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Due to rising Corona case numbers, stricter restrictions have been introduced again. Besides restaurants, leisure businesses like public gyms now have to close again too. Are you wondering how to stay fit from home regardless?
Exercising is more important than ever in Corona times. Outdoor exercise is of course still possible and also helps clear your head and lower your stress level. If the cold temperatures leave you lacking motivation for that, you can simply move your training home.
Why you shouldn't skip your home workouts these days, and which fitness exercises help you stay fit and high-performing from home, you'll learn in this blog post.
Exercising is more important than ever these days
Especially in times like these, when we're being asked to stay home, it's particularly important to stay physically active and exercise. Partly because you can maintain your physical health, prevent weight gain and boost your wellbeing. And partly because exercise sustainably strengthens your body's own defences, helping your body handle infections better.
Admittedly, motivating yourself for a home workout regularly isn't always easy. Especially when lockdown, cold winter days and working from home weigh on your mood. But if you manage to push through and exercise regularly, it has numerous positive effects on you: you improve your fitness, can shed excess kilos, strengthen your cardiovascular system and cognitive abilities, and improve your mental state too.
The Corona pandemic affects mental health through increasing strain, worries and fears. The effects of quarantine, including loneliness and depression, are additional major mental burdens. With movement, training and exercise, you can act preventively and avoid mental health issues, but also treat them.
Especially as the pandemic continues, the risk of mental health impairment increases. So now is the time to act and actively do something good for yourself and your body.
How to stay fit at home
Now that gyms are closed again, that doesn't mean your fitness and movement have to fall by the wayside, and neither does your motivation for exercise!
You can turn your living room into a training space in no time. After all, it's already been turned into a home office ;-) All you need for it is a fitness mat.
Training with your own bodyweight
Effective training is possible even without fitness equipment. To challenge yourself and target specific muscle groups, you basically don't need anything more than your own bodyweight.
There are countless cardio and strength exercises for challenging workouts without equipment, letting you stay fit from home with no trouble at all. For example:
Cardio exercises:
- Sit-ups
- Mountain climbers
- Burpees
- High knees
- Jumping jacks
Strength exercises:
- Squats/ sumo squats/ squat jumps
- Lunges/ side lunges
- Push-ups
- Plank
- Superman (with leg lift)
With water bottles, a backpack filled with books or other everyday objects, you can easily add extra weight to your home workout and train even more intensely. Maybe you also have a jump rope at home that you can use to vary your endurance training.
Depending on which fitness goal you're pursuing, and whether you mainly want to build muscle or burn fat and boost your endurance, your focus should be on cardio or strength exercises respectively.
Getting through lockdown with HIIT and Tabata workouts
Other training formats that let you boost your fitness at home are HIIT and Tabata workouts.
HIIT workouts ("high intensity interval training") are short (about 20 to 30 min.) but very intense exercise sessions that alternate with short recovery phases. During the intense intervals, which usually last between 15 and 60 seconds depending on your fitness level, your body gets pushed to its limits. This lets you burn especially large amounts of calories, both during and after the training session, thanks to what's called the afterburn effect.
Tabata workouts are a variant of HIIT, where the intervals are defined at 20 seconds. That's followed by a ten-second break. A Tabata session consists of eight intervals in total. At four minutes, that's a fairly short home workout, but one that really packs a punch. During the 20 seconds, the goal is to give everything and do as many reps as possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS9r5Or7olE&feature=emb_logo
Start now from home - with online personal training
I'm happy to help you achieve your fitness goals within your own four walls with a professional training plan. In virtual personal training, we work together to build a tailor-made training plan for you (which gets adjusted along the way to match your progress and needs).
With an HD livestream broadcast from my virtual 360-degree studio, our shared online training feels as if I were training right beside you. I don't just monitor your exercise execution and can correct you and perfect your form at any time, with my NLP life coach experience I can also build you up mentally and motivate you during this difficult time.
Staying fit through lockdown with nutrient-rich nutrition
During quarantine, the temptation is often big to spend your free time on the couch with a movie and a bag of chips. But when was the last time you had so much time to cook fresh food?
Lockdown and the turn of the year are the best time to refresh your routine and build regularly preparing fresh meals into your everyday life. It doesn't always have to be something elaborate, after all, sometimes even working from home doesn't leave time for that. Healthy can be simple too. For example, you can also batch-cook larger amounts two to three times a week, prepare sauces, chop vegetables in advance, etc., and keep them fresh in the fridge or freeze them.
The right nutrition is crucial above all for your wellbeing and your training success. Nutrition and training simply go hand in hand. I'm happy to show you in online personal training how to optimise your nutrition for a healthy lifestyle, and I'll build an individual nutrition plan for you, helping you lose weight more easily and build muscle. Sign up now for a free 30-minute consultation.