Don't let the weather affect your training regime
Unfortunately the British weather is notorious for throwing a spanner in the works of even the best laid training plans. Whilst you can hit the treadmill, after a few days of rain this can become a little tedious, not to mention expensive if you don’t have a gym membership.
However, it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom when the rain starts fall as there is plenty of useful training you can do from the comfort of your own living room as Greg Sellar, one of the world’s leading fitness experts, explains…
Greg Sellar has worked in the fitness industry around the globe for over 17 years, acting as an instructor, trainer and presenter for some of the largest fitness brands on the planet. Greg uses effective training methods and fitness techniques across multiple disciplines and has picked up a whole host of accolades on the way.
Greg’s top tips for keeping things moving indoors are…
1) Keep your body loose – Use the time to keep your body loose. Missing out on training time can leave your body feeling tight. Yoga and other stretching exercises are great ways to relieve these tensions, and can also help improve your gait (the pattern of movement of the limbs) making you a more efficient runner. If you have access to a foam roller, definitely hit those pressure points in your legs, glutes and lower back – something you can do in front of the TV!
2) Your home can be your gym - Use what’s around you, our homes are full of useful objects that can be easily added in to our exercise routines. For example a simple wheeled chair presents a couple of great opportunities:
Try the Bulgarian Split Lunge. Face away from the chair with your back foot on it and allow yourself to fall into a lunge position, with you back foot elevated to the height of the chair. You could also drive the chair backwards as you dropped into a front leg lunge. It’s a tough exercise.
3) Hydrate and refuel - Your body loses fluid at a rapid rate when running, so you need to replace the water, electrolytes and salt on your ‘off’ days as well. Every 1% of fluid loss can further reduce your running performance, so stay hydrated all week. It’s much easier to remain hydrated than to try and play catch-up with dehydration. Take on a more calories through increased consumption of fruit and vegetables to replace valuable vitamins and minerals lost through your runs.
4) Strengthen your core – Core stability and strength is vital to a runner. A runner with poor core control and the resulting postural problems, will experience all sorts of issues relating to the lower back, hips and knees.
Using your wheeling chair at home once more, you can use it as a part of plank exercise. Put your elbows on the chair and slowly roll it away from you, using your core body muscles try to bring it back to the start position – you’ll feel this one in the morning!
5) Update and plan – If you’re using any kind of GPS navigation to track your runs, or programmes such as Google Maps or Nike+, use your recovery days to update the programmes and change your running routes. Not only will this alleviate boredom for longer runs, but it will also allow for more accurate tracking when it comes to time and distance. These tools are great for measuring pace and calculating overall distance covered and can be a real help to novice runners trying to stick to a pre-designed plan.
If you’re inspired by Greg’s ideas, or the rain is continuing to fall and you need more exercises, he has helped compile a number of workout DVDs for fitness fx. For more details visit www.fitness-fx.com
Tagged in exercise fitness tips Workout