It can be easy to fall into a comfortable routine, but doing the same workout week in and week out is not only boring, but can be detrimental to your body by creating muscle imbalances and compensations. Below are 6 ways to change up your workouts. Try adding one per week to change it up and keep your body guessing.
1. Yoga: Yoga is a great way to add stretching into your routine. If you don't incorporate much stretching at all (even though you should stretch before and after each workout), try adding a 20-30 minute yoga session in each week. More than just stretching, yoga helps with strengthening stabilizers, relaxing the mind, and creating a mind-body connection. And yoga can be free - YouTube has a great variety of yoga videos to choose from created by various yogis!
2. Plyometrics: Plyos are jumping and explosive movements. Rather than just squatting up and down with your feet planted, as soon as you have exerted enough power and force for your feet to leave the ground, you are performing a plyometric movement. Plyos expend a lot of energy and therefore a lot of calories and can be performed in a short amount of time. Add some power, strength and muscle definition to your legs and glutes with plyos!
3. Kettle bell workout: Most of the exercises performed with kettle bells are a great way to get the whole body moving and a lot of muscles firing at once, including the core. Some great exercises are Turkish get ups, kettle bell swings, and windmills, among many more! For a killer full body workout pick 5-6 kettle bell exercises that target different muscles!
4. Active rest: Something your body needs the most a day or two after a hard work out is an active rest day. Something to get the body moving, whether it be walking, hiking, biking, or playing a light sport such as tennis or golf for fun will get the blood flow going, will bring nutrients and fluids to muscles to help them recover. Pick something that you enjoy and do it on one off your rest days.
5. Supersets: Supersets are when you perform two exercises back to back without resting. You can superset the same body part for example chest press and push ups. You can also superset the same type of movement, for example, chest and triceps which both perform the same "push" movement by performing a chest press and skull crushers without resting between sets of each. Or you can superset two different movements, such as chest and back where each perform different movements (a "push" and a "pull"), with a chest press and rows.
6. Combination movements: There are hundreds of exercises that you can put together to make a combination of movements, which will fire up more muscles and overall burn more calories at once. Typically, an upper body and lower body exercise combined will work great to get your full body working and test your coordination!