The gyms are closed. Stay-at-home orders are in place to slow the spread of SARS-Cov-2. And yet, you still want to be able to workout to stay active and healthy during this period. What should you do? According to health experts, adults should aim to incorporate at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise into their daily routine to maintain a healthy weight. All the distractions of home and, and in most cases, the turning of our homes into offices, daycare centers while still functioning as “home”, can make it difficult to keep up with an exercise routine.
However, even with the added layers of complexity, it is possible to stay active and healthy at home. In this post we’ll talk about 7 ideas that will help you stay active and healthy. Here’s the best part of it – you don’t have to leave your house for any of them.
Disclaimer – Before you start any exercise program, please consult your physician.
Seven effective workout exercise ideas you can do at home
Before we jump into any of the ideas, it’s important to realize that anything that doesn’t get scheduled, most likely will not get done. Thus, we recommend that you schedule exercise into a special slot during the course of your day. It doesn’t matter what time of the day you decide on as long as you are getting the exercise in.
Now let’s talk about those exercise ideas.
Jump rope exercises
There’s hardly anyone who doesn’t know what a jump rope is or who did not use a jump rope themselves as a child. As it turns out, skipping alongside choosing a healthy diet with the right calories can help you stay incredibly active and healthy. All you need is a jump rope and a willingness to use it.
You might find an old abandoned rope in your garage from years gone by. Or you could buy one for very cheap from any of your favorite retailers.
If you’re looking for inspiration on how to skip your way to health, check out this website.
Use an exercise mat
You can use an exercise mat to stay active without ever leaving your house. Exercises you can do on an exercise mat include:
- Yoga
- Pilates
- Barre
- Jumping jacks
- Lunges
- Abdominal exercises
And that’s a short list. Usually with an exercise mat, people workout to tone different muscle groups of their bodies. These exercises torch several calories quickly and are well-known to help people maintain a healthy weight.
Use the stairs
Stairs are an underrated and yet effective exercise tool. Even if all you have is a set of 3 stairs, you can still use those to stay active and healthy. Running or walking up and down the stairs for 30 minutes can help you meet your exercise requirements for the day.
If you need more ideas on what you can do beyond walking/running up and down your stairs, here are stair exercises you can do at home.
Weightlifting at home
If you already have weights you can lift at home, these are a powerful way to help you stay active and healthy while at home. Don’t have the weights you need? Fill up bags with rice and lift those instead.
Perform house chores
House chores can surprisingly burn a lot of calories. Washing the dishes, doing the laundry, chasing after kids to feed them and standing up to iron, all add activity to your day.
And so you accomplish two things at once – you complete the task for the home chore while giving your body the work-out it needs to stay healthy.
Dance Workout
You don’t need to have moves like a music star to benefit from dancing! A simple YouTube search for dance exercises in preparation of this article yielded 13.8 million videos.
All that wealth of dance exercises for free and you can access each one of them from the comfort of your home. And if you like none of the almost 14 million videos on YouTube, you can simply turn on your favorite dance music and move to that for 30 minutes.
Walking or jogging in place at home
You can also walk or jog in place and meet your daily activity quota. If you want to add some more work into a walk-in-place or job-in-place routine, you can add hand-held weights.
You may not be able to get to the gym right now to workout. But it is possible for you to get an effective work-out done without leaving your home. These seven ideas will get you there.
