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5 Important Strength Building Moves

| June 10, 2014 Comment

5 Important Strength Building Moves – If you think building strength requires hours upon hours in the gym, you’d be wrong! Check out these 5 important strength building moves you can do at home.

Expert: Laura Miranda MSPT, CSCS

Transcript

If you want muscle tone instead of flab, you’ll need to increase your lean muscle. Lean muscle not only improves the way you looks, it increases your strength and boosts your metabolism.

The seated Russian twist is great for your core, your obliques, and your overall posture. So to execute this exercise, have a seat on the floor with your knees bent to about 90 degrees. From that position, engage your stomach, lean back about 15 degrees and tighten it up again. You’ll either take a medicine ball in your hands or a dumbbell–whatever you have available. Slowly rotate to the side, pause–again, engage your stomach as hard as you can and bring it back to the center. Do the same thing to the other side, exhale, bring it back to the center.

At no point on this exercise do you let your abs go. You keep it tight the entire time. Breathe normally throughout and rock that weight right to left.

For an extra challenge in this exercise, raise your feet slightly off the ground, hold that position and repeat as we just instructed you. The walking muscle will help build lean muscle across your entire lower body–most women’s problem areas. So you’ll start off in a standing position. Take a large step with your right foot straight out in front of you. Drop your body weight straight down to the floor. Make sure that knee is not over your foot; it is right in line with your ankle. From there, drive your body weight forward so that you stand up to two feet next to each other. From there, repeat with the opposite leg.

To make this exercise harder, add a dumbbell or a weighted medicine ball. Hold the ball in this position. This will work your arms, your core, and your legs that much harder. The dumbbell press is an exercise for your entire upper half of your body–shoulders, back as well as triceps. What you’ll do is you’ll take dumbbells in your hands–start out with a weight that you’ll feel comfortable with. Press the dumbbells straight over your head until they touch at the top. Pause in that position. Drop the dumbbells back to the starting position.

The importance of this exercise is to maintain the dumbbells right next to your face the entire time. Don’t let the come too far forward or too far back. As you get stronger in this exercise, you can make it more difficult by standing on one leg to increase the work over your entire body or you can simply increase the amount of weight that you’re holding in your hands.

The kettle bell swing is an exercise that works your entire body–lower body, core and arms so you get a lot of bang for your buck. If you don”t have a kettle bell available, you can use a dumbbell like I’m going to use right here. You put this dumbbell straight down in front of you. I want you to imagine moving this dumbbell with your legs so what that means is you’ll descend down into a squat position and with one motion from your legs, extend up and throw the dumbbell up with your legs. This move is a pendulum position that is coming from your hips, not necessarily your arms. Your arms come along for the ride.

Most important, crucial factor for this exercise is to maintain a perfect squat position throughout. That means maintaining a neutral spine here so you want to engage your shoulders to keep this dumbbell strong as an attachment to the rest of your body. So, extend into the squat, pull up, pop it from your hips. It’s a hip motion and your arms again are along for the ride. Once you finish ten reps on the right arm, switch to the left arm and repeat just as we said.

The spider monkey is an exercise with an obscure name but it’s essentially a modification on the basic mountain climber so it will engage your entire body–upper, core, and lower body.

So what I’d like you to do is start out in the push up position. your body is straight from your shoulders down to your hips with your feet next to each other. Hands are right underneath your shoulders in a strong, stable plank position. From there, take your right leg, pull it as far forward and close to your right hand as possible. Engage your stomach and then slowly place it right back out.

Switch to the opposite side. get it as far close to that hand as possible–stable core, stable hips. And keep repeating this as fast as you can to make it look pretty. And that means keep your hips stable, your shoulders in line and your legs right where they started. For other great workouts just like this, check out other videos in this series.

Last Modified: 2013-10-15

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Category: Fitness, Videos

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