No excuse physical activity!

 

Part of our healthy new year plan involves physical exercise. So here is a post to help you out. This is the minimum of what we plan on doing daily. 

 

Do exercise daily. We all know that physical activity is important. But it is hard to find time to go to the gym. So this year we resolve to do 4 minutes of exercise a day! I can just hear you now: “4 minutes… but that’s nothing.” You are right! You have 1440 minutes each day. 4 minutes is .002% of your day. So there is literally NO EXCUSE not to meet this resolution. 

The idea of 4 minutes of workout comes from the Tabata training protocol. This training protocol involves performing a particular exercise (or exercises) at high intensity for 20 seconds followed by 10 seconds of rest. This is repeated 8 times for a total training time of 4 minutes. The wonderful thing about Tabata is that YOU set the pace. As you do this on a daily basis, you will see how your fitness level improves as you are able to do more in your 4 minutes as time goes by. (This is a great website to check out for more info on Tabata http://tabataexercise.com/ )

You don’t need any equipment to perform these exercises. You can do them in your PJs if you want. You can do them inside or outside. You can do them alone or in a group. What I suggest is getting your whole family together each day to do the workouts together. The moves aren’t difficult and won’t take long to learn. If you do this with your kids and loved ones you will be helping them to get healthy too!

First I will introduce you to each “move”. Some of these you will know how to do already. Others may be new to you. So I will provide you some pictures. To make your own Tabata workout, simply choose 8 moves and do each for 20 seconds with 10 seconds of rest between. Or you can chose 2 moves and alternate them for a total of 4 minutes.
1) Jumping Jacks

2)Burpees

3) Mountain Climber

4)High Knees

5) Imaginary Jump Rope

6) Skaters

7) Butt Kicks

8) Push Ups

9) Lunges

10) Squats

11) Curtsy Lunge

12) Lunge Jumps

12)Squat Jumps

13) Bridge Up Downs

14) Wall Sits

15)Planks

16)Plank Jacks

17)Ski Hops

18) Spiderman Planks

19)Leg Raises

20) Supermans

21) Triceps Dips

22)Side Squats

23) Calf Raises

24) Russian Twists

25)Bicycle crunches