Back to Basics - 5 Exercises From PE Class That Will Boost Your Fitness

If COVID lockdowns taught us one thing in the health and fitness industry, it’s that many people don’t know where to begin with at-home exercise. The landscape for fitness has changed, and more and more people are staying home for their workouts - and there are a LOT of options out there for you. The issue? A lot of these fitness apps and at home programs leave out the basics - the foundational fitness, stability, and mobility exercises that allow you to progress quickly and safely, without injury or pain.

We’ve forgotten the basics!

Boost your at home fitness with these 5 exercises - exercises that you should be familiar with from middle school gym class that are almost impossible to forget. The best part? Cycling through this set of exercises won’t take more than 5 minutes of your day.

Use these exercises as a launch pad to higher level exercise or as foundational fitness work to build your stability, mobility, and overall physical capabilities.

1) Sit and Reach

The Sit and Reach Test is the most common measure of flexibility across professions, from PT to PE teachers. This test (essentially, a toe touch in seated) is a great way to look at the length and pliability of your hamstrings. While flexibility and mobility across your whole body is an important component of foundational fitness, the hamstrings are a key muscle to unlock range of motion limitations, back pain, knee pain, and core stability.

Your hamstrings (primarily) start at your pelvis (on your sit bones) and travel down the back of your thigh, attaching around the back and sides of your knee. They work to bend your knee, control the momentum of your leg while you’re walking, and create speed and power in your workouts. When our hamstrings are too short (when we can’t touch our toes in sitting), we can’t create as much power, rendering our legs weaker and requiring other muscles to compensate for their lack of strength. Tight hamstrings also tend to pull at your sit bones, tilting your entire pelvis backwards. Posteriorly tilted pelvic bones place additional stress on your low back and knees, inevitably leading to pain (and making your butt look flat!).

Sit and Reach

Sit and Reach is a great test to get a baseline measure for your hamstring flexibility- but also a great static stretch to loosen them up.

Hold stretches 30 seconds, don’t bounce at the end range, and you’ll create flexibility.

2) Squats

Foundational strength and mobility are kind of my “thing”. Without the building blocks for exercise, we can’t advance ourselves - this is true with anything in life, but very especially with human function. Movement of our body weight with any degree of coordination and without falling over requires the building block of core strength. When this movement needs to get us from point A to point B on our own 2 feet, we also require the building block of leg strength and stability.

In the realm of foundational fitness, squats give you the ultimate bang for your buck. Squats challenge your core, keeping you stable while you move your body through planes of motion. They challenge glute, quad, and hamstring strength - the muscles we need for standing up, for taking stairs, for walking, running, jumping. And they challenge mobility from the hip to the ankle the deeper you go.

Squats burn fat, create power and speed, improve joint health, and support good posture. Basically, squats are the key to successful, pain-free movement.

Form is key! Send your hips back (like you’re sitting in a chair) instead of bending at the waist. Don’t lift your heels. And don’t go down so low if your knees hurt! Add weight to the front of your body (front squat) for increased quad activation and greater glute gains with less pressure on your spine.

3) Jumping Jacks

I’ve touched on strength, core, mobility, and flexibility - but we haven’t covered cardio here yet. Wouldn’t it be great if there was one exercise to combine all five? Enter the jumping jack.

Moving all four limbs against gravity and in a controlled, repeated pattern requires a solid, stable foundation. Unless you want your jumping jacks to look like the inflatable tube guy at the used car lot, you need to use your core here to stay up straight and keep your arms and legs moving in a straight line.

Mobility of ball-on-socket in both the hip and shoulder make your jumping jack wide and bring your arms up overhead. Strength lifts your body off the ground. Flexibility keeps your back straight and strong. And the longer you do them, the faster you do them… jumping jacks can kick that heart rate right up into fat burn zone.

Work your way up in reps, pace, or time performed and down in rest time for a progressive plyo/cardio workout.

4) Push Ups

The push-up is the squat of the upper body. You’re still moving your weight over a stable core- but this time, using your arms instead of your legs. So unlike a squat, which gets you from point A to point B, the push up can help you carry objects (groceries, babies, boxes) from point A to point B.

Push-ups protect your shoulders, build upper body strength, improve your posture, and challenge your core. Plus, upper body workouts increase your heart rate by 30-40% more than lower body - again, bringing you well into the fat burn zone.

Modified push ups (on your knees) still work! Just make sure to tuck your hips and keep the back straight. No matter your position, create a straight line with your body from the top of your head to the point where your lower body hits the floor.

5) Single Leg Balance

Before you go ahead and click out of this post because I just told you to do push ups and now I’m telling you to stand on one foot, go ahead and stand up, get onto your non-dominant foot (the one you WOULDN’T automatically kick a ball with), and then close your eyes. If you can’t stay there for 30 seconds, keep reading.

There are 3 components of our balance: proprioception (our ankle‘s ability to tell our brain where it is in space), vision, and vestibular (tubes in your ears that tell your brain that you’re rightside up). When one of these components is out, the rest need to work overtime - and as we age, all 3 start to slowly decline in function. Have you ever asked your mom to stand on one foot? She will laugh in your face.

To hold a single leg stance, you need hip stability, core stability, and ankle stability - your whole body is involved. Walking and running are basically a series of single leg activities in quick succession. Plus, we all have that dominant foot - and over time, subconsciously leading to climb the stairs with the same leg and favoring one leg over the other can create imbalances that ultimately lead to pain. Single leg stance is a true functionally foundational position that give us a measurable sense of our balance and stability.

Make sure you do this exercise with something nearby to grab in case you feel a topple coming on!

SKIP THESE: Sit Ups

In PE class, I dreaded sit ups the most. Turns out, I was ahead of my time, because even the US Army has phased sit ups out of their fitness tests.

While sit ups do challenge your abs to some degree, they tend to do more harm than good. They’re tough on your back, so if you’re in pain, you’re not doing yourself any favors. Plus, it’s difficult to have great sit up form - we commonly strain with our necks, use our hip flexors, and rely on our upper abs to do this motion as compensations, meaning our lower abs (the ones we want to tone!) get left behind and may even make your midsection look BIGGER.

Long story short, the research is starting to point to sit ups as less effective than we’ve previously thought. Substitute with planks to torch your lower abs and create foundational core stability.

For questions about how to start an at home exercise program, increase your foundational fitness, improve your flexibility, and build your strength, email dominique@intentionalmobility.com or contact me for a free 15 minute consult.