Training at your convenience

Hey everyone sorry for the lack of activity of late, I’ve been away and generally a bit busy.

In this post I want to talk about something which I like to call Convenience Workouts. The name gives it an air of ‘softness’ as if it may be easy, but let me tell you that is not what I am getting at. What I mean by Convenience Workouts is finding a workout which you can fit around your life. For example, a workout which...
Which takes no space,
You can do sitting down,
You can do in just a few minutes,
Which won’t cost you any money,
Which no equipment is needed,
Which gets results fastest,
or any mix of the above, or anything else. A lot of novice trainers who seek to get fit may get the impression that the only way to do so is to spend huge amounts of money on gym membership. This can work, if you go regularly, use the equipment correctly and effectively, and most importantly if you stick at it, fairly indefinitely. However, having gym membership and even going to the gym isn’t necessarily going to make you fit, nor is it the only way to do it.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere it is summertime now, and so a lot of you will be going away. And even if you’re not going away, the chances are there is going to be some slight disruption from the norm, filling in hours for someone who is going away for example. One of the most important features of maintaining a successful workout or training programme is structure and regularity. By that I don’t mean doing the same workout, I mean if you have a busy life you need time set away every week which is devoted to working out. Otherwise you’ll find an excuse not to.

What Convenience Workouts do is allow you to fit the workout into your life. You can create a workout you can do in a hotel room on the other side of the world just as well as you can do it at home. You can create a workout you can do in 15 minutes. You can create a workout to do while driving (be careful with that one though, save it for traffic jams, or waiting if you’re a taxi driver). As long as you’ve set time to do workouts every week, be it daily, 3 times a week, or once a week, it will be easier to maintain.

One of the most effective, simple and notorious of what I would call Convenience Workouts would be Burpee training. You may have heard of burpees either from some PE lesson nightmare in school, or from the endless tales told of them on the net not long ago. It came about after a criminal went to prison looking skinny and unfit, came out in the best shape of his life, in great shape, and never set foot in the prison gym. One of his main ‘secrets’ was burpees.They provide a surprisingly complete workout, testing balance, coordination and speed along with explosive power, as well as workout muscles in your legs, core, chest, back and arms. Done well, they can be adapted to be a strength workout or incredibly effective and dynamic cardio workout.


For those of you unfamiliar with them, I’ll help you out. If you have room to do a press up (that’s push up to you Americans) then you have room to do a burpee. What I call a ‘full’ burpee is as follows:
Stand up straight, arms by your sides.
Drop down into a crouch, so your hands are on the ground but most of the weight is on your feet.
Jump back with your feet into press up position, transferring some weight to your hands as you do so.
Do a press up.
In one flowing movement, jump your feet back into the crouch, then launch straight up into the air in a jump.

The two simplest workouts you can do with these are as follows:
20 descending sets. This is a tough workout and you will complete 210 reps in a fairly short space of time, so work up to it slowly. Simply, do 20 burpees, catch your breath, then do 19 burpees, catch breath and do 18, continue downwards until you are doing just one burpee, and you’re done. Start at 5, 10, or 15 if 20 is too hard to start with. Try not to rest longer than 30 seconds between sets.
Maximum effort time attack. Set a timer for 5 minutes, and do as many burpees as you possibly can in the time.
These can both be turned into challenges against yourself, simply by recording your best score (time yourself for the descending sets, and count your reps throughout the 5 minutes), and strive to beat your records. Then challenge your friends, just to make yourself feel really tough when you crack out twice as many in half the time as them!

There is a lot of variations you can do on the burpee for easier or for worse.
Easier: Cut out the press up, and just go into the position then jump back
Just do the jump from crouch to press up position, no jump or press up. This can actually be a very challenging cardio workout.
Don’t jump at the end, just stand up.

Harder: Do more tricky variations of press up such as diamond press ups or super wide arm press ups.
Turn the jump at the end into a tuck jump
Turn the jump at the end into jumping onto a pull up bar and performing a pull up or chin up (this one is a brutal one)

I’ll get on with some more posts ASAP, until then... HAPPY HOLIDAYS!