Short on Time for Your Workout? Add This to Your Workout Routine for Muscle Gain.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 36 seconds.]
The New York Times recently published an article on barriers to exercising and how much mindset can play a role. Note that some of us may have brain chemistry that counteracts that so Go Long is not saying that this is the only way to overcome this hurdle. But for many, mindset plays a significant role in changing habits and making them stick.
The article has some good advice around starting small, carving out mini-breaks throughout your day or finding cost-effective options if you’re on a budget.
When the article ventured into different types of exercises you can do at home, I started to think about what my “GoTo” exercise is where:
You don’t need traditional exercise equipment to do it and can do it in a small space
It is scalable from both a weight bearing and a duration perspective (more on this below)
You can work on both strength building and improving your balance simultaneously
Introducing the curtsy lunge
The curtsy lunge is a movement you can easily add to your at-home routine without adding more than a few minutes to your exercise time.
Why do I love them?
Functional Fitness: This is a dynamic movement that mimics how you move in life. It’s not executed as just a static exercise. What do I mean by this? Yes, you have daily movements that are pretty static like sitting down and standing up without assistance. But most movements in your life require strength, balance and rotation simultaneously.
Improved Balance and Stability: As you get older, balance and coordination starts to decline. This will impact your overall stability and studies show that people are more likely to suffer serious injury from a fall vs. becoming sick from disease.
Hits Core and Lower Body Simultaneously: You need to maintain balance during this exercise, so your core is engaged. It also targets the glutes, specifically the gluteus medius, which is essential for hip stability. They also engage the quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Unilateral Movement: Curtsy lunges are a unilateral exercise, meaning they work one side of your body at a time. This helps to identify and correct muscle imbalances, and improve your overall body symmetry.
Variety in Workouts: Adding curtsy lunges to your routine can break the boredom associated with your typical lunge and squat. You can also make them more challenging by adding weight or by adding the amount of time to the lunge itself.
Let’s talk a bit about that last point
This movement has loads of ways to make it more challenging. Once you have mastered executing the bodyweight version safely, which is highlighted in the above video, you can increase the complexity in one of two ways:
Adding Weight: Hold something in front of your chest while executing the movement, as you will see in the video below. This is going to engage your core even more. With your center of gravity higher, your core muscles have to stabilize more to prevent your upper body from falling forward, leaning back or leaning side to side. A can of soup is plenty of weight to get started here.
Adding Tempo: I’ve talked about tempo in the past by calling it ‘time under tension’. When you SAFELY add tempo to your movements, you are increasing the stress on your bones and muscles. This helps prevent the loss of bone density and muscle, which is a good thing. I’ll take 2-3 seconds on the downward movement of the lunge, hold for a second and then return to the starting position.
Do you add one or both?
I wouldn’t add both at the same time, especially if you’re just learning the movement. When I am looking to go up in weight and I’m struggling to maintain form while doing it, I’ll add tempo in first at the weight that I am currently moving.
Why?
I’m still building strength and I feel safer.
Now how to find that sweet spot?
What sweet spot? It’s about the right combination of doing the work safely, in the time that you have and achieving the results you want within your budget.
But first you have to be willing to do ‘THE WORK’. Without that, the rest of the above mentioned variables don’t matter.
You could take the first step and schedule a complimentary consult.
Perhaps then it’s deciding that you need some help with setting realistic goals.
Maybe it’s something else.
Go Long can help.
It’s your life. Go the distance. Go Long.