Humpday Health: Living room workouts that mean business

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — There are a lot of reasons folks don’t like going to the gym, but that’s no excuse to skip your workout. So how can you kick the calories at home? Fitness instructor Amy McCauley crashed our living room workout to give us tips to making the most of exercising at home.

“One of them is doing a DVD, I have a pilates DVD that just got released in October so that’s a good way to do it. Also hit training, which is a high intensity interval training that helps you get your heart rate up so you can combine the two for your strength and your cardiovascular work,” McCauley said.

Of course there are some skeptics out there who won’t believe they can really feel the burn in their living room, but according to McCauley, that;s just not true.

“You can do squats, you can sit against the wall, you can do lunges, plyometrics are high intensity so you can add those as you start to gain your strength,” McCauley said.

Home workouts fit perfectly into a busy lifestyle.

“You just kinda find a time where you can allow 20 minutes to start, and then you go into 30 minutes, and then once you start getting really comfortable, your endurance is starting to build up then you try to go a little bit longer, we do a 50 minute hit class at Gold’s,” McCauley said.

As with any workout you are going to want to hit peaks in your heart rate throughout exercising.

“You just want to try to get your peak. You can look it up online and it’ll tell you where your zone is, where you’re training about 80 percent of your maximum effort,” McCauley said.

There are some unique challenges to a home workout, like you couch being just a few feet away for example.

“I write everything I do down,” McCauley said. “Take pictures, pictures are always a really good tool to see ‘OK my body is changing.’ And also a buddy, so if you have somebody who makes you accountable. You can text them and say ‘I did my workout this week, what did you do? How was your diet was it clean? Did you work out everyday?'”

Plus having a partner makes exercising more fun.