How to keep fit without stretching your finances
There are lots of ways to work out that do not involve paying gym fees. Phil Daoust, the Guardian’s resident fitness expert, has six tips on how to exercise on the cheap.
Walk
Whatever you are doing to stay fit, walking should be the cornerstone. Not only will it support your heart, lungs and muscles, it will get you places – for free.
What you’ll need: Nothing apart from your usual outdoor clothes, unless you develop a taste for something more extreme, such as fell-walking.
Run
The simplest form of aerobic exercise – but if you’re not already a runner you’ll need to ease into it. It’s hard to beat the NHS’s free Couch to 5k programme, which aims to get you running for about 30 minutes in only nine weeks.
What you’ll need: A smartphone and, as a bare minimum, shorts, leggings or tracksuit bottoms and underwear that won’t chafe, plus trainers that don’t immediately hurt your feet. If you don’t hate the whole experience, you will want to invest in dedicated running shoes and some sort of synthetic top to wick away your sweat.
Yoga
The Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel is stuffed with free and beginner-friendly workouts. As the host, Adriene Mishler, tells her 13 million subscribers: “Jump on in! You don’t even have to leave the house.” If you like dogs, you’ll love her companion, sweet Benji.
What you’ll need: Ideally, a yoga mat to protect your back and knees, especially if you have hard floors. A couple of blocks may help if you struggle with flexibility. For clothing, you’ll be fine with a T-shirt and some shorts or tracksuit bottoms. Shoes not required! Or just do it in your underwear.
Bodyweight exercises
You can build muscle and mobility using nothing but your own weight. Push-ups will work your chest, arms, shoulders and core; mountain climbers will strengthen your abs; squats and lunges will build your glutes and quads … A quick Google search will throw up lots of programmes, or start with these suggestions from the Guardian.
What you’ll need: Any outfit that doesn’t chafe or make you overheat. Again, you could start in your underwear. You can increase the intensity of many exercises with a set of cheap resistance bands – giant rubber bands. Or (free) push-ups in particular can be scaled up by adding pauses or changing the position of your hands.
Calisthenics
Bodyweight’s flashy sibling, calisthenics, cranks up the intensity with moves such as pull-ups, muscle-ups and handstands. You can look forward to dangling from bars, swinging from rings, balancing your entire body on one hand … The emphasis is on upper-body strength, unless you focus on the fiendishly hard single-legged squats. You’ll find plenty of free tutorials online but you’ll need to be pretty fit before you even start.
What you’ll need: Lots of bars – high ones to do pull-ups from, medium ones for dips, low ones for L-sits and handstands. And gymnastics rings, to add some wobble and make everything harder. A few resistance bands to support you when you are starting out, and chalk to stop your hands slipping. You should be able to access bars for free, if you have a local “street gym”. Or try the monkey bars and climbing frame in the park.
High-intensity interval training (Hiit)
For an introduction to Hiit, start with a seven-minute workout to build muscle and cardio fitness: 12 30-second bursts of intense exercise, with 10 seconds’ rest between them. The classic version, developed by the exercise physiologist Chris Jordan, crams in jumping jacks, wall sits, push-ups, abdominal crunches, step-ups, squats, triceps dips, planks, high knees, lunges, push-ups with rotation and side planks.
If that doesn’t tire you out, repeat the whole thing as many times as you like.
What you’ll need: A sturdy chair, first for the step-ups and triceps dips, and then for a nice sit-down afterwards.
