I have a question for our community: how do you exercise when you don’t have a gym available?
I am sitting in a different office today and therefore don’t have access to my fitness center. I can take a moderate to brisk half hour walk and I see from my handy dandy app Loseit! (see new thread about apps) that I will burn a paltry 100 calories.
So my qusetion to you is what do you do when a gym is not available? For argument’s sake let’s take having a jog off the table.
Fill a room with toddlers and puppies. Try to keep up. 
emphasis on “try”. I feel myself to be a fairly “fit as a fiddle” kind of dude, but our toddler daughter runs us ragged. I swear my muscles ache at the end of the day worse than hitting a gym, and that is without a puppy ( or kitten) … yet.
We live on a lake and swimming is a great morning “wake me up”. When the lake freezes, break out those ice skates and carve it up.
Swimming and Skating are two large muscle group activities that definitely pay off … and are fun too
If not ice skates, try roller blades or skates. Definitely wear protection though. Asphalt is very bad for the complexion.
Cheers
I run into the same issue since, working two jobs, time is of the essence. I’ve found that doing the stairs in my apartment building will get my heart pumping better than a brisk walk. And if you can find something moderately weighted to carry in each hand, you can increase the intensity.
isometrics
isometrics
isometrics
Thats What Bruce Lee did…
There’s also the option of push ups and sit ups, dips on the edge of a chair, core exercises like side planks and back extensions, and squats/squat thrusts and all that other calisthenic type stuff.
You can have a field day with the context, but there are a plethora of “Prisoner” exercises out there that use the weight of limbs and torso with gravity as resistance, similar to what Wolfgeek said about Lee’s isometrics principles.
Example: Prisoner squats. Stand like a stork, with one leg bent at the knee such that the shin is parallel to the floor. Stabilizing yourself with a hand on a chair back if necessary, slowly descend into a one-legged squat position for three seconds, and slowly raise over the equal time. The working leg would think you were holding forty pounds in dumbbells.
Lunges are great, too, and can be combined with simultaneous upper-body work like military presses if you have weights/tomes/babies handy.
Hey Solai, great question for the thread. I had to dig back into the archives for these, but this question used to come up on the old thread a bunch. Here’s a response from Bishop and myself, that echo a lot of what’s been said above:
Hope this helps!
It’s time consuming (though I have the whole thing to under 80 minutes a day which is epic in itself) but I walk 6 miles a day, there’s a park here with a two mile lap and I do it three times, headphones on the Blackberry (so I can take work calls too)…and it’s not only the exercise but it’s my “tune out the world” time…this is a good thing also…I recommend it highly when I can, and I do it every day I don’t have a hockey game!!
Excellent suggestions. I could do 80% of the core workout that my trainer puts me through sitting in my office with nothing but my desk chair and a floor mat. Do two rounds of 10-15 each of the exercises that Edoz suggests and your core workout is done.
Also, purely for destressing, rather than workout purposes, I try REALLY hard to make time for a brisk 20 minute walk at lunch. I eat over my keyboard most days so feel no guilty doing a walk as long as I am not so busy I really can’t spare the time. It clears my head quite nicely and gets me ready to settle in for the afternoon. Plus, who couldn’t use another 40-80 minutes of light exercise a week? You’re already bringing a gym bag with you some days so it shouldn’t be a problem to bring a pair of athletic shoes for the lunch walk.
I agree, any body weight type movements like those are a great workout.
This is going to sound very karate-geek; but you could have a good upper-body isometric workout doing the sanchin kata ~_~
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Ok, it sounds sucky and cheesy, but exercise videos. Jillian Michaels has a whole bunch available on iTunes and you can get a pretty damn good workout in half an hour with the aid of them. I quit the gym after having my baby because I didn’t like their childcare, so I started doing this video workouts (30 day shred and 6 week 6 pack) while she napped. Lost all the baby weight and my ab definition started to come back too. Personally I prefer the gym, but this was a good alternative, plus you can turn down the volume and put on your preferred music if you can’t stand the canned stuff.
Also there are some excellent free yoga podcasts on iTunes. My favorites are All the Way Live and Power Yoga with Dave Farmar. If you already know what you’re doing, you can do free classes on your own that way.
When I first started working out I couldn’t afford a gym membership, I did a lot of exercise videos for cardio. You can usually find a great selection at the library or rent them from itunes/Amazon for very little $$$. I also invested in a jump rope and resistance bands. Just little inexpensive things that you’d be surprised can make a difference.
Judge me not, but as a male comfortable with sweating alongside women (Solai, shut your face), I’ve busted my ass to the 30-Day Shred workouts. I am a strong proponent of the “constant motion” approach, which I think is what makes the current boot-camp trend so popular, and this is exactly that – short overall timespan for the circuit, but no break whatsoever, and cardio intervals that come up frequently enough to keep the heart and lungs constantly revving. I’ve also (ahem) seen full-workout clips (ahem) on YouTube (ahem) that are taken directly (ahem) from the DVD, if you want to “sample” it first before purchasing.
All of you Wolverines, keep at it. This fitness trend in the forums and twit-stream is an amazing thing to see growing so rapidly lately – you are all AWESOME. Every step is progress, every ache is strengthening!
I’m lucky because there is a gym nearby that I really like with good equipment and friendly trainers, so I haven’t been working out at home. But, I still really love the Step Reebok with Gin Miller system that came out around '95, I think. I love the music and the exercises. But there have been times when I haven’t been able to go out, so I’m thinking about investing in an exercise ball.
I also got that rope sport system a long time ago and someday I’m going to use it so I can stop feeling guilty about wasting my money on it. But there’s one exercise that I love that’s really hard for adults to do . . . double dutch. Maybe I can try and find a group of women who also enjoy it or coerce some GWCers at the meetup to jump with me.
I’m starting half marathon training this week, which will be basically no-gym (unless weather forces me inside). I have light strength training that can be done at home with free weights. So I do believe you can do a lot on your own and still be successful.