Three exercises to do every day.

In the enablement phase of your early training career, its very important that we are enfranchising ourselves to the true nature of physical fitness, and that means keeping it at the front of your attention each day. When making a sincere and honest effort to do just that, your day should be littered with exercise-laden events such as this that will help with this kind of integration. Below are three exercises that you can do each day, ( in succession ) that are easy to do at home and will provide you with rather dramatic results right away.

The Push-Up

Everybody say, “Oooooooooh! Push-ups!”

Pushups are the dreaded exercise of death that humiliated a lot of us in our high school PE classes, caused a lot of mental anguish for those of us who like to do things right and made many of us comfortable with the idea of cheating for the first time.

The reason this type of exercise is hard is because it forces us to interact with an exercise concept called our “Max”. I will touch more upon what this concept is in a later article, but for now just understand that in doing these types of calisthenics, your activity level will be hovering around the high end limit of exertion.

Push ups are a compound exercise that is performed using three separate muscle groups and is perfect for its portability because all you need is a smooth surface for your hands and gravity. The exertion uses your chest, your triceps and your deltoids to pull off the maneuver. Your hands should be about shoulder width apart, or slightly wider, depending on what feels more comfy for you. The movement mechanics of the exercise should have your elbows bending out at a right angle to the length of your body. Your back and body should be straight as your chest touches the ground at the bottom of the movement, pushing yourself all the way back up to complete one repetition of the exercise. Start out with a small number, like 10 or so, to get yourself used to it. What I try to do is add one every day. I’m up to 65.

The Sit-Up

Nobody knows how to do these. The way you were taught in grade school was no doubt flawed and you are probably inclined to add your quadriceps into the movement… no worries though…. We will break that habit right now.

Lay on the ground with your feet firmly affixed under something sturdy like a couch and make sure the floor is at least as soft as carpet. Place your hands up by your ears but do not grab onto your neck or use your arms in any sort of assistive pulling motion to get you off the ground. Curl your head and upper torso inward towards your gut until you are as curled in as you can get and do not bring your lower back off the ground. Then, return to your starting position with your shoulders touching the ground. This is one complete movement and should have all of the work done with the contracting “pull” of your abs. If you lift your lower back off the ground and bring your elbows to your knees, that’s great, but your missing the point of targeting your abs. Once you lift your lower back off the ground, it has become a compound exercise with your quadriceps doing most of the work. Do as many as you can with the strictest form possible and don’t stop until you feel your abs begin to burn.

The Pull-Up

Yowza! You want me to do what? Really?

Yes. Really. The pull-up is the bridging cornerstone exercise to the land of the uber-fit people. The barrier to entry of the pull up exercise is so difficult that most people go through their lives not even being able to do 1. You will be the saving grace of the planet if you help me reverse this trend.
The difficult reality of doing a pull-up is that you are almost guaranteed to be engaging your “Max” as you start out if you can only do one. If you can not do one, then a pull-up is well past your max and this makes getting stared next to impossible. However, you are reading my blog, and my blog is about figuring things out, so here are two ways you can surmount this problem:

The first solution requires a friend and they may not be routinely available on a daily basis and it is the more difficult option. Have your friend accompany you to your pull up bar and reach up and grab a hold. You should be off the ground at least a few inches and your hands should be slightly wider than shoulder width apart. Your palms should be facing away from you and your body should not swing around during the clean and swift upward motion as you pull your chin above the bar.
If you can not do one, this is where your friend comes into play. Cross your ankles on top of one another and bend your knees so your lower legs stick out, parallel to the ground. Your friend can assist your movement by taking a firm grasp of your bottom foot right at the curve of your ankle. During your pull up movement, your friend can “spot” you, lifting with you during your movement, paying careful attention to lift just enough of your weight to help you complete the repetition. The angle of your legs and leverage provided to you by your friend will allow you a perfect double spot from being able to use your hamstrings to press your lower legs downward against their hold on your ankles.

The second solution is more solitary and provides a much easier way to get to your goal, however, a gym with the proper exercise equipment is needed. I’m sure you are familiar with the “lat pull down machine”. This machine will provide you with the exact opposite movement of the same exercise which you can step down the weight of to any degree you specify. Work out with this machine routinely until you can pull down your own body weight. Then you are ready to start doing pull ups. 🙂