How to exercise at home

If you really want to figure out a home fitness method that suits you, the core is not to collect high-end equipment or plan a perfect training schedule, but to first find an entry point with almost no threshold. If you can persist for a long time, it will be more than 10 times more effective than a single training to exhaustion.

When I first started thinking about home fitness two years ago, I followed the trend and bought yoga mats, adjustable dumbbells, resistance bands and even a small trampoline. They were piled up on the balcony and took up half of the space. After the novelty wore off, they all fell into dust. Instead, my roommate who shared the same apartment last year gave me one. Wake up, she didn’t buy any professional equipment. She would do 15 bodyweight squats in front of the mirror every day while she was drying her hair after taking a shower. When watching variety shows on weekends, she would do a plank during commercial breaks. In two months, her leg circumference had slimmed down by two centimeters. She usually climbed the fifth floor without gasping for air.

Oh, by the way, the fitness community I frequented before had quarrels about this matter several times. Some people said that without professional equipment at home, it is impossible to achieve the muscle-building effect, which is simply a waste of effort. Others said that as long as the movements are standard, bodyweight training can fully meet the exercise needs of ordinary people. In fact, there is nothing wrong with both opinions. If you already have a certain foundation in exercise and your goal is to develop clear arms and back lines, spending about 100 yuan to buy a pair of adjustable dumbbells and several elastic bands with different resistances is really cost-effective and can basically cover most upper limb and core training movements. , if you just want to relieve shoulder and neck pain caused by sitting for a long time and maintain basal metabolism, there is no need to hoard a bunch of equipment to occupy space first. The dining chair you usually sit on and the 2-liter mineral water bucket filled with water can be used as temporary weights, and you can even practice well just by relying on your own weight.

I don’t have any fixed training time now. When I open the door after work and change my shoes, I stand against the wall for 3 minutes, with the back of my shoulders and head pressed against the wall, and my chin tucked in. The hunched-over energy accumulated at work all day is instantly relaxed. When sitting at the workstation to fish, I lift my feet off the ground and stretch my core for 10 seconds. I do it four or five times in a group. I can also train the muscles of my lower abdomen, and I don’t need to spend a lot of time. To be honest, this is like saving change in daily life. You don't have to force yourself to save thousands of dollars at once. Squeezing in three to five minutes to move every day is much more useful than grinding your teeth for two hours until you can't get out of bed and then lying flat for half a month.

Some people said before that you need to exercise at home for at least 40 minutes to burn fat. I believed this before. Sometimes I would come home ten minutes late from overtime, and I would stop practicing for almost half a month because I thought I wouldn’t have enough time. Later, I asked a familiar fitness instructor, and they said that even if you only exercise for 5 minutes at a time, three or four times a day, the total consumption will not be much worse than exercising for 40 minutes at once. There are not so many rigid rules. The only thing you need to be careful about is not to just follow the bloggers and do high-intensity movements. People who have been practicing for five or six years can do dozens of burpees in one minute. If you do it hard after not moving for a long time, it is easy to grind your knees or stretch your waist. Before doing it, search for the key points of the movement and feel the contraction of the target muscles. It is much more effective than just trying to do the exercises. After practicing, take two minutes to stretch your muscles, otherwise you will be so sore the next day that it will hurt to walk, and you will easily have resistance.