Fast and Furious Fitness

All,

The beauty of most (nay, all) the exercises that I talk about here on this blog is that there are virtually dozens, if not more, ways to make any ONE exercise more productive. You can do the exercise a certain way one day, and another way the next day - a good example would be fingertip pushups vs regular pushups. Slow the pace down one day, increase the next day. Vary your sets, reps, exercises - and there you have it - a perfect blend that never quite “tastes” the same, if I may say so.

Anyhow, I’ve talked about a lot of this before - today what I’m going to cover is how exercising on a different surface taxes the body differently. This fits in with my last post about morning walks in the park as well. . .

What I do these days is do my bodyweight stuff after my walk. And believe it or not, training on park soil can be tougher than training on a cement floor. For instance, I find the extended arm pushups to be virtually impossible to do in the earth - these require a solid hold on the ground, and a sweaty palm combined with slippery earth makes the exercise FAR tougher to do, purely for balance reasons. The same goes for reverse pushups.

So, yes, some exercises are tougher to do this way. On the other hand, actually DOING the exercise as mentioned makes it a more productive one, as your entire body is taxed more than doing it the regular way on a floor/mat - especially the forearms and grip.

And that’s just one example of how an exercise can be made more productive - simply do the same exercise on a slippery surface. You’ll find that maintaing your balance will become a workout in itself. The Iranian wrestlers of old knew this - they used to wrestle each other while covered in oil - this made it far harder to grip the opponent’s body, and thus developed the grip and forearms a lot more.

Word of caution: Make sure you don’t strain your wrists on some of the exercises if you do them on soil or otherwise slippery surfaces. Great to do for the grip, but strike a balance between safety and pushing it. No sense in ending up with sprained wrists, shoulders, or ankles. . .

Further, we aren’t limited to simply grip building here. The park I walk in has several slopes - and I do my pushups on the slopes. Trust me, doing pushups on a sloping surface is tougher than it seems - and when you mix in tablemakers - WHAM!

Then, we come to exercising with shoes, and without. I generally exercise barefoot at home, but have been doing my squats etc with shoes in the park. Different feel to it for sure, but I don’t feel it as much in my toes as I would if I did these barefoot.

I do my pull ups on a THICK monkey bar - talk about an awesome forearm workout, and better overall upper body strength from these!!

I could go on and on - but you get the picture - your imagination is the only barrier when it comes to making an exercise more productive.

All for now. Do write in and let me know how your workouts have been coming along!!

Get fit - FAST!

Rahul