General fitness - Week 7

Working out at home with fitness equipment is a convenient way to increase your fitness levels. Some common pieces of fitness equipment that you can include in your home workout are:

• Fit balls
• Tubing or Theraband - light to medium resistance
• Free weights - 2lb to 10lb
• Foam roller

If you do not have some of the home equipment suggested, you can incorporate other household items such as:

• Tennis ball - used for rolling out your back, feet and glutes
• Chair - to use for stability
• You can use water bottles or soup cans for weights
• Ankle weights

Tubing and free weight workout:

When using tubing, please anchor your tubing to a stable piece of furniture or pole to perform the tubing chest press and back rows. To make the tubing or weight workouts more challenging, try to use a few combination moves such as squat and shoulder press or lunge forward with a tubing press (refer to the weekly workout).

Examples of free weight and tubing exercises: (check the weekly workouts for more ideas)

• Squats holding onto dumbbells
• Side shoulder raises using dumbbells
• Reverse flys lying over a fit ball
• Bent over rows - using dumbbells

It is important to ensure that you are breathing throughout your exercise session. Use the following tips to help make your workout safe and successful.

1. Breathe:

• Breathe in during the easiest part of the exercise.
• Breathe out during the hardest part of the exercise.
• Do not hold your breath and ensure that you are breathing throughout the exercise session.

2. Core Engagement and Proper Posture:

• Focus on engaging your core by standing or sitting tall and engage the abdominal muscles.
• Keep your shoulders pulled down and your shoulder blades pulled back to open the chest.
• Keep your abdominal muscles engage throughout the exercises.

3. Pay attention to your body:

• Listen to your body through the movements.
• Ask yourself: How does it feel? Does one side feel different than the other?
• Thinking about and listening to our bodies may give us an indication of our imbalances, strengths and areas that we need to improve on.
• You should not feel pain when performing exercises, if you do, reassess your posture and technique to ensure that you are doing the exercises correctly.

There is risk of injury when participating in exercise, physical fitness and physical training programs. If you have any concerns or questions about whether or not you should participate in exercise activities demonstrated on this website or videos offered on this website, you should consult with a physician or other health-care professional before starting any exercises.

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