Fitness workouts require a variety of different movements to keep them varied and make sure you don’t grow bored of them, or let get your muscles too used to them. These movements listed bellow are some unusual ones to add to your fitness workouts that will train the muscles in different ways from what you’re used to. They are all great as ways to train your muscles in unison and many of them are great for CV too. Putting them together would make an excellent training circuit.

Squat thrust

One from circuits/other keep fit classes/gym juniors (ah those were the days). This trains the whole body and is great for CV too. Don’t forget it!

Shadow/mirror boxing

My chosen favourite form of CV, though mine is more like 'shadow kung fu' and also involves kicking and blocking too (great martial arts practice). I like to listen to dramatic music and pretend I'm fighting armies of enemies... It’s a great way to tone muscle and to burn body fat.

Crazy pec attack

For this one you lie on a bench holding two fairly light dumbbells directly above you (as if you were about to do dumbbell presses) then get a fried to push your arms in one of random several directions... down, out, over… it could be a pec fly, a pullover, a press... a combination of them... This one is courtesy of my gym buddy Nathan who came up with the idea and really turned our fitness workouts up a notch.

Rocking press ups

Get into press up position but then only go down on one arm each time so leaning to one side, then repeat on the other side. It's brilliant for training the pecs in an isolated fashion and is also a great way to learn to do one-armed press ups. You can also do rocking pull ups but I'll leave you to figure out what they entail...

Sissy squats

The guy who runs my local circuits class calls these LA squats as they look slightly porno... They aren’t pornographic though… Basically they involve standing with your feet shoulders’ width apart as a normal squat, but then leaning forward with your knees onto your tip toes and backwards with your back so that it’s diagonal. Now squat by bending at the knees, lowering your upper body towards the floor. It’s called a sissy squat but it’s hella-hard!

Jack in the Box

You all know how to do these, but like the squat thrusts you may be neglecting them. Infact they’re a fantastic lower body workout that will train the fast twitch muscle fibres and burn like hellfire, really making you sweat during your fitness workouts.

Dumbbell runners

Stand as though you're running (one foot forward and arms by your sides bent) but hold a dumbbell in either hand, then run slo-mo like baywatch but going to extremes on the arms. Basically you're doing a hammer curl in one hand and a tricep kick back in the other then swapping. This is a favourite of Stallone himself.

Mack LeMouse

Copyrighted material; do not reprint without permission.

 

View all articles by Mack LeMouse