City of Ames, IA Healthy Living With Nancy Shaw, 20 Feb 2014

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From YouTube: Healthy Living with Nancy Shaw

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Nancy shows some Body Weight Training exercises you can do at home.

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Hi, I'm nancy shaw with healthy living today. I'd like to talk and show you some body weight, training exercises you can do in your workouts, who needs a gym when you can work out at home in your living room body. Weight training can help improve strength, balance and flexibility without the use of machines or going to a gym, they're easy. You can do them on vacation. You can do them at home without any special equipment.

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There are a lot of variety of body weight, training exercises, including cardio exercises and various strength, training workouts that you can do to improve your total body workouts. Today, I'd like to show you some of those exercises I'll be showing you some cardio and strength training exercises to get a total body workout. You might want to do some cardio, alternating with some strength exercises.

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The first exercise I'm going to do is just a good old squat. We do these in exercise classes. We do these in the weight room. You don't necessarily need weights to make that squat efficient.

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If you want to make it a little harder, we can balance first of all on one leg again remembering that balance is such an important part of our workout and then just taking it down to a one-legged. Squat, definitely feel the challenge by taking it to one leg, to even increase that squat or the difficulty of that squat, taking it down trying to keep that balance as we go a little deeper.

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Taking that leg, slightly behind you and back the lunge is another great exercise for a body weight training having one leg back, make sure you have a nice wide stride with that back heel lifted. We can just take it to a squat or lunge here, or we can alternate back lunges.

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You can alternate front lunges.

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And if we want, if we want to add that cardio component, we can take it to a lunge and take it to a split jump lunge trying to de-accelerate slowly, bending those knees taking it deep and you can increase your speed if you want to increase the intensity.

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Another great cardio exercise. We've all done these way back in school is the good old burpee. The burpees are coming back into a lot of our exercise classes. It's a very functional exercise. Just reaching up coming down extending the legs out in and jumping up. We can always add that push-up at the bottom, so we can be here here- jump push up, jump in and jump up.

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Another great exercise, of course, jumping jacks can't forget about jumping jacks. Just taking the arms halfway up can be efficient.

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If you want to eliminate that jump in your workout, taking it to a low impact, jack or maybe playing with the arm so taking it reaching it here, taking it in front taking it here again adding that cardio component to your body, weight, training, workout.

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Doing some core exercises, we can come down to a plank hand shoulder width apart. This is one of the best core exercises you can do.

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We're going to have our eyes down our abdominals into our stomach and just holding is a great way to work that core and we can spice it up a little bit by coming down to a hover and either holding that or alternating between plank and hover down and up.

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Of course, we can't forget about the push-up. Push-Up is one of the best upper body exercises for body weight training. We do a lot of push-ups in classes here at the community center. So with the correct push-up, you want your hands wider than shoulder distance apart and there's a lot of variations on the push-up. So if you want to really focus on the chest, hands will be a little wider.

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We can either drop to our knees or come up to our toes and then just dropping that chest down and pushing up trying to keep those eyes to the floor.

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Definitely is a great chest: workout we can move to the triceps by just doing a variation of that push-up by having the hands narrow under the shoulders. So we're here eyes are down. Elbows are just going to sweep the body and come down and push up again focus changes from the chest to the tricep on that one.

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So laying on our back of course, for some body weight exercises the traditional crunch.

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Here, drawing the navel into the spine is a great one, and from here we can take it to our bicycle rotating the shoulder towards that knee and extending that leg out to the floor to work those obliques. We can take it to the side, hover or side plank, I'm going to start with the hover. We can either stack those feet, one on top of the other or bend that bottom knee.

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Our goal is to lift this hip up. Elbow is going to be under the shoulder, so we're going to lift and just holding it here is a great exercise for the obliques for the entire core so reaching it here and holding. We can add a hip drop.

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Or we can add a tuck through some people call this thread the needle.

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So for a little more challenge, we can take it to a full plank side plank where, again, our hand is under our shoulder and we're extended up and just holding. You can add a little challenge here. Also by lifting that top leg and holding well balance work a lot of core work. It's a very good, challenging move.

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These are just some of the exercises and body weight, training that you can do at home on vacation or away from the gym a lot of body weight. Training exercises are used in classes here at the community center. So if you'd, like more information on body weight, training or any of our classes here at the community center through ames parks and recreation, you can contact me at 239-5353 or online at ames parkrec.org, I'm nancy shaw with healthy living and remember it's never too late to get fit.