Getting Fit: A compact home gym for under $200

As I mentioned previously someone in my apartment complex complained about the free weights in the gym–the paint on them was chipping–which caused a knee jerk reaction by the management to remove the free weights from the gym all together. And the moral of this story? The whiners and bitchers in this world always fuck it up for everyone else (hear that Tea Party?)

I’m over it now. But not having dumbbells to work with put a dent in my routine. I don’t have the space for and can’t afford a full set of dumbbells, especially those sweet adjustable dumbbells they have these days. I needed to find a solution. Enter resistance bands.

I know, images of middle aged women doing Pilates popped in your head didn’t they? But a quick Google search will show you that resistance bands can provide you with a very rigorous workout. You won’t gain any significant amount of mass with them. Free weights are the best option for this. But you will get stronger, you will get more fit and you will be able to do this in the convenience of your own home or apartment. The P90X system uses resistance bands. Many bodybuilders use them in a pinch when they can’t get to a gym, some even use them as part of their daily routines.

My Weider Total Body Works 5000 sees more action lately. It’s a fantastic, compact home gym that has served me well, now, combined with the resistance bands to isolate muscles like the biceps and triceps I get a thorough and rigorous home workout every time.

• Black Mountain Products Resistance Band Set with Door Anchor, Ankle Strap, Exercise Chart, and Resistance Band Carrying Case @ Amazon for $29.99
• Weider Total Body Works 5000 @ Amazon for $149.54

So if you haven’t got the space but would like to be able to get a good workout at home without spending a load of money you should look into these products.

Getting Fit: Let’s be realistic when counting calories

I got a search hit for ‘grease the groove calories burned,’ and it got me thinking.

If you’re serious about losing weight you just can’t count things like this. If you’re greasing the groove push ups or pull ups or whatever, you’re doing 10-20, 30-60 second sets throughout the day with plenty of cool down time in between. Are you burning calories? Of course you are but hardly enough to give yourself a medal. I read an article on About.com on losing calories while playing guitar hero, I’ve heard of apps for your iPhone that can calculate the calories you burn while sitting… … …

(that was stunned silence btw)

If you’re micro-managing your caloric intake versus your physical activity to this extent I can guarantee that you are eating too many calories. You’re not counting calories at that point, you are looking for a reason to eat more.

About.com has calorie counters for men and women. You enter your current weight, what you want to weigh, how tall you are and how old you are (ladies, remember to be honest.) Here, I’ll do it with you; I entered 170 lbs, I want to weigh 155 lbs, I’m 68 inches tall and I’m 42. This is what I got:

You need 2423.1 calories per day to maintain your current weight without exercise.
You need 2314.7 calories per day to reach your goal weight slowly and maintain that weight without exercise.
If you reduce your current caloric intake to 1923.1 calories per day you will lose one pound per week without exercise.
If you increase your current caloric intake to 2923.1 calories per day, you will gain one pound per week.

Exercise and Calorie Needs
If you exercise for 30 minutes each day, you may increase your caloric intake to 2660.9 calories per day and still maintain your current weight.
If you exercise for 60 minutes each day, you may increase your caloric intake to 2963.5 calories per day to maintain your current weight.
If you exercise for 30 minutes each day, you will be able to reach your goal weight with 2540.5 calories per day.
If you exercise for 60 minutes each day, you will be able to reach your goal weight with 2827.9 calories per day.

Macronutrients
The United States Department of Agriculture suggests that approximately 50 percent of your calories blah, blah, blah.

Out of all that information Exercise and Calorie Needs is the important one. Specifically, the two sentences I highlighted in red. If I exercise for 60 minutes a day I could–if I wanted to–wolf down near 3000 calories a day and still loose a pound a week. HOWEVER, if I exercise 60 minutes a day and kept my calorie intake to around 2000 calories a day I would be losing more than a pound per week. Savvy?

Now, when this calculator refers to exercising it means EXERCISING. Not playing with toy drums on your 360. Not doing the laundry or cleaning the house. Not sitting at work all day banging code out on a computer. It’s talking about balls to the freakin wall, sweat flying everywhere, gut busting, soul searching exercise. Does cleaning the house or doing laundry burn calories? Yes, but that’s a hidden bonus you should not be relying on.

B33m3R’s Calorie Counting Method:

I broke it down to a weeks worth (7 days) of exercising versus caloric intake and made a nice little chart I could look at:

Everyday I would tally up the amount of time I’ve exercised for the week and compare it to the amount of calories I had eaten for the week to know where I was for the week. This allowed me to honestly cheat the system. How? Because there were plenty of days I ate a meager 1600 to 1800 calories and there were days I exercised for more than an hour therefore there were days that I could go over my allotted calorie intake or even skip a day or two of training without fear of failing my goals.

Let me ‘splain it another way Lucy…  Lets say your anniversary is coming up and you’re planning to go out to eat with your husband on Friday night. We’ve all read the internet horror stories about restaurant food packing a whollop of calories so you’re nervous about the meal because you really want to fit into that slinky lingerie you got to top off the night (look, I’m a guy, I think about these things!) So you go to your logbook and you see that you’ve eaten a meager 1600-1800 calories a day since Sunday and you’ve worked out for 30 minutes every day except for Monday when you exercised for 45 minutes. At this rate you could easily scoff down a 3500 calorie meal and skip exercising (no, sex does not count as exercise in this scenario, even if you’re on top) on Friday and still be well within your goals. Counting the calories this way gives you room to fudge (mmmm Fudge!) the numbers a little without cheating.

While my chart has 1923 calories a day (13,461 a week) compared with 60 min. a day (420 min. per week) noted as ‘much better ratios,’ I would advise against going to this extremity. If you’re working out for an hour a day,  seven days, you’re going to need calories for energy and recuperation. I always shot for 2300-2500 calories a day when my workout cycles were heavier and I needed to focus on losing weight.

Another thing you need to know about counting calories is all corporations lie to you. If the package says 150 calories per serving, count on it being closer to 200, maybe even 250. Always round up to the next hundred when counting calories. If the package says 240 count it as 300.

Getting Fit: Dealing with a plateau: 10 X 10

I got a search hit the other day for ‘is it possible to hit a plateau using greasing the groove?‘

You can hit a plateau with any type of training not just greasing the groove. Most of the time that whole hitting a plateau thing is just another way of saying you’re bored with your routine. The easiest thing to do is switch up your routine. If you’ve been lifting heavy (6-8 reps for 5 sets,) start a high volume routine (12-15 reps for 3 sets.) If you’re lifting three times a week and doing cardio twice, switch it up and lift twice and do cardio three times a week. Do different exercises; substitute push ups for bench presses, do dumbbell presses instead of machine presses, do triceps kickbacks instead of extensions–you get the picture.

I switch up my lifting cycle every couple of months but I’m partial to heavy lifting cycles so I never do high volume cycles for more than a month. My routine itself pretty much stays the same because of the equipment available to me (the TBW 5000 and the meager offering of equipment at my apartment complex’s gym.) Sometimes I do 3 sets instead of 5, sometimes I do the exercises in a different order, and sometimes I do split routines (rarely, because I prefer a simple full body workout.) I get bored and depressed very easy (character flaw I guess) so I have to keep my routine as fresh and invigorating as possible.

But the plateau can also be a very real problem when training for big muscle and strength gains and I would like to share with you a method I learned from Hugo Rivera at About.com.

It’s called the 10 sets of 10 training method and I have found it to be a most excellent way to break through a plateau. You do an exercise 10 times for 10 reps each time, the trick is selecting a weight that you will still be able to lift 10 times on the 10th set. This, I have found, is easier said than done. When you began any weight you select will be pallid for the first 5 sets and you honestly won’t know if it’s the correct weight for you until you reach that 10th set. You want to make sure that that 10th set is a bit of a struggle while still being able to finish it in good form, no cheating or cheat reps, all 100 reps have to be good form. This being the case it may take you a of couple of training sessions to get it it just right.

This is a very intense and time consuming training method, especially when incorporated into a full body workout. For that reason many of you may find it more time friendly to incorporate this method into a split body routine. I only do it for one or two body parts at a time. Hugo advises to add a second exercise to the larger muscle groups to hit the muscle from a different angle but he only does this second exercise for 3 sets of 10-12 reps.

Now that my grease the groove cycle is complete I think I’ll do a 10 x 10 with chest flys tonight and maybe a triceps 10 x 10 as well.

Getting Fit: Grease the Groove Baby!

About 8 months ago I was going to join the Army and I started training for it. When I started I could do a maximum of 20 to 25 push ups before crashing. Sit-ups were not a problem, I could do 50 easy. My 2 mile run averaged 16 to 17 minutes. Push ups were always an issue for me. When I finished the training cycle I could do about 50-60 push ups in 2 minutes, 100 sit ups in 2 minutes and my 2 mile run was down to a consistent -15 minutes. Alas, poor vision, a history of severe asthma and some depression on my medical records would keep me out of the Army, sorry fellas.

When I was into bodybuilding in my 20′s, going to the gym 6 days a week, I had a hard time getting any muscle besides my neck to grow. I got stronger and I had one hell of a 6 pack (my ab routine alone was 1/2 hour long, every day.) I could squat 500 pounds easy. Bench press 300 or more (with a spotter.) But no matter how much I lifted my muscles never seemed to get much bigger. Some of it probably had to do with me smoking like a chimney and a lot of it had to do with my body type being closer to an ectomorph.

The one thing I noticed while I was training to pass the APFT (Army Physical Fitness Test) was how well my chest was developing. I had noticed some visual improvement in my chest when I started taking creatine and the water content in my muscles increased but this was different. The area of the pectoralis major that touches the front deltoids was meatier and the cleavage line was becoming more pronounced without me having to do a chest pose. My chest began to feel more solid too. Push ups are now a mainstay of my chest routine.

Increasing my push up count was a battle. At first I tried using my rudimentary bodybuilding knowledge, training 3 days a week, increasing the count a little at a time. I hit a plateau at 30. Just couldn’t get them any higher. I then tried the one hundred pushups method. Basically what I had been doing but a little more structured. Hit the plateau on week 5. I just couldn’t get that last maximum set to go all the way and I had to take longer breaks in between sets. Then I stumbled onto Grease the Groove for Strength.

“If you want to get good at something, do it often.”

Greasing the groove (not to be confused with spanking the chicken!) is a strength building program developed by Pavel Tsatsouline. It goes against the conventional wisdom of rest and recovery training. In a nutshell the program goes like this: on the 1st day you do a set of push ups until you can’t do anymore, this is your max. Once you know what your max is you go into a two week regime only pushing a percentage of your max, never going to muscle failure. You do this every day. No rest for the weary! Dave at straightforward health can explain it to you in more detail. It was Dave’s program that got me from 35 push ups to 50+ in 5 weeks. Keep in mind you can grease the groove with any exercise, it’s just easier to do it with exercises that do not need equipment. You can do it with sit ups, and pull ups (if you have access to a pull up bar.)

I slagged off my training a bit when I found out I wouldn’t be able to travel to far distant lands, meet new people and kill them. I’m back on the horse now. My push up count is down to 45 before failure. I started Dave’s routine up again 2 weeks ago but I modified it slightly for this week because I don’t intend on exercising on my birthday (or the day after that.) So I’m on my 16th day of greasing as I write this and I gotta tell you I really feel the burn in my chest with every rep. I’ll test myself again this Sunday after a few solid days of rest.

I do my normal full body workout routines when I grease the groove. 2-3 times a week. But instead of doing 3 chest exercises I do 1. This week it was drop set dumbbell presses. Last week it was dumbbell flys.

CAVEAT: YOU HAVE TO PULL AS MUCH AS YOU PUSH
When I started increasing my push up counts I started to develop a severe, uncomfortable pain in my shoulder. After some Google research I discovered that I was doing too many pushing movements and not incorporating enough pulling movements into my routine. I incorporated face pulls and shrugs into my workout routine and the pain soon went away.

Getting Fit: Supplementing

There are only 3 supplements you really need.

1) A good time released multi-vitamin. I use GNC Mega Men Multivitamin. I believe in time released formulas because your body does not store vitamins and minerals for later use. What it does not need it evacuates with your urine (that’s why your urine is yellow when you take vitamins).  A time release vitamin will dissolve slowly and release its nutrients gradually throughout the day. Otherwise you’re literally just pissing your money away. My wife’s co-worker once tried to sell my wife bargain vitamins by taking one of her GNC vitamins and plopping it into a glass of water to “show” her that it just “sits” in her stomach. She came home all excited and showed me this demonstration and said, “See honey, those vitamins we take are not good for us.” That’s when I pointed out to her that there is acid in our stomachs, not water. “Oh, yeh,” she said.

2) Omega-3 fatty acids. I use Pure Alaska Omega Omega-3 Wild Alaska Salmon Oil. Good for your heart, your brain and your joints.

3) Apple Cider Vinegar with “Mother”. I use Dynamic Health Organic Apple Cider Vinegar with “Mother”. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. The use of apple cider vinegar with mother is a popular tonic in places like the Appalachians and often recommended by country doctors. It’s said a couple of tablespoons a day can reduce sinus infections and sore throats, balance high cholesterol, cure skin conditions such as acne, protect against food poisoning, fight allergies in both humans and animals, prevent muscle fatigue after exercise, strengthen the immune system, increase stamina, increase metabolism which promotes weight loss, improve digestion and cure constipation, alleviate symptoms of arthritis and gout, and prevents bladder stones and urinary tract infections. It has definitely helped my acid reflux.

Other supplements I use are:

A) Creatine. I use NSI Creatine. Creatine occurs naturally in red meat, it hydrates muscles for more strength and faster recovery and enhances protein synthesis and growth. You need to drink a lot of water if you use creatine but the benefits are noticeable. Your muscles will look fuller. You will notice the extra strength you have for your workouts and the strength stays there after you stop using it. Some say to load up (dosing) when you start taking it (take 10,000 to 20,000 mg a day  for a couple of weeks) but I found that gradual increases work better for me. Dosing just gave me migraines. I started with about 3,000 mg a day for a month then increased the dose to 5,000 a day for another month. Now I just use it on the days I work out (2-3 times a week). I take 5,000 mg before a workout and if I worked out exceptionally hard I take another 5,000 mg after the workout. Find out more about creatine here.

B) L-Arginine HCL & L-Ornithine. I use NSI L-Arginine HCL & L-Ornithine. I take two capsules instead of the three this brand suggests. These amino acids help get oxygen to your muscles when you exercise. You can really feel the pump when you take these and work out vigorously. I only take them in the morning on days I workout.

C) Saw Palmetto. I use Puritans Pride Saw Palmetto. For prostrate health. Started taking these because I felt like I had to go the bathroom every five minutes. Not sure how well this works, I still get up to piss 5 or more times a night, but the urgency to pee is gone (especially during the waking hours) so it has helped some. Keep in mind that I drink a boat load of water every day so that may have more to do with it.

D) Pygeum. I use Puritans Pride Pygeum. Also for prostrate health. Just started taking these so I’m undecided as to their actual benefit.

Remember to always check with your Doctor before adding supplements to your diet.

Getting Fit: God Is In The Details

I recently posted that the biggest hurdle to getting fit will be getting up and just doing it. I said that you need to keep your goals simple. I would like to elaborate on this a bit more. When starting out you just want to get moving, get your heart beating and get into a rhythm of exercising consistently but in order to get truly fit you’ll need to put more effort into it. Your exercise sessions must be vigorous, they should make you breath hard and sweat.

After a few weeks of getting moving you’ll want to establish simple goals to help you along the path. For most of you the goal will be to lose weight. To accomplish this faster I would stay away from adding a heavy weight lifting routine any time soon. Stick to cardio exercises and do simple strength building exercises like sit ups, leg lifts, squats and push ups. Heavy weight lifting will build muscle and burn fat, but it will be hard to notice your progress when you step on the scale and weigh more or less the same every week. Even though close examination of yourself in a mirror will show otherwise this lack of “scale affirmation” can be very discouraging for some people. If you understand this and are comfortable with it, then working your way into a couple of days of heavy weight lifting every week is a great idea.

For others the goal is simply to feel healthier. This is easily accomplished with just 20 minutes of vigorous exercise 5 days a week and watching what you eat. 30 minutes a day is better.

It’s a mental game as well and to be honest I still dread working out and sometimes have to force myself to but I always feel a euphoria after I’m finished. To accomplish my weight loss goals faster I worked out best in 2-3 week cycles of balls to the wall, vigorous exercising 5-6 days a week, 1-2 hours a day. Then I’d slow it down for a few weeks (sometimes longer). Weight training once every 3 days with a 1/2 an hour of cardio in between. It worked for me. You have to find what works for you. If all you can muster is 20 minutes every other day then that’s better than nothing; just make those 20 minutes count each and every time.

I kept a journal to record my efforts and make note of my daily calories. I weighed myself every three weeks or so (naked, in the morning, after my bowels had “evacuated”). I had my wife take front, back and side pics of me every 3-6 months so I could see the progress. These things helped me stay focused. I don’t keep such a detailed journal these days but I do make note of the amount of time I spend exercising each week and what type of exercise I did. I take mental note of the calories I intake and keep to about 2,000 a day. I hover in between 162 lbs. and 167 lbs. and I don’t freak out if I hit 170 lbs. (like I did over the holidays). I just start counting the calories again and hit the gym a little harder for a bit.

My current cycle involves 2 weight training days a week, usually Monday and Thursday, for about an hour, and half an hour of cardio (treadmill, 1.0 incline 5.5 speed) on the other days with one or two days off a week. I’m feeling pretty healthy, my body mass has more muscle than fat, I’d like to get rid of this tire from around my stomach but I’ve been spending more time writing fiction so I’ll probably keep this schedule for a while and pay closer attention to my calories.

THE COUNTING CALORIES CAVEATS
If you decide to take on short but heavy spurts of exercising like I did be sure to be eating properly during these times. You will need the food for energy. I remember reading a Huffington Post story about a gym that was serving pizza and donuts one morning. The article was ill researched and misleading. Obviously, for those that are extremely overweight the idea of pizza and donuts is a Devil’s deal and is best avoided until you have your weight under control. If you’re going to the gym and doing the “look at me in my Juicy Couture sweat pants while I casually walk on this treadmill and check out my stock portfolio on my iPad for 1/2 an hour” routine then pizza and donuts may not be a good idea for you either. But if you show up to the gym at 5am and do the “balls to the wall, screaming bloody murder as your muscles rip apart from the stress” workout till 6am then a couple of slices of pizza for breakfast is not only what you deserve, it’s what you need.

Reward yourself during the process. If you lost 5 pounds last month it’s OK to take a day or two off from exercising and calorie counting. Go out and eat and don’t worry about the calories, enjoy yourself. The whole point of getting fit is to feel better about yourself, to just feel better overall and enjoy your life. If you’re stressing over how many calories that Outback steak has you’re not really enjoying yourself are you? Much has been made recently about the amount of calories in your favorite restaurant’s dishes, I say fuck it. Go out and eat and bloody well enjoy yourself. To compensate for the extra calories simply eat fruit for breakfast and lunch or plan to work out for an extra hour on the weekend; or do both.

PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER WITH NO PRESSURE
I’m a firm believer that stress kills. Stress is your enemy. So relax a bit and stop stressing, nothing is worth you stressing out. You’re going to have your bad days. I had plenty of them. I sometimes went a week without counting calories, barely working out and polishing off a whole Entenmann’s cake in a couple of hours. When Graham got sick and passed away I stopped for months. But I got back into it and you must as well. I just want you to know it’s OK to let the process slip every now and then. When this happens don’t tell yourself you’re going to get back into it, you’ll just be lying to yourself. Just know you’re going to get back into it. Ride out the minor wave of depression that has you in a funk however you need to and then one morning when you wake up just do it. Don’t think about doing it, just get back out there and start exercising again.

RESOURCES TO HELP YOU

• Calorie Calculator – Lets you know how exactly many calories you need per day to achieve your target weight with and without exercise.
• a Calorie Counter – Search a Calorie Counter for a food to see its full nutritional content.
• Calorie Counter – Another free site to find the nutritional content of that slice of pizza you just ate.
• ExRx.Net – A wealth of information on everything from dieting to the proper form of exercises.
• Bodybuilding at About.com – Bodybuilding and fitness advice by Hugo Rivera.
• OutlawMuscle Forum – Most bodybuilding forums are filled with narcissistic, steroid agitated, hormone raging obnoxious teens. OutlawMuscle is different, if you have questions about exercising and bodybuilding ask them here.

Getting fit: Counting Calories

Counting calories and eating healthier is another step you need to take to get fit. I’m not saying you should take all the enjoyment out of life but certain key changes to your diet will help out immensely. Cutting out soda helped me loose weight A LOT faster, I still enjoy a Coke every now and then but H2O is my main source of hydration these days. You can still have your cake and yes, you can eat it too; just make sure your are eating no more than 1800 calories a day. 2300-2500 calories if you’re exercising for 1/2 an hour or more every day. Counting calories is really important, I can’t stress this enough.

I have a different take on dieting than most. Fuck rice cakes and salads sans dressing. Fuck magic pills and expensive empty promises. I think you should be able to eat whatever you want, meat, starch, pie, cake; just don’t eat more than what you intend to burn off exercising. Try to stay away from empty calories, that is food that has a lot of calories but will not fill you up. Soda falls into this category. Of course to lose more weight faster you will want to pay closer attention to what you’re eating like I did for about 6 months. I ate more meat and chicken and less potatoes and side dishes, I’d forgo bread and butter. But once I lost 15+ pounds I loosened up my rules a bit and started to enjoy food again, all the while counting calories and adjusting my workouts to compensate. If I came close to 3000 calories I would work out for 1 1/2 hours, sometimes 2 hours, if not that day then the next.

Just do it. 1800 calories a day and 20 minutes of exercise 5 days a week and you should be able to shave off a pound or more a week. Most of you will find that you’ll start looking forward to your exercising time. Some of you may even increase it to 30 minutes or 45 minutes. Others may find that doing an hour every other day fits their schedule better. Do what works for you. Keep your goals simple. In the beginning you just want to get yourself moving.

At first this process can seem a bit tedious but after a while counting calories will come naturally to you as you become more familiar with the calorie content of the foods you tend to eat. You’ll have a rough idea of how many calories are in that slice of pizza you’re eating and it will be easier to keep a mental tab of what you eat during the day.

RESOURCES TO HELP YOU

• Calorie Calculator – Lets you know how exactly many calories you need per day to achieve your target weight with and without exercise.
• a Calorie Counter – Search a Calorie Counter for a food to see its full nutritional content.
• Calorie Counter – Another free site to find the nutritional content of that slice of pizza you just ate.

Getting fit is as easy as getting started.

A few years back I saw myself in a picture and realized I was turning into a sad overweight middle aged male. The only saving grace was that I was not balding, which wasn’t much of one seeing that I buzz cut my hair every 3-6 months. I weighed about 200 pounds and one push up would tire me. I needed to get myself in better shape.

I started out by going for jogs/walks with our newly adopted dog, Graham. It was more walk than jog at first. I never liked running, I used to tell people that if they saw me running they should probably start running too. Not because I’m a bad ass that fears nothing but because I was a lazy ass who would rather take a severe beat down instead of running away from it. If something had me scared enough to overcome my disdain for physical activity it would probably be prudent for them to follow suit!

Because I was spending 1-2 hours every day trying to kill 500 calories I eventually usurped my aversion to running and was spending 1 hour or less a day trying to kill 500 calories. We bought a Weider Total Body Works 5000 Gym (a less expensive Total Gym) and I started using it 2 or 3 times a week. I also started counting my calories. Physical fitness was not new to me. In my late teens and early 20′s I was into bodybuilding. Because I knew what I was doing and I knew what to expect, getting healthy again at 40 was not that hard.

Remember the Nike “Just Do It” ad campaign? That’s what it boils down to. You just have to get up and do it. It will be your biggest hurdle. If you dread all physical activity start with 20 minutes every other day with something as simple as walking on a treadmill and watch TV or read a book to “ease the pain”. I’ll be honest with you, just walking everyday (unless you’re hiking mountain trails for an hour or two) will not cut it. If you’re going to spend just 20 minutes every other day exercising, make those 20 minutes count. After a week start jogging lightly for those 20 minutes instead of just walking. After a couple more weeks start jogging faster, try for 2 miles in under 20 minutes. Work your way into exercising 20 minutes 5 days a week. You can do 3 days of cardio mixed in with 2 days of light muscle exercises like push ups, sit ups, leg lifts, and squats and take the weekends off.

Stay away from exercises and activities you do not enjoy. If you don’t like jogging and have access to an elliptical trainer, try that instead. If you don’t like doing lunges, don’t do them. Stay away from activities that will discourage you from just doing it. Some things are unavoidable though. There is no better chest exercise than a push up, no better abdominal exercises than sit ups and leg lifts. I tried doing planks but I’d rather be moving for 2-5 minutes, I’ll occasionally switch up my routines and throw some planks in but for the most part they bore me so I stay away from them (and lunges, I hate lunges).