comfortable range of motion for about 30 seconds.
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