Let’s face it: The treadmill (unfairly) gets a bad rap. Merely mentioning it as a cardio option can quickly cause your training partner’s enthusiasm to evaporate. After all, many people associate treadmill workouts with unflattering terms like boring, monotonous, and uninspiring. Yet even if your previous treadmill experiences failed to elicit motivation or effective results,
conditioning
Medicine balls are one piece of equipment you find at nearly every strength and conditioning gym and in many “functional training” areas in commercial gyms. Their use and application for power, conditioning, and improving overall fitness levels are only limited by your creativity and imagination. Anyone can integrate medicine ball training into their current programming
When it’s time to hit the gym, most people instinctively gravitate toward hitting the weights. That’s certainly an understandable course of action, since weight training plays a role in everything from muscle-building and strength gains to fat-burning and even heart health. However, for maximum results toward any of those goals — physique, performance, or health
Talk to anyone in your average gym about training to build conditioning or cut body fat, and the Turkish get-up is probably not going to be one of the first exercises mentioned, if it comes up at all. It may not have the recognition as a squat or deadlift, but a lack of relative popularity
Complexes, also known as combination lifts, consist of two or more exercises performed with the same free weight in a non-stop, continuous fashion. While this method may initially appear similar to low-intensity circuit training commonplace in machine-laden rec centers, true complexes are quite the opposite. Romanian weightlifting coach Istvan Javorek popularized complexes in the 1970s to
Picking up two dumbbells and walking around might not appear to be anything special. It looks too easy. No challenge at all, maybe some cardio and working your grip a little bit. But once you start taking the farmer’s walk seriously, you’ll realize there’s so much more to carrying weights than meets the eye. Credit:
You’ve heard about being “down to your last dime,” but how about being “down to your last dumbbell?” Maybe a hard economy forced the fire sale of your once epic home gym. Maybe you’re making do at a poorly equipped hotel gym. Or maybe you’re on a road trip with limited space for strength equipment.
Modern air bikes are far from the creaky machines your parents had at the local Y decades ago. Today’s machines are overbuilt and imposing. With bigger fans, heavier components, and electronic performance monitors, these machines are designed to take, and deliver, a beating. Credit: Jacob Lund / Shutterstock The Assault Bike® is one of a
Kettlebells are a fantastic tool that had a resurgence in the lifting world over the last 20 years, after well over a century of use around the world. They’re versatile and can be used to get stronger, put on size, improve athletic performance, and even develop iron-clad conditioning. Credit: Jacob Lund / Shutterstock The kettlebell
The humble sled has made its way from American football gridirons, into strongman gyms, through CrossFit “boxes,” and has arrived as a mainstay of everyday training. The sled’s rise to ubiquity is fueled by its versatility and the fact that it’s just plain fun to grind along the pavement or turf. Credit: UfaBizPhoto / Shutterstock