1. Lose the Lunges
This is the most over-prescribed exercise in bodyweight history and causes more knee pain than anything. You’re likely doing the exercise incorrectly and even a few reps done incorrectly can cause knee pain.
If you want to hit your hamstrings, upper thighs and glutes, then don’t risk knee pain or even injury. Swap your lunges to a split squat where the back foot is planted:
Drop the back knee to the floor and then elevate to standing in a split stance position.
You can also add a wall sit with the weight on the heels to really blast the legs while keeping the knee in a safe position.
2. Do Less Push Ups
Look, we live in a seated slumped over world since we’re often at computers or driving. We’re tight through the chest and our back muscles are weak and slack. Our posture is horrible.
While push ups are brilliant for strengthening the chest, shoulders, triceps and core, these muscles need to be balanced with back strengthening moves.
For every push up done, you need to do a back strengthening move like a ‘stick up’:
This doesn’t look like much, but it’s tough to keep your elbows and hands on the wall while moving the hands up and over the shoulders. It’s a great bodyweight exercise to strengthen the upper back and postural muscles.
Trust me, you’ll even look leaner when your posture improves.
3. Avoid “Traditional” Cardio
Old school ‘cardio’ is the #1 exercise that’s literally killing your fat loss efforts.
That’s right, when I hear ‘cardio’ for fat loss, I actually ‘cringe’.
It’s a total waste of time that encourages over-use injuries and is discouraging where fat loss is concerned. The older you get, the more you’ll see how ineffective and frustrating steady state cardio is for fat loss.
It’s the #1 thing that women turn to when they want to lose weight and it’s also the #1 least effective fat loss method.
But don’t stop ‘cardio’ completely. Simply replace traditional cardio training with anaerobic bursts. This will spike your metabolism in record time, reduce the potential for overuse injury and eliminate workout boredom.
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