Have you noticed that you have been able to do more things in the past week? Get ready to crush week 2.
Let´s start with your core and glutes:
Side lying crunch
This exercise primarily targets the obliques, your abdominal muscles on the sides of your trunk. Strengthening these muscles helps improve your posture and protects your back!
- Starting position: Lie on the floor on your side, with one foot stacked on top of the other. For stability, place your bottom arm straight out to the side with your palm down. Put your top arm with your hand behind your head and elbow pointed straight up.
- Exhale and pull your knee until your thigh is perpendicular to the floor. At the same time crunch your body up and touch the elbow of your top arm to your top knee. Do not pull your head as you crunch your body to the side.
- Inhale as you return to the starting position.
Hip trust
The hip thrust targets the glutes. Doing your hip thrusts with a resistance band gives you some advantages overdoing them with your bodyweight only or adding free weights. The resistance of a band will always increase the more you stretch it and that’s also the natural strength curve of your muscle, having the most power in the full contraction. If you do this exercise at home, you normally don’t have a bar with enough weights available to overload the hip thrust properly – resistance bands are easy to add in and add more resistance to the exercise. As you start adding weight to the hip thrust to progress, you often need to focus more on balancing the weight in your hip than focus on proper form. Resistance bands are better because they are strapped around your hip and you don’t need to mind them falling off.
Secure the band to the base of a bench, sofa, bed…
- Starting position: Rest your shoulders and upper back on the bench, and plant your feet firmly on the floor. Lower your hips as near to the floor as you can and pass the resistance band over your hips. The band should be taut but not overly tense.
- Exhale and contracting your glutes, thrust your hips upwards as far as possible, stretching against the resistance band. Imagine you will squeeze a penny between your butt cheeks when you go to the hip extension. This will give you the full squeeze and full contraction for your glutes during the hip thrust.
- Inhale and return to the starting position.
Tips to get the most out of this workout
- Read the instructions on how to do the exercises. If you skipped it, scroll up. It´s important to keep the technique in mind to perform the exercises correctly.
- Watch the first two sets before you start and visualize yourself performing the exercises.
- Grab the equipment you need (mat, resistance bands), put them in position, and keep close your bottle of water.
- Mute your phone. Next 10 minutes you´ll be unavailable.
- We aim for a total of 10 sets (5 sets each exercise), with no rest in between. However, if you need to rest, press pause and take your time.
- Each set is 1 minute long. If it´s too much for you right now, do as many repetitions as possible.
